Like others among Japan's oldest shrines, the "Kamisha Honmiya" and the two shrines of the "Shimosha" do not have a "honden", the building that normally enshrines the shrine deity. Instead, the Upper Shrine's objects of worship were the sacred mountain behind the "Honmiya", a sacred rock (磐座 "iwakura") upon which Suwa Daimyōjin was thought to descend, and the shrine's former high priest or "Ōhōri" (大祝) who was considered to be the physical incarnation of the god himself. This was later joined by two Buddhist structures (no longer extant since the Meiji period): a stone pagoda in the shrine's inner sanctum known as the "Tettō" (鉄塔 'iron tower') and a sanctuary to the bodhisattva Samantabhadra (Fugen) – Suwa Daimyōjin being considered to be a manifestation of this bodhisattva – on the sacred mountain. Meanwhile, the Lower Shrine's objects of worship are sacred trees: a "sugi" tree in the "Harumiya", and a yew tree in the "Akimiya".