As people who visit my Multiply site will be well aware, I have recently returned from a short trip to the Orkney Islands off the northeast coast of Scotland, where I visited some of the Neolithic and early Bronze Age monuments that can be found there in abundance.
I have for many years been interested in prehistoric Britain and prehistory elsewhere in the world and this interest has taken me at various times to such celebrated places as Stonehenge, the great circle at Avebury in southwest England and the amazing Newgrange complex in the Boyne valley of Ireland.
I have also visited many less well known archaeological sites across the British Isles and beyond these shores in Europe, Mexico, North Africa and Asia at one time or another.
I have had a lifelong interest in history that began as a young child when my father would take me on long Sunday walks to a place called Pimple Hill, the remains of a 12th century wooden motte and bailey castle, which we would view from the Victorian graveyard of Castle Bromwich church and speculate about its origins and the people who created it.
The Pimple as we called it actually goes back long before the Norman castle after which the village (now part of Birmingham) was named.
When I was a child local legend said it was where Romans had buried their horses, but that theory has now been discounted by excavations done in the 1970s, before the M6 motorway and adjacent road systems were built, which have more or less imprisoned the Pimple between these main arteries, where it is now inaccessible on foot.
There is archaeological evidence from those digs of the area's Stone Age origins, the Bronze Age and of the Roman occupations revealing it as a defended site for centuries before the Normans arrived to construct the castle that guarded an important crossing of the River Tame.
I mention this because from around the age of 9 or 10, I developed a fascination with the past and because we always went to the old churchyard, where the overgrown and ivy covered tombs sat gloomily behind their iron railings, this fascination included the mysteries of the life and death of those who have gone before us.
If I became a weird kid, it was because from an early age my dad never took me to the usual places my pal's dads took them, like football matches or the cinema.
We only ever went together (without the rest of the family) to churchyards it now seems and once a year we went to the chrysanthemum show in Birmingham together, until I grew out of it in my early teens and started to do my own thing.
I am not complaining about any of that though, these times of being together with my dad were valuable to me when I was a kid and in retrospect they still are today.
Since then I have been to a hell of a lot of tombs, graveyards and burial grounds all around the world and they still hold a fascination for me all these years on. I gravitate toward these places whenever I visit somewhere new and I have been thinking about why these are still important to me today. The conclusion I have drawn is that it is a religious motive that inspires this interest, but not one that is widely catered for or even recognised in contemporary multi-faith Britain.
It occurs to me that the veneration of the dead or ancestor worship is the absolute bottom line to all religions past and present and as such it is a sort of proto-religion in itself I think, which is possibly hard wired into human consciousness and is evident in our social evolution over the past 40,000 years or so.
Ancestor Worship A Humanist Spirituality
The veneration of ancestors exists in one form or another across every human society it seems from the most ancient to the contemporary.
We see evidence of it on every continent and particularly in China where it remains an important part of the culture.
Ancestor worship appears to be part of a very early trinity of religious beliefs and practices, involving three ancient traits of religion whose origins seem likely to date back to the Upper Paleolithic: ancestor worship, shamanism, and the belief in natural and animal spirits.
These spiritual developments appear to be evident in the emergent art forms, with Venus figurines, cave painting, petroglyphs and exotic raw materials found far from their sources, which suggests emergent trading links around 8000 BC.
There is a school of thought that argues that ancestor worship was influential on the evolution of human sociality because the idea that our actions are being watched by influential dead relatives, may have stimulated more co-operation between individuals and groups and promoted a sort of primeval ethic
Whether that is true or not, there is no shortage of evidence for ancestor worship in Africa including ancient Egypt, Europe including ancient Rome, Asia including India, China, Korea,and Vietnam and the Americas, where of course Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) remains a well known Mexican celebration today.
A form of ancestor worship is enshrined in Christianity in the veneration of dead saints, especially in the Roman Catholic tradition.
In Africa there may even be some accommodation to ancestor veneration within Islam which otherwise proscribes such practices as forms of idolatry.
Ancestor veneration may have pre-Islamic origins, but how it eventually developed demonstrates its deliberate alignment with Islam.
David Tyson (1997) narrates the origins of Central Asian shrines in his essay Shrine Pilgrimage in Turkmenistan as a Means to Understand Islam among the Turkmen He considers the way that shrines come from the veneration of respected ancestors who later became prominent "Islamicizers".
The same shrines castigated as anti-Islam, are actually ones dedicated to the ancestors that promoted Islam.
http://www.essaysetcetera.com/sample_2.html
There is no space here to list the ubiquitous appearance of ancestor worship in all of its multiple manifestations around the world throughout the history of human development, but it can be found everywhere across the entire socio-cultural history of humanity from the Paleolithic to the Space Age.
In the Southern United States today for example, many people honor deceased loved ones on Decoration Day.
Times like Easter, Christmas, Candlemas, and All Souls' Day are also special days [in the Christian Calendar] which the relatives and friends of the deceased gather to honor them with flowers and candles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veneration_of_the_dead
And so I come back to myself and my beliefs which I would characterise as atheistic and rejecting of supernatural phenomena in general and the concept of a god in particular.
To me a from of ancestor worship makes perfect sense, in fact I would say that it is the only form of worship that does.
Stripped of all the cultural accoutrement's, stories, gospels, sutras, scriptures, suras or whatever canonical or commentarial scripts you can name, the fact that we all stand on the achievements of the dead, honouring the ancestors seems to me to be undeniably logical.
It is also fundamentally humanistic, what could be more so than the belief that past human beings are the only legitimate subjects of veneration? In that sense ancestor worship at least in the form I am conceptualising it here is the crowning spiritual principle of humanistic atheism.
Since all culture and therefore all religion springs from the human mind how could it not be the wellspring for all religious sentiment which on the one hand can be said to be stripped back to its basic uncluttered components, but on the other hand also endorses all the products of human creativity, including every religious artifact from the Paleolithic 'Venus' to the fractal Mandala of consciousness changing spirituality.
Unlike any other 'religion' this ancestral humanism is all inclusive, it only rejects ideologies that deny the fundamental oneness of nature and the part of human beings play within the harmonious interdependency of a living universe.
A universe incidentally we create with our senses and our understandings and which is united in a single wholeness by our ancestors, who have bequeathed us the intellectual framework by which we make sense of their existence and our own.
These beliefs come from a time before the world was divided into hostile territories and competing power elites, when cooperation and mutual interdependence were born out of our imagination and creativity and if human life has a unifying purpose at all, it is to recapture that primeval sense of mutuality that created our existence in the first place.
The ancient people of the world appear to have devised a set of processes and procedures whereby a person eventually becomes an ancestor and so, when my own life comes to an end - that will do me nicely (so far as my mind is concerned) and as for my body - I am perfectly happy that it will dissolve into the Cosmic soup from whence it materialised in the first place.
But in the meantime there is stuff to be done and oddly enough, writing this blog is one of the things that I can now cross off the list!
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