Unlike the systematic theologies of Western religions, Shinto cosmology presents a world saturated with divinity; where kami (gods, spirits, and sacred forces) inhabit every mountain, river, tree, and rock, where the boundary between the human and divine is permeable, and where the Japanese islands themselves were born from the union of primordial deities.

We think we know how civilization began. The evolution story is taught in every history class: after the last ice age, humans learned to farm. Surplus food allowed people to settle in villages. Villages grew into cities. Cities gave rise to kings, priests, scribes, and laws.

On May 18, 1974, a 3,000-pound plutonium implosion device detonated 330 feet beneath the Thar Desert at Pokhran, Rajasthan. The yield was 8 kilotons; modest by the standards of the nuclear powers, but sufficient to announce India's arrival as the world's sixth nuclear-weapon state.