Japanese ceremonies honor Amaterasu for her creative process, not for a single creation: "[T]he divine weaver continually creates the order of the cosmos. It is a process, never finished, ... never codified.... It is the goddess that one serves and not the order that she creates. The interaction of warp and woof, and indeed the knots so formed, reated the beautiful brocade of the world, whose skies, mountains, plains and seas are permeated with the essence of the kami, or the sacred." Miller compares this sense of the sacred in Shinto to Hopi, African, and Greek/Roman parallels (p. 44): Arachne in Ovid's Metamorphoses (Greece, Italy) the Dogon, West Africa: "Spirit speaks and its words fill all the interstices of the cloth; they were woven in the threads and make the body of the cloth. They were the weaving itself ad the weaving was the words. And that is why cloth is called soy, which means, `It is speech.'" the Tewa, a branch of the Hopi people: Then weave for us a garment of brightness: May the warp be the white light of morning, May the weft be the red light of evening, May the fringes be the falling rain, May the border be the standing rainbow. Thus weave for us a garment of brightness, That we may wealk fittingly where birds sing, That we may walk fittingly where the grass is green, O our Mother the Earth, O our Father the Sky." ---quoted by Miller as recorded by Herbert J. Spinden, Songs of the Tewa (New York, 1933), p. 94.

above: excerpt from a print by Utagawa Kunisada, c. 1830s