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Updated: June 5, 2025
Yet another large class of persons, converts to Buddhism, continued to profess the older creed as well; and, while practising their ancestor-worship according to the Buddhist rite, maintained separately also the domestic worship of the elder gods.
In addition to that power which past generations exercise over present generations, by transmitting their natures, bodily and mental, and in addition to the power they exercise over them by bequeathed habits and modes of life, there is the power they exercise through their regulations for public conduct, handed down orally, or in writing.... I emphasize these truths," he adds, "for the purpose of showing that they imply a tacit ancestor-worship." ... Of no other laws in the history of human civilization are these observations more true than of the laws of Old Japan.
Much of that is natural and proper patriotism, no doubt, and no one would deny the ancient glories of India or the many admirable characteristics of the people of India to-day. It is the self-deceiving patriotism, the blind ancestor-worship, of which we are speaking as a phase of modern opinion.
All have felt and recognized that loftiest of all truths, the communion of the living and the dead, and have given it various names designating the same mysterious verity: the Christians know it as revival of merit, the Buddhists as reincarnation, or transmigration of souls, and the Japanese as Shintoism, or ancestor-worship.
According to our modern ideas it seems a very strange thing to worship a living man as a god; it seems also strange to worship a dead man as a god, but there we have at least the analogy of the worship of the saints, and the inherent instinct of the race toward ancestor-worship which unexpectedly crops out in all of us at intervals.
The teaching of Herbert Spencer that the greater gods of a people those figuring in popular imagination as creators, or as particularly directing certain elemental forces represent a later development of ancestor-worship, is generally accepted to-day.
Sacrifices were offered to Heaven, the hills and rivers, ancestors, and all the spirits. Dancing held a conspicuous place in worship. Idols are spoken of in the earliest times. Of course, each religion, as it formed itself out of the original ancestor-worship, had its own sacred places, functionaries, observances, ceremonial.
In the Greek system of theology we find in the first place a number of deities of varying importance and power, whose special functions are defined with some distinctness; and then, below these, an innumerable band of spirits, the souls of the departed probably the relics of an earlier pure ancestor-worship who still interest themselves in the inhabitants of this world.
It is a dream that some one really dreamed, one of those bad dreams in which the figure of a person beloved becomes horribly transformed; and it has a particular interest as expressing that fear of death and of the dead informing all primitive ancestor-worship.
The process of framing these ideas is rather obscure. The savage 'lives in terror of the souls of the dead as harmful spirits. This might yield a Devil; it would not yield a God who 'makes for righteousness. Happily, 'deified ancestors are regarded, on the whole, as kindly spirits. The dead ancestor is 'now passed into a deity. Examples of ancestor-worship follow. But we are no nearer home.
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