CHINESE ANCESTOR WORSHIP
The rules of as I understand it are as follows:
1. Women do the cooking but do not conduct the ceremony exclusively the province of the male, but this rule is now more honoured in the breach than in the observance.
2. Confucius was very particular about observing the correct rituals and he must have included this one too, because the Ching Ming Festival - also known as the Tomb Sweeping Festival - is the most important family festival of all, the equivalent of Easter for Christians.
3. The eldest son would be expected to conduct these ceremonies, with his dutiful wife in a subservient role of cooking and assisting. No woman must actually conduct the ceremony herself.
Hungry Ghost |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Festival#Religious_festivities
"They have long needle-thin necks because they have not been fed by their family, or as a punishment [for not having dutiful descendants or any descendants at all] so that they are unable to swallow."
Hungry Ghost |
3. What if you don't have children? You become a Hungry Ghost and there will be a festival just for you and others like you on the seventh month of the lunar year.
4. What if you don't have a son? You become a Hungry Ghost.
5. What if you have an only son who is a confirmed bachelor? Then you become a Hungry Ghost.
6. What if your only son marries and dies without siring a son? Then you become a Hungry Ghost.
7. If all your offspring are daughters, you become a Hungry Ghost.
8. If all your sons are confirmed bachelors, you become a Hungry Ghost.
9. If your sons have no grandsons, you will become a Hungry Ghost after your last son dies.
10. If you have sons and grandsons galore but neglected to persuade them of the crucial Chinese duty of passing on this tradition to them, you also become a Hungry Ghost.
11. Eventually, everyone becomes a Hungry Ghost and ends up in hell, because, eventually, the Chinese - along with the human race - will die out with no one left to appease the dead. The Ancient Chinese had the idea of entropy and reversion to the mean long before the West thought it up. Maintaining your civilisation is therefore like being a swan - seeking to seem outwardly unruffled but in reality paddling furiously. Keeping women in their place in order to preserve and maintain human civilisation is therefore the most important undertaking of the male sex. In our degenerate times, men are overwhelmingly ignorant of the existence of this masculine imperative. While hell is inevitable for all, rational and moral Chinese men would not want it to be their generation that let the side down.
12. While some religions work using both carrot and stick by using both heaven as an inducement to good deeds and hell as a deterrent to evil deeds, it can be seen that Chinese ancestor worship is all stick and relies absolutely on fear and shame. This also neatly demonstrates that what doesn't kill you can indeed make you stronger and how obedience to these harsh rules have produced a people more resilient and more socially cohesive than most. If you thought being a Jew was high maintenance without much reward, you ain't heard of Chinese ancestor worship. Not even death brings you peace. Even after death life's oneupmanship does not end. You could be exclaiming in despair to the other denizens of the Underworld "O tempora! O mores!" dismayed at the neglect of your descendants if you had any, or boasting that your grave has just been done this year.
A grave of a wealthy family that has not been tended in years. Observe the height of the grass. |
These very harsh rules are meant to put the frighteners on Chinese couples to get most of them who can to produce at least an heir and a spare.
Since this ritual is performed annually, it would concentrate the minds of those attending that they had better marry and have sons or else end up being a Hungry Ghost, a much inferior status to being a worshiped ancestor.
This idea is, I would suggest, a more sophisticated version of "Go forth and multiply."
http://www.timemaps.com/blog.xml/0/1/ancestor-worship-and-the-history-of-china
A requirement to have sons
Ancestor worship (in its Chinese form) puts a huge pressure on a man to have children - especially male children (females didn't really count for much when it came to worshipping ancestors, apparently). In the West, the destiny of one's immortal soul rested with oneself alone - on one's own behaviour, one's own standing with God, one's own salvation.
For the Chinese, the quality of one's afterlife rested mostly with one's future family. Without male descendants to remember one, and tend one's grave, a person's immortal soul was in jeopardy.
People, therefore, would have had to try and have at least two male children (the second one as an insurance policy in case the first one died). This implies, even with the widespread practice of female infanticide, that Chinese families would tend to be larger than Western ones.
Hungry Ghosts do get attention in their special month, but it is more a community ritual than a familial one, less personal and definitely second class. In Ching Ming your grave is tended personally by your respectful and dutiful descendants. In the month of the Hungry Ghost however, you are only appeased collectively with the other Hungry Ghosts since no one any longer knows who you are, because your descendants no longer perform the tomb sweeping ritual for you. Hungry Ghosts who have lost their individuality capable of inflicting malign mischief on the living are appeased namelessly en masse while worshipped ancestors retain their surname, history and location.
Nowadays with smaller families, daughters increasingly also get in on the act, which strictly speaking they are not supposed to do. It is rather like allowing gay couples to marry - a softening of the rules which must not be softened, because they are there for a purpose - the continuance of the Chinese race in the context of a patriarchy in sufficient strength and numbers. However, no filial daughter wants to think of her deceased parents becoming Hungry Ghosts because of a lack of a son, and so takes on these duties which she cannot quite see why she cannot perform for her parents since she is still around and able to perform them with equal ability. She therefore performs these rituals furtively and against the rules, out of loving memory for her parents, but this is not meant to be. To ignore these rules is to ignore their real purpose - to encourage couples to have sons and reinforce the perception of the apparently inferior status of the female.
However even undertaking these duties furtively against the rules but only as a quasi son reminds her that if she were a son she would be able to perform these rituals without being questioned, reinforcing the point that only had she been a son would her parents have the ritual properly performed.
I am sure even in Confucian times there were daughters taking it upon themselves to perform these ceremonies for their parents, which Confucius himself must have frowned on, insistent the correct performance of rituals meant that only those qualified by dint of their sex have the right to perform this ritual - in other words, men only - is key to the enduring patriarchal strength of Chinese civilisation.
You can well imagine more traditional Chinese parents bewailing their fate if they only have a son who happens to be a confirmed bachelor. It is possible that repeatedly asking him if he really wants them to become Hungry Ghosts after he is dead might induce him to eventually marry - however reluctantly - and sire male descendants capable of fulfilling this peculiarly Chinese duty.
The modern Chinese with their one child families should understand that they are now doomed to be plagued by increasing numbers of Hungry Ghosts with each passing generation, whose increasing disgust and anger will reach a disastrous peak at the current generation's neglectful and incorrect practice of ancestor worship as well as the Chinese government's one-child policy and appeasement of the increasingly vocal LGBT activists in China will eventually end their civilisation. If the Chinese continue to disregard this tradition, the numbers of Hungry Ghosts are bound to increase while the numbers of dutiful descendants capable of appeasing them decrease. China is already suffering from the problem of unmarried Slut Single Mothers, which can only be discouraged by the implementation of quran.com/24/2. It is actually rather degenerate of the Chinese government not to do what is necessary to discourage bastardy. Fining these never married mothers would be laughably ineffectual - the perfect example of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted, while jailing them would be too expensive and futile. Slut-shaming as 24:2 of the Koran prescribes is the only way to do it effectively, but do Chinese men dare?
There are far more Chinese men than there are women and they will be wanting to have sex with them. Chinese Men Outnumber Women by 33 Million After Decades of Gender Bias As any heterosexually active man would understand, criticising women who fornicate is probably not the best way of going about trying to have sex with a fornicatress. Chinese men, like men of other races, would find an offer of no-strings sex by a fornicating slut impossible to resist. That the Chinese government take strong action against fornicating Chinese sluts is about as likely as a junkie calling the cops on his dealer, I would suggest. Goodbye, Chinese civilisation, and eventually all the goodies that come with it, especially Chinese food, which is enjoyed globally. Only 24:2 of the Koran will have the necessary deterrent effect on sluts and their running dogs.
How likely are the Chinese to adopt Secular Koranism? http://thevoiceofreason-ann.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/secular-koranism.html When the Chinese revolutionaries adopted Marxism, they displayed a utilitarian cosmopolitan preparedness to do what was necessary to stop themselves from being the weak man of the East. Believing that the Marxist narrative of human progress and a workers' paradise was inevitable, Chinese leaders implemented Communism. Having tried it and seen it fail, perhaps an infusion of Islamic principles would paradoxically bring them closer to the tradition that really made their civilisation endure and kept their people together: that of being a patriarchy. After all, the ancient Chinese practice of kowtowing is indistinguishable from a Muslim doing his prostrations when at prayer.
A court in China consider a gay couple's legal action to register their "marriage" instead of throwing it out.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10095242/Unmarried-Chinese-mothers-to-be-fined.html
That there will be more Hungry Ghosts than there are living Chinese to appease them is therefore inevitable under China's disastrous one-child policy. It is only a matter of time before the Whore of Babylon and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse pay the Chinese an unwanted and dreaded visit.
As for the British, it surely takes only a little imagination for the 21st century British to see how furiously enraged their Hungry Ghost Victorian ancestors would be with them by now. Not only do the British not have enough sons to fight the Muslims they so obviously hate and fear, their children are mostly illegitimate, atheist and ignorant of their Judeao-Christian heritage, the most important of which is the sanctity of traditional marriage. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2285670/Most-children-of-British-mothers-born-out-of-wedlock.html Sadly for the British and the West in general, the only marriage Western degenerates support is gay marriage, which would only have the effect of accelerating their degeneracy, making them even riper for an inevitable Islamic conquest.
The dead do not cease their consumerism. These paper goods are for the dead. Burning them is the equivalent of paying for their postage and packaging to the Underworld. |
Demographics is destiny and nothing illustrates this better than the application of rules of ancestor worship. You do not have to literally believe in the existence of Hungry Ghosts to see its cultural and eugenic utility of maintaining the patriarchy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qingming_Festival |
https://mrsmerkow.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/fiverelationshipsreading.pdf
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