accompanied by the most frantic expressions of grief, such as rending garments, tearing the hair, thumping the face and eyes, burning the body with small piercing firebrands, beating the head with stones till the blood runs; and this they called an offering of blood' for the dead. Everyone acquainted with the historical parts of the Bible will here observe remarkable coincidences." 1 But offerings of the worshipper's blood are, as we have seen,2 made to gods, and the scars which the operation leaves, or the tatooing to which it leads, are interpreted as marks showing that the worshipper is under the protection of the god to whom the offering has been made. When, therefore, as in Australia, "widows as a rule have a number of cuts made on their back as a sign of mourning," and the blood shed by the relatives comes to be regarded as an offering "to" the deceased, there is an obvious danger of the ceremony coming to be considered as worship of the deceased, by those who practise it as a matter of custom, and explain it by obvious, and incorrect, analogies. Hence it was forbidden to the Hebrews: "Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the Lord," 5 whereas the cuttings and marks would imply that the dead man was the lord of those who made the cuttings in their flesh. Where, however, the tendency was not thus checked, i.e. everywhere else, ancestorworship was free to develop; but its development required the co-operation of other causes, which we shall shortly set forth. But first it is necessary to consider the very interesting question of the hair-offering.

The fact that mourners all over the world do cut off their hair and shave their heads, is well established. The reason for their doing so is disputed. 6 Mr. Frazer regards the proceeding as a means of disinfecting the mourners from the taboo contagion, analogous to the breaking of the vessels used by a taboo person. The late Professor Robertson Smith7 regarded it as an offering of the hair, in which, as in the blood, the life of the individual is commonly believed to

1 The Rev. G. Turner, Polynesia, i. 227.

reside. The two views, however, are not irreconcilable, and the analogy of the blood-offering, as explained in our last paragraph, enables us to combine them. Originally, the hair was cut off at once in order that it might not catch and convey the taboo infection: the hair was not an offering to the deceased, any more than the blood of the clan, which was communicated in order to revivify him, was an offering in his honour. Then the custom is continued even when the reason is forgotten; and meanwhile the practice has grown up of commending one's individual prayers and fortunes to the gods by offering one's blood or hair to them. Finally, the mourning custom, the original reason of which has been forgotten, calls for explanation, and is explained on the analogy of the offerings to the gods. That it is so explained by those who practise it, is clear from examples of the custom, in which it is done in honour of or "for" the deceased.1 That originally it was a measure of disinfection, is clear from the fact that it is observed in cases where the theory of an offering is quite inapplicable.2

The history of food-offerings to the dead is, on the theory here suggested, exactly parallel to that of hair and bloodofferings. Originally, the dead were supposed to suffer from hunger and thirst as the living do, and to require food-for which they were dependent on the living. Eventually, the funeral feasts were interpreted on the analogy of those at which the gods feasted with their worshippers-and the dead were now no longer dependent on the living, but on a level with the gods. The food-offering is, however, more interesting in one way than the offerings of blood or hair: it enables us to date ancestor-worship relatively. It was not until agricultural times that the sacrificial rite became the cheerful feast at which the bonds of fellowship were renewed between the god and his worshippers. It could not therefore have been until agricultural times that the funeral feast came to be interpreted on the analogy of the sacrificial feast.

Offerings of food, hair, and blood, then, are elements both of the rites for the dead and of the worship of the gods. But they do not together constitute ancestor-worship: they are its elements-as yet, however, held in suspension and

In other words,

waiting for something to precipitate them. worship in any proper sense of the word implies worshippers, united either by the natural bond of blood or by the artificial bond of initiation. In the case of ancestor-worship, the body of worshippers is supplied by the family and united by the natural bond of blood. But the family is a comparatively late institution in the history of society. It does not come into existence until nomad life has been given up. A nomad society, to maintain itself in the struggle for existence at all, must consist of a larger group than that of parents and children, i.e. two generations; and in the patriarchal form, the group consists of three or four generations. It is not until the comparative safety of settled life and of village. communities has been attained, that it is possible for a son, as soon as he marries, to sever himself from the group into which he was born, and become the founder of a family. In nomad times, he and his wife and children are not a family, but members of the group to which he belongs by birth: they do not form a separate organism or institution, having separate interests from the rest of the community, regulating its own affairs. Thus once more we are brought to the period of settled, agricultural life as the earliest time at which the "worship" of ancestors begins.1

When ancestor-worship is established as a private cult, it, like other private cults, is steadily assimilated in form, in its rites and ceremonies, to the public worship of the gods. The animals which provided the food that the deceased originally was supposed to consume, are now sacrificed according to the ritual observed in sacrificing animals to the gods. In West Africa, "water and rum are poured on the grave, and the blood of living sacrifices, who are killed on the spot, is sprinkled on it." 2 In Equatorial Africa, "the son who succeeds the deceased in power immolates an ox on the grave.' "3 Amongst the Basutos an ox was slaughtered on the grave as soon as the deceased was

1 "But the worship of ancestors is not primal. The comparatively late recognition of kinship by savages, among whom some rude form of religion existed, tells against it as the earliest mode of worship."-Clodd, Myths and Dreams, 2 113.

2 Ellis, Ewe-speaking Peoples, 112.

3 Casati, Ten Years in Equatoria, ii. 210.

buried.1 The Battas pour the blood of a fowl on the corpse.2 The Tehuelche (Patagonians) sacrifice mares with all the rites previously described. It is not surprising, therefore, that the graves on which these sacrifices were offered should, like the sacrifices themselves, be affected by the tendency to assimilate the private cult of ancestors to the public worship of the gods. The cairns which are frequently erected to mark a grave, and on which the sacrifice was offered, would recall the primitive altar to mind. The single stone or wooden post erected on a grave was converted into a human shape, on the analogy of the idol to which the community's sacrifices were offered. Thus, in De Peyster's Island, "a stone was raised at the head of the grave, and a human head carved on it."4 Amongst many American tribes "a gravepost is roughly hewn into the image of the person over whose body it is placed." 5 The practice is reported of the Indians of Quebec ("anointing and greasing that man of wood as if living," says Father Salamant), the Ottawas, Algonkins, Alaskans, the Indians of the North-West, the natives of Chili, of the West Indies, Nicaragua, the Isthmus, Peru, and the Mayas and the Aztecs. Where cremation prevailed, the ashes were placed in hollow wooden statues, hollow clay images, or urns having on the outside a representation of the deceased."

When the assimilation of the rites for the dead to the ritual of the gods has proceeded thus far, it naturally happens that in many cases some superhuman powers are ascribed to the spirits of the dead. But it never happens that the spirits of the dead are conceived to be gods. For this there are several obvious reasons. Man is dependent on the gods; but the spirits of his deceased ancestors are dependent on him. The house-father, when he dies, does not cease to be "the father whom they knew"; though dead, and sometimes differing in degree of power from his sons, who in their turn will be "worshipped," he does not like the gods-differ in kind from mortal men. Above all, the gods of the community, merely from the fact that they have the whole of the community for their worshippers and under their

1 Casalis, Les Bassoutos, 264.

3 Supra, p. 146.

5 Dorman, Primitive Superstitions, 117.

2 Bastian, Oest. Asien, v. 365.
4 Turner, Samoa, 286.

6 Ibid.

protection, must inevitably be regarded as greater powers than a spirit who is only worshipped by the narrow circle of a single family, and cannot do much even for them.

To speak of the gods as "deified ancestors," is to use an expression which covers some ambiguity of thought. If what is implied is that in a community possessing the conception of divine personality, certain ancestors are, by some unexplained process, raised to the rank of gods, the statement may be true, but it does not prove that the gods, to whose rank the spirit is promoted, were themselves originally ghosts-which is the very thing that it is intended to prove. What then of these gods? Either they are believed to be the ancestors of some of their worshippers, or they are not. If they are believed to be the ancestors of their worshippers, then they are not believed to have been human the worshipper's pride is that his ancestor was a god and no mere mortal. Thus certain Greek families believed that they were descended from Zeus, and they worshipped Zeus, not as ancestor but as god. The "deified ancestor" theory, however, would have us believe that there was once a man named Zeus, who had a family, and his descendants thought that he was a god. Which is simplicity itself. If, on the other hand, a god is not believed to be the ancestor of any of his worshippers, then to assert that he was really a "deified ancestor is to make a statement for which there is no evidence-it is an inference from an assumption, namely, that the only spirits which the savage originally knew were ghosts. This assumption, however, is not true: the savage believes the forces and phenomena of nature to be personalities like himself, he does not believe that they are ghosts or worked by ghosts. In fine, the notion that gods were evolved out of ghosts is based on an unproved assumption and the simple fallacy of confusing ancestors human and ancestors divine. The fact is that ancestors known to be human were not worshipped as gods, and that ancestors worshipped as gods were not believed to have been human.

This last remark leads us to a generalisation which, though obvious, is important it is that wherever ancestorworship exists, it exists side by side with the public worship of the gods of the community. The two systems develop on