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Essay on The Expansion and Consolidation of the Early Han Dynasty
The Han dynasty was a civilized and sophisticated age of religious synthesis, when many diverse ancient cults were being amalgamated in accordance with an elaborate cosmogony. This process might have destroyed every literary evidence of the most ancient cults, had it not been for the scholarly reverence for an old text, which might be interpreted and commented upon in accordance with current ideas, but was never to be altered or corrupted. To form a just idea of the nature of the oldest cults, the literary evidence must be approached unbiased by Han interpretations, and assisted by the new discoveries of archaeology and paleography.
After the establishment of the Han dynasty, the p'o of Er Shih Huang Ti, last sovereign of the China, who had died by violence and whose posterity had been exterminated, was believed to be active and malignant. Sacrifices were instituted to appease the ghost. The Hun, too, cannot continue its happy after-life if the ancestral sacrifices are discontinued. Should this happen, it too becomes a ghost, an evil spirit condemned to eternal misery. The ancestral sacrifices can only be performed by male descendants, and therefore the extermination of the clan could alone end them.
It is the fear of this last and irremediable catastrophe, the extermination of the clan, and the transformation of the ancestral spirits into miserable ghosts, which was, and still to the mass of the Chinese people is, the chief incentive to continue the male line, the profound cause for which male children are esteemed above all other blessings. They not only continue the living line, but, through the ancestral sacrifices which they alone can perform, they are indispensable to the continued repose and happiness of the ancestral spirits.In ancient and feudal times ancestor worship was the cult of the noble clans......
