**Referring to this episode, Aston writes in his Nihongi: "Amaterasu-o-mi-Kami is throughout the greater part of this narrative an anthropomorphic deity, with little that is specially characteristic of her solar functions. Here, however, it is plainly the sun itself which witholds its light and leaves the world to darkness. This inconsistency, which has greatly exercised the native theologians, is not peculiar to Japanese myth." Then follows a scene perhaps the most celebrated in all the mythological legends; a scene which was the origin of the sacred dance in Japan and which furnished to artists in later ages a frequent motive. The "eight hundred myriads" of Kami--so numerous have the denizens of the "plain of high heaven" unaccountably become--assemble in the bed of the "tranquil river"* to confer about a means of enticing the goddess from her retirement. They entrust the duty of forming a plan to the Kami of "thought combination," now heard of for the first time as a son of one of the two producing Kami, who, with the "great central" Kami, constituted the original trinity of heavenly denizens. This deity gathers together a number of barn-yard fowl to signal sunrise, places the Kami of the "strong arm" at the entrance of the cave into which the goddess has retired, obtains iron from the "mines of heaven" and causes it to be forged into an "eight-foot" mirror, appoints two Kami to procure from Mount Kagu a "five-hundred branched" sakaki tree (cleyera Japonica), from whose branches the mirror together with a "five-hundred beaded" string of curved jewels and blue and white streamers of hempen cloth and paper-mulberry cloth are suspended, and causes divination to be performed with the shoulder blade of a stag. *The Milky Way. Then, while a grand liturgy is recited, the "heaven-startling" Kami, having girdled herself with moss, crowned her head with a wreath of spindle-tree leaves and gathered a bouquet of bamboo grass, mounts upon a hollow wooden vessel and dances, stamping so that the wood resounds and reciting the ten numerals repeatedly. Then the "eight-hundred myriad" Kami laugh in unison, so that the "plain of high heaven" shakes with the sound, and the Sun goddess, surprised that such gaiety should prevail in her absence, looks out from the cave to ascertain the cause. She is taunted by the dancer, who tells her that a greater than she is present, and the mirror being thrust before her, she gradually comes forward, gazing into it with astonishment; whereupon the Kami of the "strong arm" grasps her hand and drags her out, while two other Kami* stretch behind her a rope made of straw, pulled up by the roots,** to prevent her return, and sunshine once more floods the "plain of high heaven." *These two are the ancestors of the Kami of the Nakatomi and the Imibe hereditary corporations, who may be described as the high priests of the indigenous cult of Japan.