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Updated: June 5, 2025


Its original unit was not the household, but the patriarchal family, that is to say, the gens or clan, a body of hundreds or thousands of persons claiming descent from a common ancestor, and so religiously united by a common ancestor-worship, the cult of the Ujigami.

On the whole, we cannot explain away the conception of the Creator as a form of the conception of an idealised divine First Ancestor, because the conception of a Creator occurs where ancestor-worship does not occur; and again, because, supposing that the idea of a Creator came first, and that ancestor-worship later grew more popular, the popular idea of Ancestor might be transferred to the waning idea of Creator.

The hypothesis, as usual, breaks down on the close relation between the ethical code and the theological creed, among low savages, with a relatively Supreme Being, but without ancestor-worship, and without polytheistic gods from whom to select a heavenly chief. Whence came the moral element in the idea of Jehovah? Mr.

He had never held a religion the Lashcairn religion had been a jumble of superstition, ancestor-worship and paganism on which a Puritan woman marrying a Lashcairn in the middle seventeenth century had grafted her dour faith. It had flourished something hard and dictatorial about it found good soil on the Lashcairn stock.

Lafcadio Hearn, the writer who has most closely studied and understood that wonderful ancestor-worship, says: "One of the surprises of our future will certainly be a return to beliefs and ideas long ago abandoned upon the mere assumption that they contained no truth beliefs still called barbarous, pagan, mediæval, by those who condemn them out of traditional habit.

Shinto is the ancient Japanese system of ancestor-worship, with its doctrine of the divine descent of the Mikado from the Sun-goddess and its requirement that every faithful adherent make daily offerings to the spirits of the family's ancestors. With the future life or with moral precepts for this life it does not concern itself.

37. =Ancestor-Worship.= When a practice or institution is seen to work well it soon becomes indorsed by social custom, law, or religion. The patriarchal system became fortified by ancestor-worship, which helped to keep the family subordinate to its male head. Even the dead hand of the patriarch ruled.

Last, but not least, is the idea common to both people, that no family or clan can prosper which does not duly perform the worship of deceased ancestors; this, as Hearn puts it, is "the fundamental idea underlying every persistent ancestor-worship; i.e. that the welfare of the living depends upon the welfare of the dead."

But, however this may be, I think it is again merely matter of fact that, among a large portion of mankind, ancestor-worship is more or less thrown into the background either by such cosmic deities, or by tribal gods of uncertain origin, who have been raised to eminence by the superiority in warfare, or otherwise, of their worshippers.

It may be said in general that the attitude toward the dead becomes finer with advance in civilization; but before a specific moral power in ancestor-worship can be proved, it will be necessary to have exact details of moral ideas and conduct in all the lower tribes, together with some information regarding the attitude of individuals toward questions of conduct, and the motives that impel toward this or that action.

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