Man service
The man service (ancestor cult, soul cult) is the cult dedicated to the dead (see Manen ) . It is probably the oldest and most widespread form of cult in the world, which can be traced back to prehistoric times.
The man service consisted in giving the dead food and weapons to the grave , even accompanying the wife , his servants and favorite animals into the afterlife through killing and burial.
As a rule, this cult also extended beyond the day of burial and the period of mourning : the deceased was continually brought to his grave with food and drink.
With the Romans , this ancestral cult expanded into a private religion by setting up altars and masks of the ancestors in every house and praying to them as if to guardian spirits ( penates ). Other peoples left the whole house to the Manen as a dwelling.
In addition to these private ancestors, the chiefs , kings and heroes , provided that they had left a good memory with their own, a public service ( hero cult ), which in some cases took on the character of a god cult. The hero here and there became the ancestral hero from whom the entire people derived his origin, and the names of the divine ancestors in question often mean nothing more than "lord" or "king".
Even Euemeros had closed from similar considerations that the Manendienst the source of all religion, and that the gods of the Greeks are nothing but deified men. These views have been substantiated more deeply by Geiger, Caspari and J. Lippert, whereby it was emphasized that the local worship of the individual deities in the polytheistic systems suggests that these are the ancestral deities of individual united tribes who, so to speak, come under suzerainty of that victorious tribe which had brought about the union or submission and allowed the tribal deities of the subjugated tribes to continue, just as the Romans accepted more and more foreign gods the more countries they assimilated. But in making these conclusions, other important factors in the formation of myths, namely the personification of the forces of nature and the service of nature, have been completely neglected, and they should only be taken up with great caution.
In the Christian Church, man service is taken into account through funeral masses and funeral festivals .
Individual evidence
- ^ "The cult of the soul", Berl. 1881, and "The Religions of the European Cultivated Peoples", 1881
