Ancestor Worship

acts of veneration paid to the spirits of the dead. Ancestral worship may be of three kinds, the first being fundamental, the others growing out of it:

1. Family worship of immediate ancestors, as parents and grandparents. 2. Clan worship of a departed chief. 3. National worship of an ancient ruler or rulers.

Ancestral worship seems to be the earliest form of religious emotion. It is held to be the foundation of all civilized religion, a stage through which all advanced religions must pass. It bears the same relation to religious thought, therefore, that the early ages of man bear to civilization. The nations of history were ancestor worshipers. The pre-Homeric Greeks, the inhabitants of ancient Mycenae, users of bronze and makers of pottery, buried their dead and worshiped them. The altars and ceremonial of the classic Greeks retained many traces of an earlier ancestral ritual. In connection with patriarchal government the ancient Romans developed an advanced type of ancestral worship. The Roman manes is the accepted word for ancestral deities. In order that the spirits might have a proper abiding place, and be propitiated, the Egyptians embalmed the bodies of the dead with care, and showed them the highest honor.

In all these nations, and among the Chaldeans, the Assyrians, and the Babylonians, as well, it was a part of proper burial to build an altar at the head of the tomb on which to place food, drink, and precious offerings. The worship of the Semitic peoples, the Hebrews and the Arabs, as history knows them, is remarkably free from ancestral deification; but the altar and its sacrifices, shewbread, and other ceremonials lead scholars to the conclusion that these people prove no exception to the general principle that all civilized nations have at one time practiced ancestor worship. The following passage quoted by Herbert Spencer from a German authority goes to show that the practice, often in a disguised form, still lingers in central Europe:

Roman Catholic peasants do not forget all the year round to care for the welfare of the souls of their dead. The crusts of the table are collected throughout the week, and on Saturday night are thrown into the hearth-fire, that they may serve as food for the souls during the following holy day. Any soup which drops on the table . . . is left to the poor souls. When a woman prepares the dough, she casts behind her a handful of flour, and throws a piece of dough into the furnace; when she bakes little cakes, she puts some fat into the pan and the first cake into the fire. Wood-cutters put little pieces of bread which have become too dry, upon the tree trunks: all for the poor souls. . . . When the time of All Souls is approaching, the same care for the deceased is shown more vividly. In every house a light is kept burning all night; the lamp is no longer filled with oil but with fat; a door, or at least a window, remains open, and the supper is left on the table, even with some additions; people go to bed earlier,--all to let the dear little angels enter without being disturbed. . . . Such is the custom of the peasants of the Tyrol, Old Bavaria, Upper Palatinate, and German Bohemia.

The origin of ancestor worship is to be investigated, however, among more primitive people than those of history. The field of investigation is a wide one. Ancestral worship was, and is, practiced by the savage tribes of both Americas, of Africa, of Australia, and of Asia. It is doubtful whether there are any tribes so low in the scale of humanity as not to have notions of ghosts and the necessity of propitiating them.

The foundation of ancestor worship is a belief, however shadowy, in ghosts; a belief that the ghost hovers about the body it once inhabited and that it has a disposition and a power to help or to hinder for good or for evil, as in life, only more so. For this reason, call it abject fear, to begin with, the survivors treat the body of the dead, especially the body of one late in authority, as a father or a chief, with respect, make offerings of food and drink, employing the same arts to keep on the good side of the ghost that they did to secure the favor of the living. Veneration proceeding from affection and respect seems of later development. The earliest form of ancestral worship is the propitiating of authority. In the earlier stages of his development, the savage believes that the spirits are as capricious, as loyal, as jealous, and as vindictive as he is.

With the belief in ghosts, spirits, souls, manes of the fathers, is joined a belief in their activity and supernatural power. When good hunting and game scarcity, the speeding of an arrow and the failure to hit, victory in combat and disastrous ambush, the rotting of seed in the ground and the sprouting of seed, rain and drouth, harvest and starvation, fat flocks and animals dying of disease, health and pestilence, are not regarded as the outworkings of great and permanent forces of nature, but as the work of spirits once in the body, spirits good and spirits evil, spirits well disposed and spirits angered, it is not strange that propitiation of the dead should be the serious business of the living. In such a stage of thought no effort to please the dead is too great. Just where affection begins and fear leaves off, none can say. The Roman feared the omission of a single word or a mistake in a single gesture. The Egyptian even seated the mummy of his father at the table.

Among the lower tribes the spirits of ancestors were ever near at hand. The thought of a heaven and a hell, of an elysium for the souls of the just and a place of discomfort for the spirits of the unjust, is not primitive. The Indian, who provided game, pipe, bow, and arrows, that his father might have a prosperous passage to the happy hunting ground, is as far ahead of the Tasmanian in religious development as his bow and arrow are ahead of the rude tools of stone and shell used by the savage of the South Seas. As a general principle, we may assert that the more primitive a people, the greater their fear of ghosts, and the more abject their form of worship. As people advance, the belief in the active participation of the manes in life fades out. The worship of ancestry assumes more and more the form of affectionate remembrance.

Far more than half of the inhabitants of the world now practice ancestry worship in one form or another. The most complete type is the household worship of the Japanese. The following passages are taken, with trifling modification, from Japan: An Interpretation, by Lafcadio Hearn:

There survive in the Japanese ancestor-cult these three beliefs, which underlie all forms of persistent ancestor-worship in all climes and countries:

1. The dead remain in this world,--haunting their tombs, and also their former homes, and sharing invisibly in the life of their living descendants.

2. All the dead become gods, in the sense of acquiring supernatural power; but they retain the characters which distinguished them during life.

3. The happiness of the dead depends upon the respectful service rendered them by the living; and the happiness of the living depends upon the fufilment of pious duty to the dead.

These beliefs, in modified form, are yet a fundamental part of the existing cult. In every home, there is a shrine devoted to it. This shrine, a tiny model of a Shinto Temple, is placed on a shelf fixed against the wall of an inner chamber at a height of about six feet from the floor. Such a shelf is called a "Shelf of the August Spirits." In the shrine are placed thin tablets of white wood inscribed with the names of the household dead. Such tablets are called "spirit-sticks." The number of mortuary tablets in a household shrine does not generally exceed five or six,--only grandparents and parents and the recently dead being thus represented; but the names of remoter ancestors are inscribed upon scrolls, which are kept in the Butsudan or the mitamaya.

Whatever be the family rite, prayers are repeated and offerings are placed before the ancestral tablets every day. The nature of the offerings and the character of the prayers depend upon the religion of the household; but the essential duties of the cult are everywhere the same. These duties are not to be neglected under any circumstances: their performance in these times is usually intrusted to the elders, or to the women of the household. There is no long ceremony, no imperative rule about prayers, nothing solemn: the food-offerings are selected out of the family cooking; the murmured or whispered invocations are short and few. But, trifling as the rites may seem, their performance must never be overlooked. Not to make the offerings is a possibility undreamed of: so long as the family exists they must be made. It should be recognized that no religion is more sincere, no faith more touching than this domestic worship, which regards the dead as continuing to form a part of the household life, and needing still the affection and the respect of their children and kindred. Originating in those dim ages when fear was stronger than love,--when the wish to please the ghosts of the departed must have been chiefly inspired by dread of their anger,--the cult at last developed into a religion of affection; and this it yet remains. The belief that the dead need affection, that to neglect them is a cruelty, that their happiness depends upon duty, is a belief that has almost cast out the primitive fear of their displeasure. They are not thought of as dead: they are believed to remain among those who loved them. Unseen they guard the home, and watch over the welfare of its inmates: they hover nightly in the glow of the shrine-lamp; and the stirring of its flame is the motion of them. They dwell mostly within their lettered tablets;-sometimes they can animate a tablet,--change it into the substance of a human body, and return in that body to active life, in order to succour and console. From their shrine they observe and hear what happens in the house; they share the family joys and sorrows; they delight in the voices and the warmth of the life about them. They want affection; but the morning and the evening greetings of the family are enough to make them happy. They require nourishment; but the vapour of food contents them. They are exacting only as regards the daily fulfilment of duty. They were the givers of life, the givers of wealth, the makers and teachers of the present: they represent the past of the race, and all its sacrifices;-whatever the living possess is from them. Yet how little do they require in return! Scarcely more than to be thanked, as the founders and guardians of the home, in simple words like these: "For aid received, by day and by night, accept, August Ones, our reverential gratitude." ... To forget or neglect them with rude indifference, is the proof of an evil heart; to cause them shame by ill-conduct, to disgrace their name by bad actions, is the supreme crime. They represent the moral experience of the race: whosoever denies that experience denies them also, and falls to the level of the beast, or below it. They represent the unwritten law, the traditions of the commune, the duties of all to all: whosoever offends against these, sins against the dead. And, finally, they represent the mystery of the invisible: to Shinto belief, at least, they are gods.