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Updated: August 27, 2024
Probably the filial piety that centred about the domestic altars of the ancient West differed in little from that which yet rules the most eastern East. But we miss in Japan the Aryan hearth, the family altar with its perpetual fire. The Japanese home-religion represents, apparently, a much earlier stage of the cult than that which existed within historic time among the Greeks and Romans.
What emotional poetry, for even the least believing, in the ancient home-religion, in the lamplet nightly kindled before the names of the dead, the tiny offerings of food and drink, the welcome-fires lighted to guide the visiting ghosts, the little ships prepared to bear them back to their rest!
Yet there is nothing stern or solemn in this home-religion to-day, nothing of that rigid and unvarying discipline supposed by Fustel de Coulanges to have especially characterized the Roman cult.
But, in speaking of the family-cult as the oldest, I do not mean the home-religion as it exists to-day; neither do I mean by "family" anything corresponding to the term "household." In prehistoric Japan the domestic cult of the house-ancestor probably did not exist; the family-rites would appear to have been performed only at the burial-place.
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