Page:Primitive Culture Vol 2.djvu/131

Rh forest, calling in the most piteous and touching tones upon the spirits of their ancestors.'

In Asia, manes-worship comes to the surface in all directions. The rude Veddas of Ceylon believe in the guardianship of the spirits of the dead ; these, they say, are 'ever watchful, coming to them in sickness, visiting them in dreams, giving them flesh when hunting;' and in every calamity and want they call for aid on the 'kindred spirits,' and especially the shades of departed children, the 'infant spirits.' Among non-Hindu tribes of India, whose religions more or less represent præ-Brahmanic and præ-Buddhistic conditions, wide and deep traces appear of an ancient and surviving cultus of ancestors. Among Turanian tribes spread over the northern regions of the Old World, a similar state of things may be instanced from the Mongols, worshipping as good deities the princely souls of Genghis Khan's family, at whose head stands the divine Genghis himself. Nor have nations of the higher Asiatic culture generally rejected the time-honoured rite. In Japan the 'Way of the Kami,' better known to foreigners as the Sin-tu religion, is one of the officially recognized faiths, and in it there is still kept up in hut and palace the religion of the rude old mountain-tribes of the land, who worshipped their divine ancestors, the Kami, and prayed to them for help and blessing. To the time of these ancient Kami, say the modern Japanese, the rude stone implements belong which are found in the ground in Japan as elsewhere: to modern ethnologists, however, these bear witness not of divine but savage parentage. In Siam the lower orders scruple to