A Research On Offering Sacrifice To The Gods Of She In Pre-Qin

As an academic subject, offering sacrifices to the Gods of She has occupied considerable labours and thoughts of researchers for generations. Significantly, it embodies the politics, economy, military affairs, social life, religious belief, folk custom,spoken and written language, and so on, and can guide us to learn the Chinese society before the Qin Empire was established. In order to promote the researches on offering sacrifices to the Gods of She in pre-Qin times, the dissertation discusses the new-born academic questions in details and puts forward new opinions on the important but controversial issues.The first chapter traces the roots of offering sacrifices to the Gods of She, while analysing the most four typical but misleading versions:the totems, the holy land, the worship of genitals, the wood and forest. It points out where these four explanations failed to find the very roots. And then, this chapter provides enough and convincing proofs of script and religion for the argument that the offering sacrifices to the Gods of Land in pre-Qin times grew out of the worship of land directly.The second chapter deals with the institutions of sacrifice in pre-Qin times. All of the evolvement of procedure and offering, the assistant sacrifices, the symbols and the metamorphic body are discussed successively. Owning to the humbleness of the mass in the Shang Dynasty, the custom of sacrifice to the God with human body was very brutal, which became more and more unpopular in the Zhou Dynasty as the result of the rulers putting emphasis on the morality in government. The oblation was always affluent in the Shang Dynasty, while the rites and meaning of sacrifice to the Gods were upgraded in Zhou Dynasty. Besides, the Gods of Heaven, the Gods of Land and the metamorphic bodies of ancestors got systematized. Gradually, both Gou Long and Da Yu as heroic ancestors got elevated to the level of a deity, at the same time the Gods of nature were humanized. In addition to this, the difference of the metamorphic bodies between the Gods and the ancestors was explored.The third chapter makes a thorough inquiry into the sacrifices in army and military affairs of the Zhou, Qin and Han Dynasties. Undoubtedly, significant differences existed among them, because the scale and character of wars and religious believes changed with time passing by. Once having decided to take military action, the rulers of Zhou Dynasty would hold memorial ceremony to the Gods of Land, and the rulers of Han Dynasty would offer sacrifices to the God of War called Chi Yo. It is necessary to explore the questions about the exact locality of the capital called Bo and the very nature of oblations in the Bo city. This Chapter also disputes the truth of the arguments that "Bo" was the same script with "Gao" and that oblations in the Bo city was not the symbol of falling dynasty.The fourth chapter tries to find out the difference and relationship among Hou Tu, Di Zhu and She. It reopens the debates on the nature of Hou Tu, Di Zhu, Gong Hou Tu, Gong Di Zhu and Ye Di Zhu. Meanwhile, the source and relationship of She and Ji are discussed, the questions when She and Ji were put together as one word, how to distinguish the Gods of She and Ji, where located the sacrificial altars called Da She and Wang She and what was the differences between Xian Nong and She, Ji are all answeredAs far as the function of offering sacrifices to the Gods of She, the fifth chapter wastes no ink on the political and economical aspects, because the relevant research has been close to ripe. Instead, it focuses on the influence of sacrifices on folk life and religious custom, which has been omitted by many studies. At last, the main points of this dissertation are summarized in the conclusive part.