Anthropoetics I, no. 2 (December 1995)

Archaic Chinese Sacrificial Practices in the Light of Generative Anthropology

Herbert Plutschow

East Asian Languages & Cultures
University of California at Los Angeles
Los Angeles CA 90095-1540

René Girard and Eric Gans developed their so-called "originary" or "generative anthropology" by reinterpreting some of the major developments in Western civilization. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the applicability and relevance of this theory in the field of archaic Chinese culture. China has been essentially a sacrificial civilization and, therefore, may be an adequate testing ground for Girard's and Gans's "originary" thinking.

The epistemology Girard and Gans bring to the "Chinese" testing site suffers from their almost exclusive concentration on Western traditions, as well as from the absence of any discussion on the wide-spread divinatory/oracular activity and the "animistic" phenomenon one finds throughout ancient humanity. From the beginning of its documented history, until recently, the Chinese state and much of its intellectual life remained directly or closely sacrificial. One can go so far as to say that the Chinese premodern state was built upon sacrifice. Sacrifice remained central in the Chinese state and no theory of Chinese statehood could ever be proposed without reference to sacrifice and sacrificial ideology. Like Western culture, China follows the evolution from blood sacrifice to non-blood, re-presented, "morally correct" sacrifice, and to the esthetic and ethical systems, such as Taoism and Confucianism, that evolved from it. It would be a formidable undertaking, however, to study the evolution of Chinese sacrificial practices and the impact they had on statehood throughout their long history, especially if we study, as we should, the Chinese sacrificial system or systems within a cultural totality. I must content myself with summarizing the sacrificial history of China's earliest states. I do so to point out how, always keeping Girardian and Gansian originary hypothesis in mind, sacrifice continued to play a central role in both "Realpolitik" and socio-political ideology in the subsequent periods. The reader should keep in mind that ancient Chinese archeological and written data lack academic consensus and may invite controversy. Yet an attempt to put Girard's and Gans's hypothesis to a Chinese test is essential to our understanding of the usefulness of these theories.






1. Ping-tzu/question/K'o/question/no/purification/Princess Hsieh/front/Keng, promise/Keng/pair of sheep/promise/Keng/three/sheep pairs.
Most likely meaning: "On the day of Ping-tzu, K'o asks (asked?) the oracle: Should Princess Hsieh be purified in front of [the late] Keng? Should one or three pairs of sheep be promised?"

When the bones mention the word "promise" it probably was fulfilled after good results. A large number of oracle bones indicate that animals and humans were sacrificed to "purify" a royal ancestor. The control of natural forces seems to have been the main reason for this purification. The following example combines animal and human sacrifice with a petition for rain:

Most likely meaning: "Should a petition for rain be addressed to Hsi? Should nine pairs of sheep be sacrificed?[2]


Most likely meaning: "Should a man be burnt at the stakes? Will rain follow?"

Most likely meaning: "Should a man be burnt at the stakes? Will rain follow?"[3]

The Shang offered blood sacrifice for a good harvest of millet:


Shih-jen, the preferred object of such petitions, was the grandfather of the dynasty's founder, and Chi-mao was his name date in the ancient Chinese decimal cycle.


Most likely meaning: "On the day of Chia-hsu Hsuan divines (divined?): "Should Princess Hau be purified in front of [her late] father? Should a slave be sacrificed?"

7. Purification/before/Tsu-hsin,use/Ch'iang
Most likely meaning: "Should the purification take place before Tsu-hsin? Should a man of Ch'iang be sacrificed?

Men from the sheep-raising Ch'iang tribe seemed to have been the preferred source of human sacrifice. Sometimes, diviners presented the deities with a choice of animal or human sacrifice:


8. Question/question/purification/before/Ting/three/oxen pairs/Ch'iang/ten
Most likely meaning: "Should the purification before Tsu-ting be done with the sacrifice of three oxen pairs and ten men of Ch'iang?

The Shang also divined the outcome of war:

9. Question/perhaps/king/going/fight/Hu...
Most likely meaning: "Should the king personally lead the military expedition against the Land of Hu?"


10. Question/not/recruiting/fight/Hu Land
Question/not/recruit/man/three thousand
Question/petition/Hu Land/to/Shang-chia
Most likely meaning: "Should the people be recruited to fight against the Land of Hu? Should three-thousand or one thousand men be recruited? Should the petition for victory in the campaign against the Land of Hu be addressed to T'ang or Shang-chia?

Thanksgiving sacrifice was also divined. E.g.:

HsinTzu/question/K'o/question/wine/libation/we/reciprocation/Ta-chia/Tsu-i/ten/decapitation/ten/sheep pairs.
Most likely meaning: "On the day of Hsin-szu K'o divined: 'Should we offer wine? Should we offer ancestor Ta-chia and Tsu-i ten beheaded men and ten pairs of sheep to thank them?"





Shang China seems to support Gans' understanding that human sacrifice was not practiced in illo tempore, only later in agricultural "high culture".[5] Tsung-Tung Chan believes that human sacrifice was a relatively late practice belonging to an agrarian high culture and its centralized court and, therefore, cannot be found in more primitive local agricultural settings. There is also ample evidence of human funeral sacrifices which, by the tenth century BC, were gradually replaced by clay and wooden substitutions. According to the Shih-ching, they buried in all 117 men including three high dignitaries during the funeral of duke Mu.[6] In this particular area of China, such human sacrifice was abolished only in the year 384 B.C.E. and replaced, like in China's heartland, by clay and wooden figures.








The Shang especially offered sacrifice to the royal ancestors and other deities who had a stake either in the continuous welfare of the state or, in case of "ritual neglect", in causing harm to the state. The royal family worshipped the founder of the dynasty as an ancestor who continued to have an interest in its maintenance and, therefore, continued to be the center of attention. Also, these ancestors were thanked for good weather and harvests and for victory in battle, all in "thanksgiving" sacrifice. Conversely, the humans therefore blamed them for droughts, bad harvests, enemy invasions, or, for the curses they inflict upon the members of the elite. The role the Chinese attributed to their ancestors follows universal patterns. When social ills began to proliferate and clan relationships to crumble, when ritual was neglected and taboo broken, the ancestors were allegedly displeased with the living and caused natural disasters, nightmares, social disharmony and other ills. The leaders' ancestors, who have a stake in the order they had established, were particularly identified with natural calamities and social upheavals. Thus the ancestors were feared to cause natural calamities and worshipped to control them; they allegedly provoked as well as contained violence. From the viewpoint of generative anthropology, one can interpret the royal ancestor as the "first" violent deity who created a new order on the basis of "sacrificing" the old. As every royal successor's authority depended on the dynasty's founder, the maintenance of the new order continued to depend on the violence of its foundation which, in peacetime, was continued under the control of the sacrificial violence offered by the royal descendants.


In the way sacrifice is linked to royal ancestors, we discover an intrinsic system of reciprocity . The king's worldly authority seemed not only to depend upon, but to correspond to the ancestors' spiritual power. Therefore, in order for the combined king/ancestor to have sufficient power to maintain the state order, they had to be fed properly with nutritional sacrifice, the most potent food being, of course, raw or cooked meat. According to the Tso-chuan, ancestors, especially royal ancestors, had to be fed to keep them strong, like their living descendants. By this acquired strength, they could respond effectively to the demands and needs of the state.[11] If underfed, writes Girard about other archaic cultures, the god would waste away, or else, he will descend among men and lay claim to his nourishment with unexampled cruelty and ferocity.[12] If we understand the deities, like Girard did, as initially a "sacrifice" then the offer of sacrificial flesh and blood would mean feeding the god with his own "originary" substance.[13] This view is relevant to the Chinese experience insofar as, later, under Taoism and Buddhism, the deities' diet was changed to the less violent one of words and incense. The living, too, had to feed themselves well; behind an underfed human was an equally underfed deity and meagerness was taken as a sign or presage of a drought. Sacrifice was therefore a sharing of divine powers, ensuring longevity. This was also why the spirits of those who died premature, violent deaths were feared because they were supposed to take their still vibrant living energies with them into the world of the dead where, as evil ancestors or kuei, they were feared to curse the living and inflict illness.


The ritual language, too, reflected this reciprocal state; the same word being used for 'revenge', 'atonement' and thanksgiving'. This reciprocity may have contributed considerably to the kind of "give-and-take" that, under Confucianism, dominated Chinese social ideals. Veritable "deals" or covenants, based on a strict give-and-take, bound the living to their ancestors. Whoever it addressed, sacrifice has to be understood as a ritual, carried out in a ritual context. Scholarly opinion is divided as to who officiated in ritual. Oracle-bone divinations and, most probably, oracle-bone inscriptions were the domain of "official" diviners. Yet, according to Chou dynasty data, there were also both male and female shamans, whose functions are subject to controversy. Some may have served "private", others "public" interests. Some oracle-bone inscriptions, such as the following, refer to the practice of sacrificing shamanesses during droughts:

Most likely meaning: "Should the woman Tsai be burned at the stakes? Will this bring rain?"




Most likely meaning: "On the day of Chia-tzu the oracle was asked: Should Wu sacrifice to Ti?"


13. Wu/Ti sacrifice/a/dog
Most likely meaning: "Should Wu offer a dog to Ti?"




To define Shang kingship as shamanistic is misleading, especially in view of the strong possibility that the Shang kings supervised most if not all politically sensitive oracular activity and were, no doubt, assisted by subservient oracle interpreters and other "morally pure," "loyal" officials. Conceivably, not all kings possessed the necessary shamanistic skills, nor did all have shamanistic inclinations, the use of "professional" shamans thereby becoming a sine qua non. Perhaps we should judge Shang shamanism in light of the Chou kings who placed the shamans under their political control, presumably to discourage ordinary people from sacrificing to state deities. It is easy to understand that such private sacrifice increased as central control weakened. Sacrifice and politics went hand in hand. Also, the difficulty in maintaining political control over shamanistic practice may have prompted the later Taoists to oppose shamanism and sacrifice, accusing the shamans of causing cosmic disharmony and earthly violence (succession struggles) and warning against its harmful effects on the state. It wanted to replace shamanistic practice with a state-controlled "shamanistic" bureaucracy, and sacrifice with an emphasis on "healing" and longevity, which it considered more beneficial for the state.


The kind of archeological evidence as summarized above strongly suggests that the Shang state was held together by ritual. Ritual rules and obligations were in fact law, the legal system developing out of ritual as in other cultures. The ancestral temple was the center of ritual and therefore the center of state affairs. In tune with the importance or "centrality" of ancestral worship, the ancestral shrine constituted a center of social and political activities, where divinatory questions were asked, the place where important decisions were made, where warriors received their portions of meat before going into battle, where, after the war, the prisoners of war were paraded, where those who were not enslaved for labor, were sacrificed, and where quarrels were mediated and judged. It was the sacred center of the state where most if not all "significant" activity took place. It was a place on which depended the community's very existence. This place corresponds well to Gans's "sacred center of signification".

We can further conjecture that the defense of an ancestral temple was paramount to the existence of the state; its destruction or defilement meant the end of it. Taking its symbol across a borderline meant a declaration of war. Ancestral worship determined all those elements that allow leaders to "legitimately" claim and control a state, to establish the necessary socio-political hierarchy. Myths were tightly attached to the temple; they explained the virtues of the dynasty's founder(s), providing the raison d'etre of the ancestral cult. The ritual also determined the calendar, that is, the measuring of time as an important device of socio-political control.


An ethical system also emerged from early Chinese ancestral ritual. This was not the freedom and equality Gans discovered in the "originary" human, but one which determining the relationship between king and subject, typical of the socio-political hierarchy of the early, as well as of the later Chinese states. The kings' ancestors become the ethical models of political and religious virtue the ruling kings allegedly inherit. Therefore, at least in principle, the kings merit the loyalty of their subjects because of the virtues they were supposed to embody, having inherited them, in direct patrilineal descent, from their ancestors. The myths portray the dynasty's founder as a person of exceptional virtue, a tradition the ritual wants to preserve. The Li Chi states:

According to the institutes of the sage kings about sacrifices; sacrifice should be offered to him who had given good laws to the people; to him who had labored to the death in the discharge of his duties; to him who had boldly and successfully met great calamities; and to him who had warded off great evils...Only men and things of this character were admitted into the sacrificial canon.[17]
Maybe we can discover here the seeds for the retrospective nature of most of Chinese political ideology, that is, rather than establishing their own moral order, present rulers had to abide by the ethical standards established by the mythical founders. In this way knowledge of the past, knowing the virtuous deeds of one's ancestors, became one of the requisites of political authority. Such emphasis on ritual virtue may have been a reinterpretation of the founding myths imposed by later generations of Confucian scholars/officials. First Shang King T'ang's abortive self-sacrifice - he is reported to have cut his hair and nails and was about to offer himself to the pyre as a self-sacrifice to overcome a severe drought were it not for a sudden rain that saved his life - may have been such a myth assembled and aggrandized according to Confucian ideology in a later age. This myth may have some historical basis, at least the king's cutting his hair and fingernails, since we know the Shang kings to have conducted their own sacrifices.



If the birth of language is to be found in ritual, then the birth of music must have been coeval. Music gave rhythm to language and dance and must have been an important part of shamanistic practice. The Li Chi states something one discovers in many other, including Western cultures: "When one used words in song, one drags them out. One gives words to things which have impressed one, but, because words are not enough, one adds exclamations and sighs. When one still wants to express something more, then one moves spontaneously one's hands and feet in dance."[20] Such "performance" is to be understood as the origin of Chinese poetry, music, dance, and, later, of the theater, originally offered by shamans and, as we have seen, by the kings themselves, to their ancestors. This was done not only to "entertain" the deities or an audience, but to attract a deity onto the dancer/musician, an aspect many other archaic cultures share.

The Chinese language may have started with the "ostensive" but we must keep in mind that we know nothing about the development of the Chinese spoken language, only about the written one, as it is inscribed on ritual bronze vessels and oracle-bones. Paleoglyphic investigation seems indeed to suggest that the written signs were, above all, names, that is, according to Gans's theory, an "ostensive", used in China exclusively to communicate with the "absolute center". The control of writing was perhaps as important socially and politically as the control of technology (casting bronze ritual vessels and tools), all of which were strict royal prerogatives.

Oracle-bone inscriptions, however, mark a "later" development into "mature" language or narrative. This narrative continued to be based on the ostensive, especially, because of the Chinese notorious indistinction of a name/word/noun from a verb, adjective, preposition or adverb. The Chinese language continues to be one of the simplest systems among advanced languages, determining grammatical function simply by the position of a word within the narrative. The narrative is in this sense merely a juxtaposition of various "ostensive" words which, according to their positions, can be understood as nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs. The same applies to those words which, depending on their positions, function as interrogative, negative, perfective, pronominal, prepositional, and conjuntive particles, or, as devices introducing a relative clause.

There is another important possibility we need to take into consideration. The oracle-bone "written" language may, in all likelihood, have been a highly coded and esoteric language under the exclusive control of royal officials. Conceivably, only they had access to this language, only they mastered the code and only they could manipulate it to benefit (and sometimes harm) the state. The people who possessed these writing skills were both mediums and ritual scribes. How and when such a "secret" code was established, or, how long it took for it to develop, we don't know. Eighty-eight pre-oracle-bone symbols have been found in early Shang inscriptions, sixteen of which at an other archeological site, indicating that, in the early stages, only a portion of the "vocabulary" may have been a "universally" shared one. There was a great leap from there to the ca. 4500 uniform symbols Tsung-Tung Chang counted in oracle-bone inscriptions.[21] The gap between names inscribed on offertory vessels and oracle-bone inscriptions prevents us from being able to trace the writing system through each important developing stage. The post-oracle-bone development of the written language is equally untraceable. We only know that poetry, but perhaps also to a degree, the writing of myth and history, developed from oracle-bone inscription. It also influenced later poetry which was controlled, as the oracular bone inscriptions were, by the kings' and emperors's bureaucracy.



That the post-Shang Chinese official/scholars substituted ritual with language is beyond doubt. Opposed to both blood sacrifice and spiritual mediumism, Taoism only offered words. The Taoist "written" petition rites addressed to the Celestial Bureau of the government, indicate the degree of Taoist reliance on the written word more than on the shamanistic spoken word, encouraging development toward religious textualization or codification.


Of all the methods for the good ordering of men there is none more urgent than the use of li. Li are of five kinds, and there is none of them more important than... chi [rituals].[22]


Let us throw additional light on Shang practice by directing our attention to the Chou dynasty and investigate Chou continuation of, and deviation from Shang practice. The early Chou kings followed by and large the culture of the Shang and therefore maintained the sacrificial system basically as it was. Yet changes are visible; we just don't know whether they came about by sheer evolution or revolution. It is to be expected that a "violent" change in leadership would legitimize a break with tradition. On the other hand, there is also considerable continuation of traditions that depend on the virtuous founders of the previous dynasty or dynasties.





Despite the idealization of the past, this text provides a plausible rational for the "political control of heaven", allowing only government officials to communicate with it.





This ritual bureaucracy comprised at least 3,763 persons, plus several offices (e.g. spirit mediums) whose number is unknown.[27] Accordingly, the spirit mediums were either placed outside the Ministry or subordinated under its various officials. The organization of the Ministry does not suggest that the spirit mediums were an entirely independent group, outside of government control. Yet they seemed to have been of low status, priority being given to the diviners in charge of ancestor worship rather than on the spirit mediums in charge of nature worship. According to the Chou Li, the shamans were squarely under government control: "When the king offers condolence, they together with the Invocators precede him." And in case of the wu (shamaness): "When the queen offers condolence, they together with the invocators precede her... In all great calamities of the state, they pray, singing and wailing."[28] The spirit mediums continued to fulfill important ritual functions for the state including rain-making dance and exorcisms. They bore the titles of deities and lent their bodies to them (spirit possession), which suggests their identity with the divine, and with the political world only if this possession was politically manipulated. This was different for the invocators who, in charge of proper ritual demeanor and sequence, represented the needs of the government.

The Chou began what the Han (206 BC - AD 8 and 25-220) completed, namely the subordination under the state of all religion with the emperor as the high-priest of the nation. The Chou appointment of a master of ritual became, under the Han, the minister of sacrifice. Each dynasty changed the ritual system. The Ch'in ordered a general survey of all ritual activity in the state, from which only those that confirmed the overlordship of the Ch'in were tolerated. Ti (highest imperial title probably deriving from the Shang "Shang Ti") came to signify "divine emperor" or "emperor by divine right". The religious system had to reflect the state order and vice-versa. Private sacrifice was prohibited. Ritual became professionalized under ritual experts serving the state.



In the early Chinese states, however, the emphasis is not on the originary control of human violence, but on the natural forces which, under the control of the king's ancestral deities, threaten the state. The control of human violence is only indirectly implied in this perhaps more positive system of deferring human violence onto natural violence. Yet, in all royal ritual, the maintenance of the human order was a central concern of the king/priest. Since sheer martial force could not guarantee continued order, political authority and charisma had to come out of the divine center with which the king identified himself. Even this "scheme" did not ensure political eternity. During major sacrificial crisis, the king was vulnerable to rebellion, justified by the center and its clever sacrificial/ritual, oracular, and linguistic manipulation. Overthrowing the king, as can be observed when the Shang changed to the Chou and during subsequent dynastic changes, the "last kings" became the real sacrificial victims, who, by neglecting their proper rites, have lost legitimacy and, have, like some of their African counterparts, become the system's outsiders eligible for sacrifice. This regicidal sacrifice would absorb all impurities and potential for violence and shift the control of the natural forces to a new, legitimate representative of the center.[29] The new king was not only appointed as the new representative of the center, but, on the basis of this newly acquired identity, was charged "by the center" of writing the history of the former dynasty. By so doing he legitimized his newly acquired authority by pointing out how the last kings of the preceding dynasty had lost their legitimacy (mandate) by breaking ritual taboo. Thus, it was not the break of taboo which engendered the new order, as we observe it in ancient Judaic myth, but a legitimate re-establishment of taboo.

The unmistakable trend we discover in the early Chinese experience, is the political control of the divine "center" upon which the welfare of the state seemed to hang. Most Chinese emperors continued to identify with t'ien (heaven) the symbols of which were embroidered on their garments and signified by the palaces they inhabited and rituals they performed. The natural successor of this system is the bureaucratization of the divine in the Han dynasty, which gave government ranks and titles to a corresponding hierarchy of deities. In this development, the emphasis shifts from a "center" as the divine source of the human order to one combining control of the natural forces with that of human order thus trying to sustain the agricultural productivity which supported the state. The deities of the "center" turn into the ancestral spirits of the kings and other prominent families. The new king replaced the older deities of the "center" with his own ancestors. He cannot tolerate the continuation of separate deities related to a different or previous power base. Yet, as all founding kings embody universal virtues, each new king had to base his order on a combination of preceding founders. His rebellion against their later descendants becomes legitimate only if he can prove a spiritual discontinuity between them and their own founding ancestors, regardless of the blood that linked them.

In order to assume control within a state, the king must appropriate control over the "center". Without this, the Chinese state if not any early state, would have been impossible. This may be a "normal", to-be-expected development of early state formation. His position within the system is therefore highly volatile. To avoid undermining his state, he appoints ritual officials who can cushion some of this volatility. Since natural calamities never last forever, the king was able to claim that his power and control over "heaven" enabled him to overcome the "ritual crisis". The state functioned squarely within this juxtaposition of human and divine in the absolute center of signification. The state ideology emerged from this center; it gave the king or any other claimant the ideological justification for authority, rebellion and war, and, by the same token, for the establishment of a new and "corrected" order.


In view of the Chinese experience, The Gansian theory based on René Girard's pioneering work, finds a fruitful new testing ground. Both Girard and Gans developed their theory on the basis of Western traditions. The non-Western, Chinese tradition has strengthened rather than weakened their theory of the centrality of ritual, especially sacrificial ritual. The Chinese experience confirms that sacrifice played an important role in state formation, in the ordering of human society and in the control of human violence. This suggests that a state, like Shang and Chou China, could not have been successful without the violence control mechanism a state could provide. We might discover differences between "East" and "West" in the ways this mechanism was put in place, but we also discover the paradox of a state as a violence-controlling and avoiding organism. Paradoxically, the state could only avoid violence by perpetuating it in ritual periodicity. The archaic Chinese experience seems to confirm the universality of sacrificial ritual as a civilizing force. Like other nations, however, modern China carries on the "historical" burden of its violent "ritual" past as we have learned from recent events, and this, despite the non-violent, non-metaphysical Confucian ideology that has dominated much of China's state ideology.



1. I owe this information to Hung-Hsiang Chou, "Chinese Oracle Bones," Scientific American, vol. 240, no. 4 (April, 1979) pp. 135-51.(back)


3. These examples have been adopted from Tsung-Tsung Chang, Der Kult der Shang-Dynastie im Spiegel der Orakelinschriften - Eine palaographische Studie zur Religion im archaischen China (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1970) p. 34ff.(back)


5. The End of Culture - Toward a Generative Anthropology (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1985) p. 137ff. (back)



8. James Legge, transl., The Ch'un Ts'ew with The Tso Chuen, The Chinese Classics, vol. 5, part 1, p. 117 (as a result of a solar eclipse); p.167 and footnote, p. 177; p. 633 and footnote on p. 635. (back)










18. Originary Thinking, p. 64ff.(back)

19. Originary Thinking, p. 94.(back)


20. Transl., Seraphin Couvreur, Li chi: Mémoires sur les bienséances et les cérémonies... Tome II (Paris: Cathasia, 1950) pp. 113-14.(back)





25. From Derk Bodde, "Myths of ancient China," Mythologies of the Ancient World, ed. Samuel N. Kramer (New York: Doubleday, 1961).(back)

26. See on this, Lothar von Falkenhausen, "Reflections on the political Role of Spirit Mediums in early China: Two wu Officials in the Zhou li," forthcoming in Early China, no. 20. Von Falkenhausen argues that this early Chou dynasty ritual bureaucracy may have been projected on the Chou by ideologues of the Warring States period.(back)

27. This figure may be exaggerated. See "Reflections on the Political Role of Spirit Mediums in early China," p. 5.(back)




Anthropoetics - The Electronic Journal of Generative Anthropology
Volume I, number 2 (December 1995)
ISSN 1083-7264