Shimogamo Shrine

This guide to Shimogamo Shrine in Kyoto opens with the shrine's founding myth: a young woman named Tamayorihime finds a crimson arrow drifting in the river, takes it home, and soon finds herself pregnant with a son who becomes a god of thunder. It follows her father, the clan chieftain Kamo Taketsunumi, and a shape-shifting legend attached to him, tracing how this family's story became bound up with Japan's earliest imperial line. The shrine sits inside Tadasu no Mori, an ancient forest with trees standing for some six hundred years.