Kuze Code

The Kuze Code was a series of rules and taboos followed by the family who ran the Kuze Shrine. The rules were meant to preserve the shrine's ritual purity and ensure that the rituals were successful. The exact requirements of the code were never well-defined in the game, but some of its laws can be inferred.

Principally, the Kuze Shrine was to be led and inhabited by women only. Men were only allowed to enter occasionally, for specific reasons, and this rule was strictly observed. Men were permitted to enter when the snow was on the ground. If they were villagers come to offer their pain to the Tattooed Priestess, they were known as Worshippers, and had to keep their faces covered at all times, to keep the priestess's heart from stirring. More rarely, men were permitted to enter as Outsiders, for the purpose of continuing the Kuze family bloodline; they did not have to wear masks, but were only permitted to enter certain rooms. If this union produced a male child, he would be cast into a well in the shrine before the age of four. (This particularly brutal requirement might not have been followed as rigidly in the later years of the shrine, as Kyouka Kuze managed to smuggle her baby son into the village below rather than killing him, and the Ceremony Master Yashuu Kuze seemed to have been aware of this.)

It was considered particularly taboo for men to enter the innermost parts of the shrine, where the Tattooed Priestesses slept.

The punishment for violating the code was death. A man who violated the code would be killed with a cleaver and cast out, whereas a Handmaiden or other shrine dedicate would be impaled.

It is possible that the code made an exception for the Moriya family shrine carpenters who were dedicated to the shrine, allowing them onto the shrine premises to carry out repairs. The spirit list includes one such carpenter who was in the Last Passage at the time of the Unleashing.

"Casting Out"

Someone who had been killed for violating the code was said to have been "cast out" (流し, nagasu). This is a word with several possible meanings, including "drain/spill blood" or "wash away", and is the same word as in "Toro-Nagashi", the festival in which paper lanterns are floated down a river to honour the dead. The word's association with flowing water makes it particularly appropriate to the Kuze Shrine.