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JOHN KARL EVANS
China ancestral spirits, while fundamentally benevolent with regard to their descendants, are on occasion punitive, and that in some communities they can simply be malicious.44
This repeats the pattern already observed at Rome, and a further parallel should be mentioned at this point. When the manes act with malevolent intent, we have seen that they are situated in the hostile and aggressive category of larvae, or ghosts. If a Chinese spirit tormented by neglect attacks its descendants, whether for the sake of vindictiveness or to draw attention to its pitiable condition, it undergoes a similar transformation and enters the ghostly realm of the kuei, for it is now behaving in the hostile manner normally associated with ghosts.45 These form a vast society, for viewed from the perspective of any given individual, all spirits save for one's own beneficent ancestors constitute kuei. Still, certain species of ghosts are generally considered to be more dangerous than others—the same types that we have already encountered in Rome. Those who are sentenced to perpetual starvation and misery because they lack descendants to honour them have good reason to be aggressive; hence the intense desire for male offspring that Hsu remarks in West Town, and the total absence of bachelors and spinsters in the community.46 Individuals who have died before their time, and especially those who have met violent ends, are also angry and jealous of the living, whom they terrorize whenever possible.47 In China as in Rome, ghosts are evil spirits, demanding and dangerous.
Cult practices in Rome and China
If there is a marked similarity in the attitude the Romans and Chinese exhibit toward the spirits of their dead, and in the interplay between the latter and the living, one might naturally expect to find a high degree of correspondence between their cult practices as well. This is in fact the case. In each society, for example, there is an annual celebration designed to placate the ghosts.
The Chinese Festival of the Hungry Ghosts takes place on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month. On this date, the gates