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or She Ji was still a political manifestation up through the Tang (618-907) and the Song (960-1260) dynasties, articulating neighbourhood and local belonging. In the Ming (1368-1644) period of early modern China, government regulations required that every hundred households maintain one She shrine and the ceremony conducted there should include the slaughtering of animals. It was then a day of feasting.4
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There is reason for caution here. While it cannot be denied that the ancient rituals of the remote Zhou dynasty share something with those performed more than two thousand years after in late Imperial China, the similarities must be deemed to be no more than a certain family resemblance. There is no reason to assume that the late counterparts of pristine sacrifices were caused by a true structural continuity through the ages. Forms are similar, so are the offerings of meat and wine, and a political component was permanently involved; but having recognized this, we must also remember all those agrarian, religious, social and political changes that have had such a profound impact on life in China in these millennia. Whatever ideas and notions that informed the rites of ancient and early China, these must have been modified and transformed in the course of these two thousand years of history. Still, these resemblances over the millennia continue to fascinate.
The observation that the archaic links between the cults of the She and the dead re-appear in contemporary rituals in southern China, invites some further speculation. If death was an essential semantic component in the ancient notion of the She, a robust structure of meaning may well have survived—or been generated and generated again—despite ever changing symbolic environments; if it was true that the She could not be separated from the dead, or, possibly, was a manifestation of collective death, this close connotation [death<>vegetative force] may have been a presupposition for any ritual activity concerned with the earth and its generative power.
What can be said here, in our present context, is that in some places in the central Yangzi valley there were visits to the graves of the dead in connection with the celebration of the She. The rituals to the agricultural god of the soil solicited blessings for the coming season by offerings and prayers which were sent in a downward direction to reach
48 Aijmer 1991: 191-92.