Let's
finally return to the key feature of Ise with which we began, the periodic
rebuilding of both Inner and Outer shrines. Historical records indicate
that such rebuilding was practiced at a number of ancient shrines, but
only at Ise has it been sustained to the present, despite an interruption
of over one hundred years during the feudal wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries. This survival of course reflects primarily the political power
of the imperial clan that patronized it, but the symbolic meaning of the
rebuilding reaches far beyond politics and historical circumstances into
one of the deepest ideas of Shinto, the belief in the periodic necessity
of ritual renewal.