The ritual and worship in the Shang dynasty (), the second royal dynasty of China, comprised the acts through which the Shang worshipped a pantheon of ancestral spirits, nature powers, and the high god Di. The principal acts were divination recorded on oracle bones and the sacrifice of animals and human victims, supplemented by a regular liturgical cycle of offerings, mortuary ritual, posthumous naming, spirit mediumship, and possibly pilgrimage. Almost everything known of these practices derives from oracle-bone inscriptions of the Late Shang period (), supplemented by the archaeological remains of ritual activity.
These acts were scheduled by a sexagenary, or sixty-day, calendar and, in the Late Shang, were increasingly governed by a formalised liturgy of sacrifices to the royal ancestors. The king was the chief officiant, communicating with his most recent ancestors by offering sacrifices, they in turn giving access to more senior spirits and ultimately to Di. Divinations were recorded in a standard format of preface, charge, prognostication, and verification, while sacrifice ranged from offerings of grain, ale, and domestic animals to human sacrifice conducted on a large scale.
Shang religious practices were not static. Over the two centuries covered by the oracle bone inscriptions, divination and sacrifice were progressively regularised, until by the final reigns divination was largely confined to royal hunts and a fixed cycle of ancestral sacrifice.
Nature of ritual
Conception
The inscriptional term feng () expressed the Shang abstract concept of ritual. The resulting body of practicedivination, sacrifice, the healing of illness, and the casting of ritual bronzeshas been characterised as a "science" of the ancestors, meaning not a science in the modern sense but a systematic and impersonalised body of theology and technique through which the elite sought advantage and assurance against illness, the weather, and other uncertainties. By this account the ancestral cult was the prime technology by which the Shang managed their world.
Ritual centred on communication with the spirit world, and the king was its essential intermediary. Through sacrifice he addressed his most recent ancestors, who could in turn reach more senior spirits and ultimately convey his requests to the high god Di. As the one figure able to divine the intent of the spirits, the king monopolised the mantic arts, and his capacity to do so lent religious and political legitimacy to his rule.
The cult was highly routinised. Each desired outcome was regarded as falling within the jurisdiction of a particular ancestor, who received a matching offering on a fixed schedule, a systematisation that has been described as bureaucratic. Over fifty distinct rituals have been identified in the oracle-bone inscriptions, and probably more went unrecorded.
Ritual calendar
The scheduling of Shang rituals depended on a sexagenary, or sixty-day, calendar, in use from the earliest appearance of writing in China around 1250 BC. It combined two interlocking sequences, a cycle of ten termslater known as the Heavenly Stemsand a cycle of twelvelater the Earthly Brancheswhich together yielded sixty distinct day-names, sixty being the lowest common multiple of ten and twelve. The ten-term cycle was the more fundamental of the two, functioning as a ten-day week that the Shang termed the xun (), and the sixty-day cycle was in turn understood as six such weeks.
The ten stems ran jia (), yi (), bing (), ding (), wu (), ji (), geng (), xin (), ren (), and gui (). The twelve branches ran zi (), chou (), yin (), mao (), chen (), si (), wu (), wei (), shen (), you (), xu (), and hai (). The later correlation of the twelve branches with the animals of the Chinese zodiac is not attested within the first thousand years of the cycle's use. The concept of a seven-day week possibly also reached China during the reign of Zu Jia (12th century BC), although it was never adopted by the Shang.
The calendar was bound up with the ancestral cult. The ten stems were used to name the royal dead, every Shang king bearing a stem in his posthumous name, and the same terms underlay the schedule on which those ancestors received sacrifice. The stem in an ancestor's name was fixed, and it set the day of the ten-day week on which sacrifice was routinely offered to that spirit, so that the day-names primarily marked when an individual received cult.
Divination reinforced the rhythm of the week. On its final day the king performed the bu xun (), a divination as to whether the coming ten days would pass without misfortune. Because a full round of the developed sacrificial cycle approximated the solar year, the Shang came to reckon years by it, using the word si ()literally a cycle of sacrificeto mean "year". The count of sexagenary days itself ran on unbroken into later Chinese history, and the calendar structured the major religious observances of the Shang, above all those directed to the ancestors.
Divination
Oracle bones
The Shang practised a form of divination called pyromancy, the reading of cracks produced when bone or shell was exposed to heat, as a way of communicating indirectly with the spirits. Divination of this kind was far older than Shang writing and reached back to Neolithic scapulimancy, but only in the Late Shang were the divinations recorded in inscriptions, and even then the inscribed bones make up less than a tenth of the surviving corpus. The oldest divinatory inscriptions date to around 1250 BC, though the script itself is probably older. dates the earliest inscription to 1230 BC. The inscriptions also imply some engagement with divination using polygrams alongside the burning of bone.
The principal media were the shoulder blades of cattle and the plastrons of turtles, with the scapulae of other animals and turtle carapaces used less often. Traces of pens possibly used to keep turtles have been found at Yinxu. Cattle scapulae became the dominant medium of the Late Shang, harder to burn than smaller bones but justified by their standing in ritual and sacrifice. Each bone or shell was prepared first. A scapula had its ridge and part of its socket sawn away and its surface levelled, and a plastron was cut from the carapace, stripped of its horny outer plates, and smoothed, so that the cracks would show clearly on the front and the surface could be written on.
A series of hollows was then bored or chiselled into the back of the bone or shell. These thinned it and fixed the place, shape, and direction of the crack to come, and it is this ordered array of hollows that sets Shang pyromancy apart from the free-form burning of the Neolithic. At the moment of divination the diviner proposed the charge and applied an intense, rounded heat source to a hollow, charring the bone until a crack of a bu () shape formed on the front. The cracks were read as the response of the spirits, and a scribe then incised the interpretation onto the bone.
Divination usually took place in temples, though it could also be conducted away from the ritual centres. Once a bone had served its purpose it was stripped of its divine qualities and buried in a pit.
Inscription content
A full record could hold as many as six elements, though rarely all at once. A preface gave the cyclical day of the divination and the diviner's name, and at times the place, while a postface might add the place, the month, or the number of the sacrificial cycle. The charge followed, and after it, where present, came a crack number, a crack notation, the king's prognostication, and a verification.
The charges were not questions but wishes, forecasts, or statements of intent with which the bone was charged. They were often set out as matched positive and negative propositions, a form that mirrored the complementary cast of Shang belief. The divination quoted above shows the pattern in brief, for on the day guichou the king cracked the bone and proposed that the coming ten days would bring no disaster, then read the cracks as auspicious.
A single charge was often answered not by one crack but by a series of them, made across several hollows and read together as a set. The cracks were numbered in the order they were made, and a crack notation carved beside a crack recorded how it had been read, though notations judged inauspicious were left off the bone. The same divination could also be repeated on one bone, its instances set in order by the dates recorded.
The diviners cracked the bones, but the prognostication of the outcome was the king's, introduced by the formula "the king, reading the cracks, said". A verification might then record what came to pass, as when a forecast of rain was followed by the note that "on renwu it really did rain". Both are uncommon, and most surviving inscriptions preserve only the preface and charge. The king's occasional ability to foretell specific events weeks in advance was among the skills that lent authority to his rule. A single record from the reign of Wu Ding runs through the whole sequence.
Divination was less an attempt to foretell the future than a means of ensuring that a proposed course of action would not bring catastrophes, and many charges close with the standing phrase that "there will be no disaster". Its recurring subjects were sacrifice, by far the most frequent, together with warfare, hunting, royal excursions, the ten-day week, the coming day or night, the weather, agriculture and the harvest, the king's sickness, childbirth, and tribute, as well as appeals for the assistance of the spirits. Divinations about attack from outside, for instance, are absent from Yinxu Period V, when the Shang held only a small and stable territory. Others addressed public works and royal commissions, such as the walling of cities and the mobilising of labour.
Diviners
Three kinds of diviner have been distinguished, those named in the king's service, those working for the nobility, and those who met the needs of the wider public. The distinction was visible in the bones themselves, for those used at court were carefully thinned and polished and bore symmetrical rows of paired hollows, while the bones of nobles and of public diviners were more roughly prepared and their divinations generally left uninscribed. The confinement of literate divination to the court expressed the elite's monopoly over an important form of ritual knowledge.
About one hundred and twenty diviners are named across the inscriptions, though the bulk of royal divination was the work of a handful. They fell into schools and groups set apart by their script and their concerns, the most active under Wu Ding being the Bin group, whose sixteen or more diviners included Bin, Que, Zheng, Nei, and Gu. Other groups of the kings' school were the Chu, He, and Huang groups of the northern branch and the Li group of the southern.
Divinations made for people other than the king are rare, amounting to under five per cent of the surviving inscriptions, and they are grouped into several types such as the Zi-group of the princes. Most belong to the reign of Wu Ding.
The fullest of them is the archive from Huayuanzhuang East, some 2,452 divination records on 529 shells and bones, discovered in 1991 and produced under the patronage of a royal prince during Wu Ding's reign. The prince was almost certainly a son of Wu Ding and Lady Hao, and the ancestors he most honoured were his grandparents, the earlier king Xiao Yi and his consort, while the absence of offerings to his own parents' generation shows that both were still living. His scribes wrote in a hand distinct enough to form a recognised "HuaDong" type, dated to the middle and later part of the reign. The day-to-day divining was carried out by a small and unnamed body of diviners and scribes rather than the couple of dozen once assumed, though the prince himself sometimes divined and read the cracks.