forbidding the incarnation

After her dramatic, sad death while she was searching for her hagoromo and trying to take care of her children, Ceres, being a celestial being and not limited with the same abilities of human, tried many times to reincarnate. But instead of simply reincarnating and living as the human she was born as, Ceres would take over the idenity of her human hosts, her female descents, and continue her search for her feathered robe.

However, even she was limited in power during each rebirth and was only able to reveal her existance when the girl, who's body she had chosen, turned sixteen years old. At that time she would show herself and continue to search for her robe. Her and Shiso's descendents, the Mikage, were very greedy people and did not want to give up the celestial being nor the feathered robe (even though they did not know of the location); so they started a ritual designed to reveal the idenity of Ceres on a girls destined birthday so they could kill the celestial being before she became too strong.

The ritual involved taking a mummified hand of the orginal body of Ceres and placing it in front of the girl. If Ceres was inhabiting the body of the girl then the host would have a reaction to the hand and would briefly show her divine powers. If that were the case, then the Mikage would kill the girl before Ceres came fully into being; forcing Ceres to wait until another Mikage girl was born. Then the ritual would repeat.

Sometime during the centuries that this took place, Ceres' reasoning for simple searching turned into anger at all the males in the Mikage family. Each time she was reincarnated she became stronger and angrier. Soon, her purpose deviated from searching for the hagoromo to killing all the males of the Mikage family.

Nonetheless, the cycle repeated itself until finally Ceres was able to appear in Ayashi Mikage more fully than she was able to in the past. In this reincarnation not only was she able to completely take over the existance of Aya, but was able to protect herself against another death at the hands of her own children. And so begins the story of Ayashi no Ceres.