Ancestors, WORSHIP OF, the chief element in the religions of perhaps the larger half of mankind at the present moment. It arises naturally from the primitive conception of a soul during life animating the body and exercising influence over it, and after death merely retaining its power, continuing into the unseen world the life and social relations of the living world. The dead chief now passes into a deity, goes on protecting his clan and receiving service from them, and continues to keep the same temper as in mortal life. So that it is not mere family affection, but actual fear, that impels this reverence among the North American Indians, the ancient Aztecs, the negroes in Guinea, the natives of Polynesia, and most strongly among the Zulus, who conquer in battle with the help of the 'amatongo,' the spirits of their ancestors, and reach back through a series of divine ancestors to the earliest ancestor and creator of man, the Old-old-one, Unkulunkulu. The primitive mind, it would seem, makes no essential distinction between the divine nature, the human nature, and the animal nature, and freely worships visible natural objects for the sake of the spirits resident in them. The conception is due to Animism (q.v.), and develops into a more spiritual point of view, in which the indwelling spirit is considered as having an independent existence detached from the object with which it was confounded. Thus arise those refinements of primitive religion called sorcery, fetichism, and idolatry. Sorcery is the parent of sacerdotalism; fetichism leads naturally to its æsthetic development, idolatry.
The worship of ancestors is really a subdivision of animism. The spirits of the dead are assimilated to the spirits that reside in the objects of nature, at first revered like them, then more than them. Where direct worship of the objects of nature unfolds itself into a rich dramatised mythology, that is to say among the races most endowed with the speculative and æsthetic faculties, such as the ancient Greeks, animism and the worship of ancestors develop but feebly. But where on the contrary, as in China, mythology remains infertile; or where, as among many savage races, it never gets beyond its embryonic stage, animism becomes preponderant, and often, by it and along with it, the worship of ancestors. In China it is the dominant religion. Ancestors still have their temples and their offerings, and remain so present that the virtues or the crimes of their descendants are always considered in relation to them, as covering them with honour or infamy. The Hindu pays his offerings to the pitrís (patres) or divine manes, and looks to them for success and happiness. In Europe, the most conspicuous example was the usage of the ancient Romans. Their manes or ancestral deities were embodied as images, set up as household patrons, and appeased with offerings. They were counted among the gods of the lower world, and tombs were inscribed D.M., 'Dñs Manibus,' sometimes seen as a strange survival in Christian epitaphs. And in the crowd of saints in modern Christendom, with specialised functions, deemed capable of interfering to help the spiritual interests of their votaries, we see at least with what marvellous tact new ideas were fitted to the old.
The universality of ancestor-worship has led Herbert Spencer to the opinion that it was the origin of religion everywhere. His view is a kind of revival of the old Euhemerism (q.v.), which explained the myth as containing an element of historical truth, its figures as enlarged portraits of real men and women, and its gods as merely ancestral ghosts raised to a higher power. He argues that all religious beliefs arose originally out of the erroneous conclusions drawn by primitive man from the ill-understood facts of his own nature, especially in the phenomena of sleep and dreams. These have to the savage as much objective reality as those he has seen when awake. This primi- tive conception finds further support in the facts of syncope, apoplexy, catalepsy, and other forms of temporary insensibility. During these his 'double,' the soul, has, he believes, been actually absent from the body. These ideas applied to death—but a lengthened sleep or prolonged absence—have engendered the idea of an awaking following regularly after death. Hence primitive funeral rites assume that the dead can eat, drink, and fight anew, and act in everything like a living man. Upon this conception of the state of the dead, in Spencer's view, the savage man's idea of another life is grafted, confirmed as its reality is by the apparition of the dead in dreams. A future life assumes another world—a region of souls, located at first near the place of burial, afterwards above, below, and around the living world. These disembodied souls constantly increasing in number are ordinarily invisible, but are able to manifest themselves from time to time, and to particular individuals. Hence arises naturally the idea that things astonishing, extraordinary, or exceptional, have for their causes the action of the dead spirits—invisible, and in one sense supernatural agents. Since these disembodied spirits still continue influential for good or evil, it is wise to conduct ourselves in such a way as to conciliate their good-will and to deprecate their wrath.
In this elemental consideration, says Herbert Spencer, is the foundation of all religion. But his argument fails to account for many of the facts, and at the outset its fundamental negation may be questioned, that primitive man is incapable of an illusion which consists in taking the inanimate and impersonal for the animate and the personal. He forgets that savage man is full of imagination, and that he is constantly personifying. In fact, personification remains long after the primitive stage is past. In the Græco-Roman society it was the last impress of the old polytheism, and the stars were still animate beings to the eyes of the Stoics and Alexandrians, to a Jew like Philo, and a Christian like Origen. Mr Spencer's theory does not explain the parallelisms and analogies between myths among races of the most widely different degrees of civilisation, nor the difference in the degree of divinity between the first and later ancestors, nor why the dead man has more power for good or evil than he had when alive. His opponents assert that he has not wandered far enough afield for his facts, and that the luminous and convincing appearance of his argument is merely due to the systematic selection of such facts as seem to confirm it, and the no less systematic elimination of their contraries. Certainly the problem of the origin of religion is a much more complex question than this, and ancestor worship is merely a phase of an infinitely wider question. See Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871); Herbert Spencer's Principles of Sociology; Caspari, Die Urgeschichte der Menschheit (1877); and Albert Réville, 'La Nouvelle Théorie Euhémériste,' in Revue de l'Histoire des Religions (vol. iv. 1881).