Ancestor Veneration Avatars

Social Science Background

A significant challenge for every human culture has been how to deal with death, not only one's own impending demise, but also the loss of friends and especially the loss of parents (Chidester, 1990). Anthropologists have found that what they call ancestor worship is a prominent feature of “primitive religion,” and some suggest that gods are merely ascended ancestors who have gradually lost their original identities (Fortes, 1961). As Weston La Barre put this controversial point, “A god is only a shaman's dream about his father” (La Barre, 1972, p. 19; cf. Freud, 1946). Other theories of the origin of religion exist, notably the view that religion evolved from earlier traditions of magic in order to compensate people emotionally in situations of loss, deprivation, and inescapable frustration (Stark & Bainbridge, 1985; 1987). Thus the term ancestor veneration may be more appropriate than ancestor worship for a wider range of social contexts and theoretical approaches, because it does not necessarily deify the ancestors, yet implies some continuing devotion to them after their deaths. Here the term refers to all deceased relatives, whether or not they were in the direct ancestral line of descent.

Individuals may differ on exactly why they might wish to engage in symbolic activities related to departed family members, because several distinct emotional and cognitive processes may be at work, in different degrees for different people. Some may feel guilt that they were not sufficiently kind to the family member when they were alive, and may even harbor nagging feelings that they might have prevented the death in some way. They might conceptualize a parent's devotion to them while a child as a debt that must be repaid. Others may have been emotionally dependent upon the departed persons, and unable fully to escape the sense of needing them. Many of the skills and intellectual knowledge of the venerator may have been learned from the departed one, and thus a memory of the departed is stimulated whenever those abilities are used.

One of the recent cognitive theories of religion derives belief in gods from the human ability to conceptualize the thoughts, feelings, and motives of other people (Boyer, 2001; Atran, 2002). Given how important it was for people to be able to understand the behavior of partners, prey, and predators in the East African homeland of humanity, this mindreading ability is very powerful and at times can become hyperactive. In particular, humans may read personality into complex natural systems, such as attributing thunder to Jupiter or Thor. A different result is the possibility that our minds contain semi-autonomous models of the minds of the other people most important to us, and these models will continue to function semi-autonomously after the death of the person from whom they originated. It is easy to exaggerate this cognitive phenomenon, but there is a sense in which we contain within us the souls of loved ones. It is more obviously true that humans have the capacity to play multiple roles, and some psychologists have even argued that this ability has increased in recent centuries, as a complex society and fluctuating conditions have eroded the basis for a stable, unitary self (Lifton, 1971; cf. Goffman, 1956; Erikson, 1968; Fuller, 1970). A protean self plays multiple roles over time, whereas a multiplex self plays multiple roles simultaneously.