ANCESTRAL CULT. — The cult of ancestors is distinguished from the simple cult of the dead in that it is directed toward the progenitors of one’s lineage taken collectively, whereas the latter refers to specific deceased individuals, generally but not necessarily united with the officiant by ties of blood.
In Chinese religion the cult of ancestors—in which filial piety is supremely expressed—is the most deeply felt by the people and is present within every home. The imperial dynasty had its own ancestral temple with seven chapels, of which the one oriented to the north was consecrated to the founder of the family; the temples of feudal princes had five chapels, those of vassals three, each furnished with a “spirit tablet,” regarded as the resting place of the soul and therefore the site where incense was burned, candles lit, and offerings made. The common people, lacking a chapel, venerate and have always venerated their ancestors, represented by spirit tablets, in a corner of the house; before these tablets all events of family life are consecrated—births, coming of age, marriages, funerals—since the Chinese are firmly convinced that their ancestors continue to take an active part in the life of the family. Only the firstborn son may serve as minister of the ancestral cult. The cult of ancestors in China, which for two and a half centuries fueled a bitter controversy among missionaries who either defended or denied its legitimacy as almost an act of idolatry, was declared a civil ceremony and as such authorized by a decree of the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda (Dec. 8, 1939), which considers it an act of homage and not of worship, provided that the spirit tablets are not regarded as “seats of the soul” and that only the name of the deceased is inscribed upon them. For the entire question see CHINESE RITES.
Japan, which owes its civilization to China, similarly venerates its ancestors, whose representative tablet is placed within a wooden casket in a corner of the house. Moreover, the entire Japanese religion presents itself as a cult of ancestors, beginning with those of the imperial family, venerated with great solemnity by the Mikado, especially at solemn moments in national life.
Ancestors, invoked as “fathers,” receive solemn cult in ancient India, a cult that constitutes the first of the duties for the survivors, the *pitṛyajña*, that is, the “sacrifice of the cake (*piṇḍa*) to the fathers.” This consists in offering three of these cakes upon a grassy layer before a fire placed to the south, the region of the dead. The *Fravaši* of the Iranians, now considered the sanctified souls of the just, were originally the spirits of ancestors.
Among the Greeks traces of the cult are very scarce. They are entirely absent in Homer, a fact easily explained by the circumstance that the milieu for which he sang—the seafaring cities—was still too little rooted in the soil to allow for the development of an ancestral cult. Even later, the superimposition of the democratic state upon the primitive gentilicial constitution, the development of urbanism, and above all the sense, so powerfully alive among the Greeks, of the individual—which later led to the cult of heroes—rendered the ancestral cult very weak. We must nonetheless perhaps see a trace of it in the festival of the Apaturia (see Apaturia). Among the Romans there are faint but nonetheless unmistakable traces of the cult of ancestors in the religious figure of the *di Manes*. In later times, the *di Manes* are conceived either as infernal deities (in Greek, *daimones katachthonioi*) or as the soul of a particular deceased; yet the very use of the plural—a formula that, strictly speaking, makes no sense when it designates a single individual—and the fact that the sacred rites for the *Manes* are private, even if made obligatory by the laws of the state, demonstrate that the *Manes* were originally the ancestors of individual clans. That the *Lares familiares* should be identified with the spirits of ancestors is probable but not certain; more probable, though not certain either, is that the *imagines maiorum*, preserved in the atrium of the gentes’ houses, were originally objects of cult on the part of the members of the *gens*. For the cult of ancestors among primitives see PRIMITIVE RELIGIONS.