Among the ancient Shinto liturgies, the Nakatomi Purification Prayer (*Nakatomi no ōharae no kotoba*) stands out for its solemn, expansive cadence and its detailed evocation of spiritual impurity and its removal. In its commonly recited form, it begins in the high realm of *Takamagahara*, where the deities assemble at the command of the imperial ancestral kami to entrust the “Luxuriant Reed Plains of the Land of Fresh Rice Ears” to the imperial descendant, that this land may be ruled in peace. From the outset, the text links political order, cosmic harmony, and ritual purity, describing how violent and disorderly deities and forces are driven down and pacified in the “Root Land” and “Bottom Land,” yet acknowledging that new calamities, sins, and defilements will continually arise. The gods once again gather and deliberate, and the prayer introduces the crucial distinction between “heavenly sins” (*amatsu tsumi*) and “earthly sins” (*kunitsu tsumi*), framing impurity as a disruption of the proper relationship between humans, deities, and the land.

The wording then turns to a vivid catalog of these transgressions. Heavenly sins include offenses against palace rites and offerings, the pollution of sacred spaces such as *himorogi*, *mitoko*, and divine halls, and acts that disturb the ordered landscape—breaking ridges, filling ditches, misdirecting water, and various forms of violent injury and mutilation. Earthly sins encompass grave violations within human relationships and the social body: harming the living and the dead, sexual offenses within family and community, and other acts committed “not in accordance with the will of the High Gods,” which threaten to fill the space between heaven and earth with disorder. All of these are gathered up under the rubric of “various sins and defilements,” not as isolated moral faults but as conditions that cloud the clarity of the world and obstruct the free circulation of life-giving forces.

Against this dense field of impurity, the prayer unfolds a carefully structured rite of purification. The assembled deities, using the “Heavenly Golden Tree” with its branches oriented toward heaven and the middle land of reeds, and wielding the heavenly and earthly swords of purification, ritually separate and remove both heavenly and earthly sins. The Nakatomi officiant, described as “reverently purifying,” speaks the great *norito* as a performative act that opens the “rock gates of heaven” and loosens the “rock seats,” allowing the divine words of blessing to flow. The imagery of purification is layered: sins are blown away like clouds by the morning and evening winds, carried out over the great ocean, swept along swift river rapids, and borne off to the Root Land and Bottom Land by deities associated with rapids, tides, swift boats, and swift spirits.

The prayer culminates in a sweeping vision of restored harmony. As the heavenly gods open the rock gates and the earthly gods resound from the high and low mountains, they hear and accept the petition that all sins and defilements of the people dwelling throughout the “Land of Fresh Rice Ears,” in its many islands and countless palace-places, be completely purified. The desired result is that the imperial descendant may long and abundantly rule this land in peace, with no residue of impurity left clinging to the people. In this way, the Nakatomi Purification Prayer functions not only as a liturgical text but as a spiritual map: it traces the movement from disorder to order, from obscurity to clarity, and from the heaviness of accumulated transgression to the lightness of a world ritually made clean.