>Me> I'm finding it very hard to think of a culture
> > that thinks that an ancestor is a part of oneself that exists outside
> > the body. An Ancestor is the spirit of your relatives and are normally
> > recognized by you as having independent existence whether alive or
> > dead.
>Ah : then this is what I would disagree with : I believe that a Bloodline
>in Ancestor Worship is both a part of oneself and a part of each of one's
>Ancestors and a part of one's Descendants, through which the Ancestor
>magic courses, and which is a non-independent portion of them all.
Even if this were true for all ancestor worshippers, all it states states is that you and an ancestor share something, not that the ancestor is really a part of you.
> > Then what parts of ancestor worship look theistic to you? Worship
> > is not a theistic act.
>As an illustration of what I'm trying to say (but we seem to have reached
>un unfortunate barrier of HW terminology) the Worship of his Ancestors by
>Raus of Rone, and the Worship of the Ancestral Baboons by their
>descendants are both forms of Ancestor Worship. It appears logical, then,
>that Ancestor Worship is a borderline religious technique.
Ancestor worship is an _animist_ religious technique just as worship of the Invisible God through the Liturgy is a _sorcerous_ religious technique. Worship in and of itself is not a theistic concept.
>Now ; this obviously resembles HW animism more than anything else ; but,
>if your Ancestors happen to be a clan of sorcerors with their own Grimoire
>; or if the Founder of your Family is a demigod, providing Theistic Feats
>to his descendants ; or if you are a grunting baboon ; in any case, there
>must be some rules for Ancestor Worship common to all of these particular
>cases (although it shouldn't be necessary to come up with an extra non-4/5/X-
>Worlds method of magic for AW).
Contacting the dead in a sorcerous context is either Saintly Worship of Necromancy AFAIK (there's some 4-world esoteric behind this which I won't go into here).
As for theistic worship of Ancestors, many people can claim descent from one god or another (Orlanth for the Orlanthi, Lodril for the Pelorians etc). Yet when they worship their ancestor, they do so via their normal cult. Is this ancestor worship?
>Is Raus of Rone a straight up Animist IYO ?
>More to the point, is Raus' worship of his ancestors
>an Animist tradition ?
The Deneronic Ancestors of Dara Happa is described as an animist tradition in the HW rules, I believe.
--Peter Metcalfe
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