Vivekananda Mailing List-9/12/02

[Guest guest]

With the ancient Babylonians we find the same idea of the double, but

with a variation. The double lost all sense of love; it frightened

the living to give it food and drink, and to help it in various ways.

It lost all affection for its own children and its own wife. Among

the ancient Hindu also we find traces of this ancestor worship. Among

the Chinese, the basis of their religion may also be said to be

ancestor worship, and it till permeates the length and breadth of

that vast country. In fact, the only religion that can really be said

to flourish in China is that of ancestor worship. Thus it seems, on

the one hand, a very good position is made our for those who hold the

theory of ancestor worship as the beginning of religion.