Ancestor worship or ancestor veneration are among the world’s oldest religious practices. Ancestor worship is based on the belief that the deceased continue to have an active interest in the daily affairs of the living and that they may be able to influence what happens to the living. This feeling that the dead have an ongoing interest in the daily lives of their descendants may come from dreams in which dead ancestors appear. In many cultural traditions, deceased ancestors are regularly honored with ceremonies so that they will continue to help the living.
From Ancient China through the present day, ancestor worship has been a consistent theme. Regarding ancient China, Bruce Trigger, in his book Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study, reports:
“The Chinese honoured ancestors in household shrines that varied in importance and elaboration according to the antiquity of the patrilineal descent group and hence the social status of the head of the household.”
In his book Chinese Religion: An Introduction, Laurence Thompson writes:
“The central importance of the family is no doubt the specific distinguishing characteristic of Chinese society; and the function of the ancestral cult is certainly the specific distinguishing characteristic of the Chinese family.”
In their chapter on the ethnography of ancestors in The Archaeology of Ancestors: Death, Memory, and Veneration, Jon Hageman and Erica Hill write:
“Traditional Chinese ancestor veneration was part of a complex eschatology involving beliefs in souls, supernatural beings, and geomancy.”
Chinese ancestor worship involved funeral rites, mourning observances, and offerings to the ancestors. Laurence Thompson points out:
“The ancestors dwelt in three specific places: within the home, within the family or clan cemetery, and within the clan temple.”
The Chinese clan’s ancestral temple confirms the solidarity of the clan and the ultimate reunion of the clan’s kin. Laurence Thompson writes:
“The ancestral temple was the home of the tablets inhabited by the spirits of all the clan’s deceased members. Here the souls of the ancestors were visibly personified in the rows of wooden tablets standing in order according to their respective generations and relationships on shelves under the tablet of the High Ancestor of the clan.”
In her section on China in World Religions, Jennifer Oldstone-Moore describes ancestor veneration this way:
“The Chinese feel the dead to be near, and to exercise a great influence on the living. Deceased members of the family have a powerful role in that family’s continued well-being. Filial piety demands that deceased family members receive a proper burial and regular sacrifices. Thus treated they become ancestors, a source of blessings and fertility (that is, progeny) for the family.”
Concerning the origins of ancestor veneration in China, Erica Hill and Jon Hageman, in their chapter on the archaeology of ancestors in The Archaeology of Ancestors: Death, Memory, and Veneration, write:
“Archaeological evidence indicates that ancestor veneration in China developed over several thousand years, beginning as a collective ritual among egalitarian groups during the Neolithic circa 4500 BCE and evolving into a highly institutionalized elite practice through the late Shang (1200-1045 BCE) and Zhou (1045-771 BCE).”
In Confucian Chinese villages, honoring the ancestors is important in maintaining the harmony between the world of the Earth and the realm of the immortals. In his book Religions, Philip Wilkinson reports:
“Chinese people would go to their parents’ graves to make offerings—this was particularly the duty of sons. Ancestors were also honored at shrines in the home. These shrines—usually in the main living room of the house—comprised an altar supporting several spirit tablets, where ancestor spirits were said to dwell.”
With regard to ancestor worship in Confucian Chinese villages, Jeanette Werning, in her chapter in Mummies of the World, writes:
“The traditional Confucian ideology, according to which society is bound by a strict system of mutual obligations between parents and children, old and young, ancestors and successors, death is a family event of far-reaching consequences, for it is death that transforms the head of a family into an ancestor who may demand veneration and claim sanctity. The survivors are charged with the task of caring for the spirits of the deceased, or making sacrifices to them, and protecting their graves.”
Ancestor worship can also be incorporated into world religions whose core beliefs do not include ancestor worship. For example, in the Chinese peasant village of Kaihsienkung a priest is engaged to read the Buddhist sutras at the head of the dead man. After three days, the corpse is placed in a coffin and taken to the cemetery. By this time, the spirit has left the corpse and joined the other ancestral spirits. The coffin is placed in a small pavilion. After two years and two months, the pavilion is burned. In A Profile of Primitive Culture, Elman Service reports:
“From then on, the deceased is an ancestor and is worshipped in the regular way. Special sacrifices of food and paper money are made on the anniversaries of his birth and death to symbolize the economic obligation of each generation to the previous one.”
Religion 101/102
Religion 101/102 is a series of topics about religion in which the concept of religion is not confined to the Abrahamic religions or the Western concept that religions must be god-centered. Religion 102 is an expansion of an earlier essay. More from this series:
Religion 102: Creation stories
Religion 101: Women and marriage under ancient Irish Brehon law
Religion 101: The European witch craze
Religion 102: The concept of the soul