Most religions deal with the attempt of human beings to understand something or some power which is mystic and supersensory, and the practice of ancestor worship is one such kind. The word “Ancestor worship” was coined by the famous British Philosopher and Sociologist Herbert Spencer in the year 1885 and refers to a ritualized summoning of deceased kin. According to Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), one of the founding fathers of Anthropology, the spirits grew out of attempts to explain life after death. He also considered that the spirits are separate entity from the body and a human has two souls, i.e., free soul and the body soul. The free soul remains alive after death whereas the body soul disappears after the post-burial ceremony. Ancestor worship is much more related to animistic belief in the souls and the spirits of dead ancestors. The worship is not purely considered as a religion itself, but religious appearance component, which identifies an element beyond the human power....
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Kasi, E., Mathew, G.S. (2020). Ancestor Worship. In: Leeming, D.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24348-7_200237
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