Ōnusa
Wooden wand used in Shinto purification rituals
An ōnusa (大幣) or simply nusa (幣) or taima (大幣) is a wooden wand traditionally used in Shinto purification rituals.
Ōnusa are decorated with a number of shide (paper streamers). When the shide are attached to a hexagonal or octagonal staff, the wand is also known as a haraegushi (祓串).
The Jingū Taima (神宮大麻) is a type of ōnusa. although they are often used in different ways than normal Onusa, usually kept in envelopes.
The most common type of Nusa today consists of a sakaki branch or a white wooden stick with a shide or Nusa ramie attached to the end. In Board of Ceremonies' "Jinja Matsuri Shiki" (1875), a branch of sakaki is used for the Nusa, and in Yatsuka Seinan's "Jinja Yushoku Kijitsu" (1951), Nusa is described as a sakaki branch with only ramie or, in addition, shidare attached, while konusa is made of wooden sticks, thin wood or bamboo. At Ise Jingu Shrine, mikisakaki, a sakaki branch with its leaves and branches still attached, is also used with Nusa attached to it, and a sakaki branch is attached to a cord of hemp as a yu (cotton). In some cases, such as at Kamogoso Shrine (Shimogamo Shrine), a branch of a peach tree is used, following the myth in the Kojiki.
Nusa is also used in different ways.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ōnusa” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.