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Updated: June 5, 2025
It has been said a thousand times and in a thousand books that ancestor-worship is for the most part the source of primitive religions, and it may be strictly said that what most distinguishes man from the other animals is that, in one form or another, he guards his dead and does not give them over to the neglect of teeming mother earth; he is an animal that guards its dead.
Now these three forms of ancestor-worship, the domestic, the communal, and the national, constitute all that is vital in Shinto. No single essential of the ancient faith had ever been weakened, much less abolished, under the long pressure of Buddhism. The Supreme Cult is not now the State Religion by request of the chiefs of Shinto, it is not even officially classed as a religion.
Probably they are not; but they do possess a Being who reads their hearts, and who certainly shows no traces of European ideas. If the Fuegians are not ancestor-worshippers, this Being was not developed out of ancestor-worship. The evidence of Captain Cook, no anthropologist, but a mariner who saw and knew little of the Fuegians, is precisely of the sort against which Major Ellis warns us.
It is useless to argue which race gave the first cause for retaliation; it had been give and take between them for many years. Nor should our children's children, because of any tendency toward ancestor-worship, be allowed to believe that the whites were invincible and slaughtered more natives than they lost of their own people.
The travelling foreigner in Germany after a while begins to wonder if he is not in some far Eastern country where ancestor-worship obtains, and where one tremendous personality overshadows, obscures, and obliterates all the rest. In truth, however, this is not the lesson of the imperial images for the foreigner.
But before considering how the social structure in old Japan was shaped by the ancestral cult, let me again remind the reader that there were at first no other gods than the dead. Even when Japanese ancestor-worship evolved a mythology, its gods were only transfigured ghosts, and this is the history of all mythology.
His public responsibility, however, was not determined merely by civil law. It was determined by another religious bond, that of the ancestral cult of the clan or tribe; and this public form of ancestor-worship was even more exacting than the religion of the home.
Therefore, as being at the most rudimentary, ancestor-worship in Israel could not be developed at once into the worship of Jehovah. Though ancestor-worship among the Hebrews could not be fully developed, according to Mr. Spencer, because of their nomadic habits, it was fully developed, according to the Rev. A.W. Oxford.
Perhaps the humane spirit of the legislator is most strongly shown in his enactments regarding crime, as, for example, where he deals with the question of adultery necessarily a crime of the first magnitude in any society based on ancestor-worship.
Ancestor-worship is the ultimate source of all forms of religion; to it can be traced even such aberrant developments as fetichism and idolatry, animal-, plant-, and nature-worship. Thus the primitive man feels himself related not only to his living fellows, but to multitudes of supernatural beings about him.
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