[ p. 73 ]
Historically, man worsliipped first and enquired later what lie was worshipping; so we may leave the enquiry as to what is implied by the phenomena of ancestor- worship till we have examined the phenomena themselves. The worship of ancestors is the worship not of ghosts in general but of a restricted band of ghosts, which in turn is only one band among other bands of spirits. Dead men who have become gods are not deified qua ancestors but as heroes, kings, sages, ancestral by repute to the clan or tribe, Romulus, Confucius, nowadays Shivaji, and the hke, not actual ancestors worshipped by one family. As gods become men (in the Kalevala and Persian epic; cf. Gen. 6:4), so men may become spirits as a class apart from disease-spirits and nature-spirits. In Afi’ica we find communities where ghosts are in general feared, but less tha~» gods, and within the band of ghosts the ancestral ghosts have a special cult. In Micronesia, popular consciousness discriminates between other spirits and ghosts and between general and family ghosts. Here Li Raba is Famine, Uota is a conical rock-spirit in the sea, revered, as were stones in Arabia; but neither of these is a ghost. So Saritou is a spirit that cooks the dead ghosts but is not himself a ghost. The only real ancestral ghost is the one fed for a time by a special family, but he is never worshipped till he becomes so vague that he naerely makes one of a group of Fathers, worshipped with other family ghosts in the same way, a general host of tribal powers remembered only en masse as protective genii, different [ p. 74 ] from gods and other spirits, who may be diseases personified or ghosts of discontented and malicious nature that torment men. But when, as in Babylonia, all spirits are malicious, disease-bringing devils, it is not certain whether they are in any one case ghosts or personified diseases, as both groups have the same character, -in opposition to the friendly gods. Thus a specified disease or pain is clearly not a ghost, but ghosts are clearly intended to be included in exorcisms against devils bringing distress and disease. On the other hand, ghosts as good, protecting spiritual powers are not gods. In Polynesia, ghosts have one cult; gods, another. The Australians have common ghosts and ancestral ghosts, who are not gods, but besides these they fear other spiritual powers not of the ghost-class and in particular recognize a non-ghostly creator-god. The lowest Philippine savage in the same way puts the ghost into one category and the creator-god into another. But human memory is frail and fallible and what may happen is that a vague remote tribal ancestor becomes so great in tribal esteem that he is to later generations a general spiritual power, perhaps in the guise of a culture-hero who is no longer thought of as a former man but as an omnipotent power; yet such a development is problematical in most concrete instances and the usual rule is that the ancestor m some form, perhaps not human, is thought of as having created the world or the gods and as such is respectfully spoken of rather than worshipped, as was the case with Unkulunkula, whose “divinity” was an invention of the missionaries, as Bishop Callaway said.[1]
The family feeds its dead, but other people pay no attention to them unless they become malignant. The exceptions are the rare ghosts that have been great kings or heroes, such as Tammuz and Gilgamesh (now known to [ p. 75 ] have been kings). The only ghost of a common sort that is treated with kindly consideration is the relative, in particular the defunct father of a family. For such a ghost, most races, so long as they think he is near, do somethiag, feed him, entreat, him to be kind, or at least pay him the courtesy of asking him to be content and go away. This last is the earlier attention paid to ghosts in general, a ritual on stated occasions. Yet the family ghost in many hundred tribes is not asked to depart, but to remain; he is regarded as being still a kind father interested in his offspring and desirous of aiding their welfare. That there is a ghost, that something survives, is implied as primitive belief by the practice of burying implements, toys, horses, wives, etc., with the dead and sending the soul down a stream or over water in a boat (as do the Africans and as did the Scandinavians). Just how the ghost is treated depends on the dead (probably) and on the tribal dispositioh. The apotropaic method of treatment is found, it is true, in many tribes, but in about as many more the relatives seek to keep the dead with them as a tutelary genius.
If elsewhere dread prompts the noise and beating which drives away the ghost, the picture can be offset by that of the mother giving her dead babe a few drops from her breast and by the first rites of Amerinds, Africans, and Dravidians when they feed the dead. Thus the (Dravidian) Gasiyas of Mirzapur invite the deceased with the words: “Accept this offering of fowl; sit in the comer and bless your offspring.” An ancestral ghost “is often the best friend of the cultivator and of the peasant proprietor too, if he treats him with proper respect.”[2] The Vedic Aryans “put a stone between themselves and death” in the burial ritual; but this was only to keep the infection of death from spreading back to the village. [ p. 76 ] For the dead and buried man they had only a kindly feeling, a conviction that though “gone. before” (the Sanskrit designation of the ghost) he would return to dine with them once a month at the feast in honor of the still liviiig dead. Many Amerinds showed for ghosts affection rather than fear.[3] The Veddas deemed the family’ ghost a friendly spirit eager to help. To sacrifice human beings at a funeral is to serve the dead vith attendants, etc. Even to eat the dead is a mark of esteem and sometimes of love. Thus the African mother eats her babe to keep its ghost with her; it is a mark of real affection. Even as late as the time of Zoroastrian mythology the same idea appears. The first man and woman devoured their first children because they loved them to excess.[4]
The dread of the ghost comes largely from the belief that whether well disposed or not, it needs a body and may occupy the mourner’s as a new habitation. Hence the danger of eating and yawning before the ghost is settled. Fasting here is an act of self-preservation not of purification. Sneezing is lucky because it shows that one has evicted an undesirable would-be tenant. But in Africa it indicates that the owner’s soul is suffering and hence he is greeted with a local prosit. The Hindus thought sneezing lucky.[5] To protect openings through which a ghost may slip, ears and noses are be-ringed. Bells too ai’e rung to keep off the dead, which may have been the first use of [ p. 77 ] temple bells and gongs. The bell, because it frightens ghosts, has itself become a godling to the Q-onds, as iron has become a godling among the Agarias, partly because iron scares ghosts and partly because the Agarias, smelting iron, look on it as a divinity in that it givds them -their livelihood. Many practices survive, showing the desire to ward off spirits and ghosts. So the circular motion of the ring is imitated in waving hands and firebrands (the Hindu epic says especially that these must be “waved in a circle”); then comes the waving motion for itself, in banners on temples; the curve of the iron horseshoe, which is twice potent to “bring luck” (ie., avert ill) in India, and England; and the waving of salt and mustard (in India used especially to avert the evil eye). Ghosts and all spirits are frightened by red (blood) in many countries; in India also by black, white, and yellow; hence the wide use of tumefip and white as mourning (suggested first by death paUor), as in China and Austraha. The victim’s color is white at the sacrifices of human beings, in Ashanti, where the mourner’s color is red. In India, grain is offered to ghosts (at funerals) as well as to other spirits, as a means of satisfying both spirits and ghosts and so indirectly as a means of keeping them away. In .Africa, the same sort of offering is made but before the spirit declares its own attitude as beneficent or. malignant; it is an attempt to ingratiate oneself with a doubtful power. If the spirit be naturally kind, the offering will keep it contented; if naturally malignant, it will appease. In general, rice or other grain is used not as a “sj^bol of fruitfulness,” as it has been interpreted in the wedding-ceremony in India and elsewhere, but as a spirit-offering of this sort. ThiBis.proved by the fa^t that in India it is. used not only at weddings but also at funerals; and when a man returns from a .journey he passes a stone seven times around his child’s [ p. 78 ] head and throws rice around the child, which can be only to keep ofE infection (evil influence or spirit) liable to be carried by the traveller. Moreover, the grain at the wedding is parched, which it would not be if it were a symbol of fruitfulness. But it is true that there has arisen a general feehng that grain is a blessing-bringer (hke salt, a preservative and hence lucky), and when in India one decorates a pole with seven kinds of grain and elevates it in the- barnyard, it is probably with a very remote notion of ghosts; a sense that it is lucky is all that rernains.
The religious proceeding with the ghost is logically hke that in the case of savage gods. When the god Pambi sends a drought upon the Manganjas, the priestess of this god offers him a handful of grain, crying out, Enioy this grain and then hear our prayer,” at the same time offering the god a libation of beer and flinging water into the air, with the usual naive combination of rehgious petition and magical science which appears in the ritual of the AustraUan, who seeks magically to contrql, while he religiously entreats the grain-power.
Ghosts that are not wanted about a house at all are indifferently ancestral or not. These comprise such common ghosts as the Hindu Dund or Headless Horseman, a torso lacking funeral rites, the Australian Ulthana, the Airi or Wild Huntsman (ghost of a slain hunter); graveyard ghosts of the unappeased, called in India Smasans or Masans and by false etymology regarded as “devourers” (really “graveyarders”), like Lemures. The Tolas are Hindu will-of-the-wisps, though not always ghosts. They may serve as types of those spirits of which only a dogmatist would assert that they were certainly ghosts or certainly nature-spirits., Any one such phenomenon might be either, according to circumstances. If a murderer has recently been executed, it is probably his ghost. Ordinarily it is a marsh-spirit.
[ p. 79 ]
The apotropaic rites are tlnis, in general, rites to keep off malignant influences, whether ghostly or animistic. Prom the ritual it is usually impossible to decide the genesis of the e’vil influence. But that is no argument against the fact that ghosts are not in primitiTe thought identical 'with nature-spirits. The usual attitude of the savage is that there are numberless influences, some ghostly, some not of human origin, all of "which may be offensive; and that ghosts are mainly a nuisance in trying to get back into human bodies; but that, again, among the ghosts one’s own family ghosts are not naturally malevolent. So in a wider sense, the hero-ghost belongs ^ot to one family but to a tribe and he lives a life of beneficence, helping the tribe by oracular advice and other’wise, sometimes appearing visibly in battle to aid them, etc. Such an exalted ghost receives worship; but the ordinary feeding of a family ghost is not worship at all.
Both family affection and tribal reverence, as has been sho’wn, make welcome guests of ghosts who are kin. There is no general rule, but fear is obviously not always the motive sho’wn. Our Indian widows used to make regular pilgrimages to the skulls[6] of their dead and weep over them as sincerely as a formal custom permitted, yet the custom itself was evidence of a kindly affection rather than of fear. On the other hand, any ghost of a man murdered or cut off untimely might well be conceived as unfriendly. Sometimes the cult of ancestors in general, good or bad, rises to the dignity of a state religion, as in Ashanti and Dahomey.
A feast for the dead implies only that the dead receive food from the living; as with the family ghost, it is not an act of worship. The idea of feeding the dead still [ p. 80 ] lingers in drinking to the memory of the dead, originally a libation for the dead to consume. Eeal worship of ghosts among savages is not particularly primitive nor is the custom by any means universal. The Amerinds rarely worshipped the dead at all, never generally; the Australians have only a rudimentary cult of the dead, scarcely more than a care for the dead body, a few simple acts to show that the ghost is not forgotten and exhortations to it to go away. The more advanced peoples in the same race show the more honor to the dead. Thus the Melanesians and Micronesians have more cult of ghosts than the less advanced Polynesians; but even among the Micronesians it was only chieftains whose ghosts were really worshipped.
But most civilized peoples have gone through and surpassed this cult by idealizing the ghosts as heroes or giving up ghost-worship altogether. Yet ghost-cult has left httle if any trace among the Babylonians, where spirits are malicious rather than kind. One hero is deified without dying, so that he is really not a ghost, and kings are called divine as well before as after death. In general, there was no Semitic cult of ancestors, only avoidance of ghosts. Babylonian ghosts live in a soul-prison whence there is no escape. Marduk only revivifies those who are deathly sick, and only a goddess, Ishtar, is actually raised from the under-world, when sprinkled with the water of life. There is no real ghost-worship in Babylon, only a libation-cult, which is no more than a sort of allsouls remembrance of the dead. Biblical passages as to offering food to the dead reveal that the practice is considered wrong (Deut. 26 : 14, food; Num. 6 : 18, Nazarite; hair may have been an offering of strength). Like the Babylonian hero, Enoch is translated and Elijah is carried to heaven without going to Sheol, but ordinarily no such mvine fate is for the ghost, and the whdie trend of [ p. 81 ] Hebrew worship opposed such a cult. Heroes had no cult, though the dead were consulted. Between Hebrew and Babylonian stood the Persian worshipper of Fravashis, good ghosts changed into protective spirits, w^ho, like the Hindu Fathers, appear in bird-form and later are identified Avith star-spirits. Enough of this Persian view has survived among the Armenians to make them believe that the dead dwell for three days by the tomb and they keep up the observance of the dead by feasting at the tomb once a week and on certain yearly occasions.[7] Among ^other Aryans the Kelts may have held a vague belief in metempsychosis and possibly had ancestor-worship. The Eomans worshipped no ghosts, not even heroes, except in rare cases, and had no belief in the continued individual existence of souls. They believed in an angry ghost, active till appeased, but thought that a dead man joined the indiscriminate group of Di Manes and thus, as a corporation, all souls after a fashion became a sort of divine throng, a family group of inferior godlings, whose “worship” consisted in seeing to it that they remained underground where they belonged, a ceremony called Lemuria, to drive them away. There was also a later ceremony to propitiate them, which treats the Fathers in a more kindly spirit. But in neither ease was there the intimate relation which existed between living and dead in Greece, where the evil ghost came back to haunt and the good to give advice and ivas honored as hero, just as in India today, where the Vir (Latin vir) is such a hero, when indeed he is not confused with the Mohammedan Pir (saint), which often happens. Such a Vir is an ancestor so honored that he receives worship even from those not of his own family.
In some regards the Eoman belief resembled that of the Semite and Igyptianj who also did not worship or [ p. 82 ] think of the dead as important to his own life; but expended care on the dead man to keep him safely away, with that’fear of the ghost which must be distinguished from ghost-worship. Probably in early Egyptian belief only kings were fortunate enough to live hereafter. Such a distinction is common among savages; it excludes the possibility of general ghost-worship.
The condition of the ghost in the next life requires the family’s care, first to provide it with its usual paraphernalia, weapons, implements, food, drink, wife, slaves, and other objects and persons, whose remains are found in the earliest graves, and second, to provide it with a’ proper body. The Kelts thought it went on living just the same as in life, with the same body and the same interests and financial obligations, but the Hindus and Egyptians by magical formulas “made a body” for it, the Hindus taking nine plus one days to “restore the eyes” and other parts. In modem usage something remains of this care of the dead in Purim and All-Souls’ Day and in funeral flowers; something also of the desire to avoid or get rid of the dead, in the “wake” and in opening the windows after a death; among some half-civilized people ghosts are still attracted by honey, probably used like hair and pitch as a sort of flypaper to catch and keep the ghost. Calling up ghosts as oracles, necromancy, still obtains among the deluded and ignorant.[8] Aristocratic ghosts usually had a special home, a Valhalla or Elysium, but the common mass went underground to a pit, the grave, and then slept, or followed the sun to darkness in the West (as in Babylon, Greece, and India). Probably the earliest idea was that the soul lingered in its own home, where it was buried (the Lares are home-keeping ghosts), then, when burial was in the outside ground, [ p. 83 ] that it lived alone in the earth; then with others in an assembly underground; finally as a shade it sought the West as the place of vanished light; but, when the body was cremated, the distinguished soul went up with the fire and smoke to a higher region. In their tombs the ghosts, of Borne still guarded the roads leading to the city, as they still cry in epitaphs to the passer-by for consideration and flowers. Our masses for the dead still echo the benedictions and offerings of antiquity, as our winter wreaths outside the window (sometimes negli, gently hung inside) offer the ghosts a refuge from cold and our Yule log still burns to warm them, as fires in Ireland were lighted in the fields for that purpose. While ghosts are physically weak they are also, as shadowy, tenuous, windy substances, very swift and able to pass through matter, but their intellectual power seems to be confined to foresight and oracular wisdom.- In Egypt they mediate between man and gods, recommending to the latter such men as give the ghosts food and prayers. In Hebrew belief the ghosts (ancestors) were originally conscious and potent powers, though not divine; but the prophets “cut the root of ancestor-worship by denying the. conscious existence of the dead.”[9]
Ghost-worship has been preserved as ancestor-worship by the Mongolians and reaches its height in the elaborate ritual of the Chinese cult, in which the chief feature is worship of the fathers of the family. The naturecult of the Sky-god or Heaven was amalgamated with it by assuming that the emperor’s ancestor was the Supreme God Heaven, and when ancestor-worship was carried into Japan it there also throve at the expense of Shintoism, which, contrary to common opinion, is not a cult of ancestors. The stages leading up to this racial exaltation of ghosts are to be found in the Mongolian [ p. 84 ] savages who practice Shamanism in its crudest form. These inhabitants of the wild regions of Eastern Europe and Siberia regard ancestors as great powers apart from the gods. They both minister to the needs of these great powers and utilize them as the really active agencies in- the spiritual world. The Tunguse, for example, are first and foremost ancestor-worshippers. As a form only they ask the’great god for rain, but the petition is really directed to the ancestors; often the formality of asking the god is ignored altogether. The lowest gods alone can be directly approached by men and they only through the Somo or dead ancestors, who in turn can be influenced only through the Shaman priest, an individual whose priestly power is not inherited but inborn. A family may be Shamanistic but not necessarily so, for each son in turn must prove by ecstatic performances that he can control the ghosts. When approved, the Shaman visits, on the soul of a sacrificed horse, either heaven or hell and procures what is sought from the ancestral ghosts, who in turn control the gods and devils, living above and below, as do the ghosts. But merely to drive ghosts away no great formality (such as the horse-sacrifice) is needed.
In the preceding pages gods have been derived from various sources and it has been shown that they begin generally with spirits of a neutral character and disposition, who develop into gods of more marked personality and nature. No very great or supreme god, however, has risen from an ancestral ghost. Objective natural phenomena (sun, storm, etc.) or natural processes personified (seasonal change, order) have been thus exalted, sometimes as good, sometimes as evil. Little devils are sometimes ghosts and sometimes naturaT objects or processes (diseases). Moreover, a great god is never a departmental [ p. 85 ] god solely. He may begin as sun or storm or agricultural spirit, but as he becomes greater he assimilates other functions and ends by becoming master of all and general ruler, adapting himself to an expanding, social or tribal expansion. Now in many cases when a god is first’ discovered it is after he has passed through such an experience and consequently it is difficult to analyze his character with sufficient certitude; he may have begun as a god of storm or sun-god or tree-god, and from being the commanding figure, as tree-god or sun-god, gone on to embrace other provinces, as the sun-god in India and the moon-god in Ur, or as the water-god in both India and Babylonia became more than they were originally.
On the other hand, and this is more important because it has been more disregarded, a small community may have a protecting spirit of a general character (compare Mars, for war and agriculture), like the village-gods in India, who are not apparently ghosts and yet are not markedly identified with any special natural phenomenon, as in Champa the “Lady of the City” is the local goddess, like Athena.[10] They are the local godhngs to whom the villagers pray and sacrifice and who exercise a general superintendence of the community, helping it, punishing it, of no account outside the community, bound up with it, expressing it. As such a community expands, it carries its community-god with it as a war-fetish, as a harvestgod, as a general spirit’ual s’astainer, till in time it becomes a great god of a great people. If a god of this sort is the protector of a littoral conamunity, it is apt to be regarded as a water-god, because the people are more concerned [ p. 86 ] with, water than with tillage; if inland, a huntergod or farmer-god; but this is only the most obvious side. All the time it is the god, the god of the tribe, and turns as the tribe turns, grows with it. In the end it .becomes the Father of the people; not as an ancestral ghost but as protector and guardian and giver of sustenance a’nd aid. It is, however, at all times identified with the people’s interest. Such a Spirit may of course be a Mother, and many of the Hindu godlings come under this head; but no Hindu Mother becomes a war-god and. in general most of the mother-gods remain local unless expanded as earth-mothers or goddesses- of love. Different communities differ in regard to the strictness with which gods of an expanding nature are held to their first concern. Consequently, some races develop gods more departmental than others. Other races tend to let the departmental side lapse and keep the god as general guardian. So the Semites credited their gods with local concern but attributed to them a general power and oversight out of all relation to the conception of them as water-god, sun-god, or moongod. On the other hand, Aryan communities generally confined their clan-gods to special departments par excellence but granted them over and above their special[^xxxx] concern a wide general supervision, so that while Indra is chiefly a stonn-god like Hadad he gradually becomes a god-of-all-work and even acts as a sun-god; and Varuna (like Ba) becomes a heaven-god (of sky-waters) and general guardian of ethics. So the pre-Aztec Tlaloc, god of fertility, became a sun-god. In Mexico, as in Greece, the previous local goddesses of fertility were made to marry the conquerors’ (Aztec) gods. In Peru, the great god of the seacoast was a sea-god, that is, the sea-god becomes the great god of the littoral, as inland the sun and lake become the great gods; but in all these oases- the gods rose far above their original limitations and natural functions. [ p. 87 ] In India, Rama and Elrislma may have been deified heroes, but they were certainly not revhred as ancestors, nor was Ishtar worshipped as a family ghost even if she was originally a human queen. To sum up, a dead person may become a god, but a great god is not worshipped as ancestor, and the ancestor qua ancestor is less likely to become a clan-god than is the hero or culture-spirit, who belongs to the clan or people not as an ancestor but as an adopted child. A god, finally, is often called grandfather, for respect, without intent to ascribe fatherhood. Thus the Amerinds whose totem is the fox have a cult of the owl, which, according to their own legend, conceived affection for them, and taught them to revere him, call Mm Grandfather, and dance and sing in his honor.
We have now passed in review most of the material of which gods have been made. Yet stones, trees, mountains, rivers, stars, sun, animals, and men, living and dead, do not exhaust the interminable list. In one small community of India are worshipped the “mother-goddess of the threshing-floor,” Sodal Mata; the goddess of roads and steeps, Telia; to whom are offered libations. of oil; a deified tree, Anjan Dea; the goddess of smallpox, Sitala (revered with heaps of stones, to resemble pustules); Bhulat, a cowherd, probably an historical person, and Singaja,.a man who lived three hundred years ago and is now a god remembered with an annual fair at his tomb in September; and besides all these and the usual gods of a fairly large pantheon, reverence is paid to a god called “Fifty-Six,” Chappan Deo, who represents “the largest number of places to which a lost "vMfe or child may have strayed” and is worshipped as a real divinity.[11]
Callaway, Unkulunkula, p. 124 (1868). ↩︎
Crooke, op. cit., I, pp. 176, 182. ↩︎
The food for the dead does not necessarily imply desire to content and so dismiss the ghost, since it is often bidden to remain in its old home. Sometimes an image or a sort of cage of hair is hung tip for it to enter, thinking it has a new body, for ghosts are easily tricked. This is not due to affection, however, but to fear lest the ghost enter a human body; yet it shows that the ghost is still a kindly neighbor. ↩︎
On the Veddas of Ceylon and the Africans, see C. G. Seligman, Notes on the Veddas (1908) and The Veddas (1911); J. W. Wilson, Western Africa; Nassau, Fetichism; and Ellis, The Tshi-speaking Peoples p, 159. ↩︎
Ellis, op. cit, p, 203; Warren, Froc. Am. Or. Soc., 1885, May, p. xvii. ↩︎
The Romans also kept tke skull, afterwards in effigy, as the most vital part of tke corpse, perhaps as the seat of the mind or soul, a Semitic view. ↩︎
Abeghian, Armenischer Volksglaube (1899). ↩︎
Necromancy may have been introduced among the Aryans (Homer, etc.) from the Semites. See L. B. Paton, Spiritism, p, 150. ↩︎
Paton, op. cit., p, 270. ↩︎
^10 ↩︎
Nimar District Gazetteer, ^ p. 59. The little settlement was once a Jain community. ↩︎