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There are various other forms of Shinto worship; but they need not be considered for the present. Of the three forms of ancestor-worship above mentioned, the family-cult is the first in evolutional order, the others being later developments.
And the Fetishism, Ancestor-worship, Hero-worship, and Demonology of primitive savages are all, I believe, different manners of expression of their belief in ghosts, and of the anthropomorphic interpretation of out-of-the- way events which is its concomitant.
Pleyte goes on to state "regarding ancestor-worship, it may be said that this is found everywhere throughout the whole Archipelago; even the tribes that have already adopted Islam, venerate the spirits of their departed." The same might be said of some of the Khasis who have accepted Christianity, and much more of the Japanese. I would here refer the reader to the chapter on "Ancestor-worship."
Although ancestor-worship, or, more broadly, the cult of the dead, has in many cases overshadowed other cults or even extinguished them, we have no warrant, even in these cases, for asserting its priority, but rather the reverse; not only so, but in the majority of cases the pantheon is made up by a multitude of spirits in human, sometimes in animal form, which bear no signs of ever having been incarnate; sun gods and moon goddesses, gods of fire, wind and water, gods of the sea, and above all gods of the sky, show no signs of having been ghost gods at any period in their history.
In the course of thousands of years this original cult has undergone modifications, and has assumed various shapes; but everywhere in Japan its fundamental character remains unchanged. Without including the different Buddhist forms of ancestor-worship, we find three distinct rites of purely Japanese origin, subsequently modified to some degree by Chinese influence and ceremonial.
The earliest ancestor-worship, "the root of all religions," as Herbert Spencer calls it, was probably coeval with the earliest definite belief in ghosts. As soon as men were able to conceive the idea of a shadowy inner self, or double, so soon, doubtless, the propitiatory cult of spirits began.
In fact, every advanced human society has, at some period of its history, passed through the stage of ancestor-worship; but it is to the Far East that we must took to-day in order to find the cult coexisting with an elaborate civilization.
The history of the operation of this principle upon the Jewish religion is very similar, and extremely interesting. Although they do not seem to have ever had any system of ancestor-worship, as the Greeks had, yet the Jews appear originally to have recognized the deities of their neighbours as existing spirits, but inferior in power to the God of Israel.
All the same, his opinions and thoughts, apart from his profession, were apt to be strangled and suffocated by tradition. Tradition was a mighty force in the Lampton family. It almost, as Meg said, amounted to ancestor-worship. Freddy's choice of a profession had been his one act of emancipation.
Phallic Symbols. To form one's impression of the Kami no Michi wholly from the poetic liturgies, the austere simplicity of the miyas or shrines, or the worship at the palace or capital, would be as misleading as to gather our ideas of the status of popular education from knowing only of the scholars at court. Among the common people the real basis of the god-way was ancestor-worship.
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