Religion of the Shang dynasty

The state religion of the Shang dynasty, the second royal dynasty of China, involved trained practitioners communicating with deities, including deceased ancestors and nature spirits. These deities formed a pantheon headed by the high god Di. Methods of communication with spirits included divinations written on oracle bones and sacrifice of living beings. Much of what is known about Shang religion has been discovered through archaeological work at Yinxu – the site of Yin, the Late Shang capital – as well as earlier sites. At Yinxu, inscriptions on oracle bones and ritual bronze vessels have been excavated. The earliest attested inscriptions were made, during the reign of king Wu Ding – though the attested script is fully mature, and is believed to have emerged centuries earlier.
Religion played an important role in Shang life and economy. Aside from divination and sacrifices, the Shang also practised burials, posthumous naming, and possibly shamanism, with facilitation from ritual art and ritual constructions. The royal adherents constantly worshipped the deities through those ceremonies, the scheduling of which was facilitated by Shang astronomers via the invention of a sophisticated calendar system based on a 60-day cycle. Regional estates maintained independent practitioners but worshipped the same deities for common purposes. Those acts of worship, which were formalised over time, were held for divine fortune along with prosperity of the late Shang state.
Originally derived from prehistoric Chinese religions, many aspects of the Shang religion first appeared during the Early Shang, developing gradually throughout the Middle and Late periods. After 1046 BC, the Zhou dynasty, which conquered the Shang, continued to assimilate elements of Shang religion into its own traditions. Elements of Shang beliefs and practices were integrated into later Chinese culture, with some even having legacies reflected in the traditions of countries within the Sinosphere. Various traditional texts of the Zhou and later Imperial dynasties make references to Shang beliefs and rituals, albeit with considerable differences from the actual religion.

Definition

The spiritual system as practised by the Shang has been described as a religion, and some scholars characterise it more specifically as a state religion. Some sinologists such as David Keightley defined the Shang tradition as described in oracle bone inscriptions as "religiosity" instead of "religion", due to the limited scope of what these texts offer about Shang subjective experience with the spiritual aspect. This tradition has also been referred to as a royal cult, with an intimate relation to the power of the Shang king.
Unlike other belief systems, Shang religion did not rely on any canonised scriptures to narrate its faith. It is instead understood through oracle bone inscriptions which act as the main textual evidence, together with archaeological remains of ritual activities such as sacrifices. These sources mainly describe the religion in royal and elite contexts, but parts of the information they offer may have been concerned by the common people as well.

Beliefs

Certain characteristics of Shang religious beliefs have been identified as bureaucratic or at least proto-bureaucratic. The Shang articulated a pantheon led by a supreme being and filled with deities of various origins, particularly ancestral and natural. Despite the diversity of spirits, Shang religion was dominated by ancestor worship, with core tenets of belief centred on relationships between the living and the dead.

High God Di

The head of the Shang pantheon was Di, the 'High God'. In many oracle bone inscriptions, Di is described as presiding over a hierarchy of spirits, including former humans and nature deities, of which all were under Di's control. The Shang sought to understand the will of this high deity through the practice of divination using oracle bones.
The Shang believed that Di exercised authority over both the natural and human worlds, which included controlling the climate, influencing the harvest, and overseeing the outcomes of battles. Di expressed approval or disapproval over the everyday actions of humans, and was thought to be capable of either providing aid or sending down disasters. Di was virtually the only deity who could issue commands. While the Shang conducted rituals to ensure Di would not harm them, there is no evidence that they made sacrifices to Di as they did to other spirits, implying a significant distinction in how Di was perceived.
The identity of Di has been the subject of debate. Some scholars proposed that the Shang conceived of Di in a manner similar to the Judeo-Christian God. Another approach conflates Di with the legendary Emperor Ku, the third of the Five Emperors mentioned as preceding the Shang in Sima Qian's Shiji. Emperor Ku could be the same as Kui, a spirit addressed as "High Ancestor" in at least four Shang inscriptions. This might prove to be useful for the Shang king, who accordingly was seen as sharing portions of the High God's power.
Another view is that Shang religion did not conceive of a high god as such, and that Di was a generic word applicable to all divine powers. According to Robert Eno, Di was applied to the names of some ancestors, despite the fact that these spirits were not considered comparably powerful to Di. From this, Eno infers that Di was not a name for one god in particular, but could refer to any spirit. While agreeing with Eno against the existence of a singular god, John C. Didier opposes Eno's position that the Shang conceived of Di as an entirely abstract multiplicity of spirits.

Nature spirits

Nature powers were typically addressed by the Shang only when the need for general blessings or assistance against natural calamities were urgent, and they seemed to have less influence than ancestor spirits. Among the nature spirits were wind gods, which were associated with the four cardinal directions and the four seasons. Winds also seemed to be associated with the phoenix, which is mentioned as Di's messenger. Rituals were conducted to appease the wind gods, and to pray for successful harvests. The wind itself appears as a deity, and there are other spirits that could control winds.
Some nature powers were responsible for crop failures, which were detrimental to the Shang whose economy was based on agriculture. Such spirits include the Mountain Power Yue, which modern scholars identify as Mount Song, and the River Power He, a god representing the Yellow River. Yue and He – which influenced state matters such as harvests and war – were the only nature spirits with clearly defined roles, and the Shang practice of treating them as ancestor-like deities was likely to allow them to exercise their authority together with ancestor spirits. Also recognised by the Shang, the Earth Power She – or Tu in Shang inscriptions – was associated with protection from misfortune, and potentially with the feminine.
Some inscriptions refer to gendered spirits such as the Mother of the West and Mother of the East who respectively controlled sunset and sunrise. Some identify these two spirits as goddesses of celestial objects, while others say that they were more likely earth deities with possible origins from agricultural and fertility cults.
Night and dreams were possibly associated with an owl deity, with references to owls found in Shang inscriptions and art. Dance and sacrifices acted as Shang prayers to the rains. The Sun was an independent deity to which the Shang prayed for harvests, although it did not usually receive rituals. Similarly, worship of the Moon is existent but rarely seen in Shang texts. Shang kings also worshipped the spirit of the Huan River, which served as a place where they conducted rituals. Oracle-texts mention a certain 'Shang River' and its own river spirit, whose name may be the origin of the dynastic name itself.

Ancestor spirits

The Shang upheld beliefs in royal ancestor spirits, most of whom were former kings and queen consorts. The ancestor list grew through time, as the death of each reigning king added him as an ancestor. Six Predynastic ancestor deities were recognised:

Shang Jia
Bao Yi
Bao Bing
Bao Ding
Shi Ren
Shi Gui

The Shang referred to these Predynastic ancestors as the, with the junior five called the. The Shang dynastic line was recognised to begin with Shi Gui's child Da Yi – and ultimately ended with Di Xin, the final Shang king. All Shang kings whose both father and son also ruled as kings were grouped as mainline ancestors – a lineage anachronistically referred to as the dazong – and formed the major subject of Shang ancestor worship, at the expense of collateral ancestors.
Shang ancestor worship possessed characteristics of an impersonalised cult, in which the spirits of dead royals were deprived of their individuality upon becoming ancestors. These spirits constituted what modern scholars describe as a "generational hierarchy", with the power of its members determined by seniority. Predynastic ancestors were the most powerful, with the power to influence weather and crops. In contrast, recently dead ancestors might only cause personal trouble, such as haunting the living king with nightmares. Ancestor spirits could intercede with the High God Di, and they could also inflict severe calamities if they were not appeased with the proper rituals.
The Shang also revered female ancestor spirits, including the mothers and consorts of mainline kings – except for the wives of the first four Predynastic spirits. Shang texts mention female ancestors causing the king's illness. They also occasionally describe female ancestors as being unfriendly and angry, which would thereafter result in the ancestors receiving offerings. In general, female ancestors did not receive a similar level of reverence as male ancestors, being the focus of only one-sixth of Shang rituals, possibly due to the fact that their jurisdiction was seen as being limited to reproduction. Women attested in oracle bone inscriptions included Mu Ji, Bi Bing, and most prominently Fu Hao, the consort of Wu Ding, who was referred to as Mu Xin and Bi Xin after her death.

Former Lords and other deities

In the Shang pantheon there existed a group of ancestor-like spirits that were probably recognised by a general population outside of the royal clan, and it was also some of these spirits that later reappeared in traditional Chinese literature. The most prominent spirits in this group – which the Shang called the but referred to by modern scholarship as the – include Wang Hai and Nao, whose names were written with pictographic characters. The powers of these two, who were more likely mythological than historical spirits, outranked those of the highest Shang ancestors, ranging from affecting the weather to influencing the king.
The Former Lords also comprised spirits whom modern scholars identify as former Shang ministers with the postmortem ability to curse the living, such as Xue Wu, Xian Wu, Huang Yin, and Yi Yin. The latter was accompanied by a consort named Yi Shi, and was able to control rain and ensure good harvests. Some spirits were categorised together with Nao and Wang Hai, namely Ji and Wang Heng. Also in the Shang pantheon was E, whose categorisation status was unclear, and Mo Xi, who in later literature was mentioned as a consort of the last Xia dynasty ruler Jie.

Cosmology

Shang cosmology viewed the cosmos as being composed of the, with the king being divinely sanctioned to rule at the. Shang deities – the High God Di, the nature spirits, and the ancestors – were connected together in this sifang universe, which served as an ordered medium through which Di interacted with humans. Events from the four directions were perceived as fulfillments of Di's will, making sifang cosmology a way for the Shang to understand Di and the universe.
Based on Shang inscriptional evidence, some scholars point to the possibility of Di having a cosmological identity, an addition to the various identification theories to which Di is ascribed. According to this interpretation, the Shang believed in the divinity of the north celestial pole – the Shang's 'absolute centre' – and it was at the pole's surrounding square area that the High God was thought to dwell. Di was perceived to be composed of two components, with the upper one called Shangdi and its lower counterpart named Xiadi. Either of these two was probably a collective manifestation of Shang ancestors, and Didier identifies it to be Shangdi, which he believes to have been the part of Di associated with the polar square.
The Shang oracle characters denoting Di may have acted accordingly as projections of the celestial pole, the stars surrounding it, and Di's heavenly divinity. The square-like component within the character for Di possibly denoted even the sifang itself. The square also appears as an independent character in Shang inscriptions, representing the fourth Heavenly Stem ding and signifying various ritual meanings.
Phenomena within the Shang cosmos were conceived as both positive and negative counterparts, with a worldview variously described as dualistic, complementary, shamanistic, and correlative. It was through this complementarity of the optimistic and the pessimistic that the Shang attempted to influence the spirits.
The Shang recognised five special subordinates under Di, whom they called the "Five Adjutants" or "Five Ministers", which transmitted messages to the human world about Di and may have been associated with the five classical planets.

Totemism

Inscriptional evidence seems to indicate that the Shang believed in bird totemism – the practice of associating kinship between humans and birds. Most academics identify the Shang bird totem with the xuanniao, a divine bird which was mentioned in later Zhou accounts as giving birth to the Shang high ancestor Xie, and some take this as an indication that the Shang considered themselves descendants of birds. However, most evidence indicates that the Shang likely worshipped general bird features rather than a particular species. It is also possible that these names represented beasts instead of birds.
Sarah Allan contends that the Shang may also have forged a totemic identification of their highest ancestors with the ten suns which in turn were associated with birds, and that this belief might be one of the primary basis for the late Shang ritual calendar. Although Shang inscriptions do not directly mention the ten suns, which appeared as a myth discussed in Zhou and Han literature, Allan suggests that this totemic tradition was implied by many later texts. Aside from birds, tigers and dragons depicted on Shang bronzes have been interpreted as totems.

Acts of worship

The inscriptional term feng represented the Shang abstract concept of ritual, which Keightley described as a "scientific" method by which the Shang attempted to prosper all aspects of life. Through rituals, the king was able to communicate directly with his most recent ancestors by offering sacrifices, and these ancestors could themselves provide access to more senior spirits – who in turn passed the king's requests to Di. Over 50 separate rituals have been identified in oracle bone inscriptions. In addition to those known practices, the Shang may have engaged in undocumented activities within a more extensive religious structure, making modern understanding about Shang rituals inadequate.

Sexagenary calendar

Shang rituals followed a sexagenary, or 60-day, calendrical cycle derived from 10- and 12-day subcycles. A Shang week consists of ten days corresponding with the 10-cycle signs – later known as the Heavenly Stems – with the order starting with jia, then yi, bing, ding, wu, ji, geng, xin, ren, and gui. The 12-cycle – later called the Earthly Branches – comprises zi, chou, yin, mao, chen, si, wu, wei, shen, you, xu, ending with hai. A 10-cycle sign could combine with a 12-cycle sign to form a sexagenary name for a day. This early Chinese calendar was featured in various major Shang religious practices, especially those dedicated to ancestors.

Divination

The Shang practised pyromancy – a form of divination using fire – to communicate indirectly with spirits. Major Shang periods from the middle of the second millennium BC were all characterised by pyromancy using oracle bones, but it was only the Late Shang when inscriptions on these bones appeared. The oldest divinatory inscriptions have been dated to, although the script itself possibly traces its origin back to considerably earlier periods. However, inscribed oracle bones still constituted only one-tenth of the corpus excavated at the last Shang capital. The inscriptions also show signs of Shang engagement with other divination methods, such as those employing polygrams.
Shang divination typically took place in temples, but also could be conducted outside of ritual centres. Oracle bones primarily included scapulae or turtle plastrons, to which the staff applied heat after cleaning and preparing. Bone cracks produced during the process were seen as messages from the spirits, and scribes then wrote the interpretation on the bones. After a divination ritual, the used oracle bones were stripped of their divine qualities, and were subsequently buried in pits.
Typically, a full inscription includes a preface – which records the date and place of divination together with the diviner's name – accompanied by a charge that outlines the concerned topic, the king's prognostication, and a verification recording the actual outcome. Many divinations follow a formula of positive and negative charges accompanying each other, reflecting the Shang dualistic theology of complementarity. It is common for multiple numbers of the same divination to appear on a single bone, in which case the date records help establish their sequence.
Shang divinations were conducted not to forecast the future, but to ensure that present actions would not result in catastrophes. Topics commonly covered in Shang divinations include warfare, hunting, agriculture, well-being, sacrifices, and weather. For example, there are certain divinations about outside attacks, although none of them appeared during Yinxu Period V when the Shang had established control over a small, stable area. Additionally, divinations were carried out to determine suitable policies for public works and royal commissions, such as walling cities and mobilising people.
It has been recognised that some divinations were not made on the king's behalf, but by the aristocratic elite. Scholars idenitfy multiple groups of these so-called 'non-king divinations' which mostly date to the early and middle periods of Wu Ding's reign. One such group comprises over 500 inscriptions excavated at the Huayuanzhuang East site that were originally commissioned by a Shang prince, and reflects a distinct writing style from that of the royal divinations.
Aside from the royal and noble traditions, some academics identify a third type of divination that served public needs, especially in the Late Shang capital Yin. These divinations were likely conducted with less careful preparation, as evidenced by a number of oracle bones with rudimentary preparation found outside the capital's palace complex. However, some divinations identified as public may have, in reality, belonged to the royal tradition.

Liturgical sacrifices

The Shang regularly conducted sacrifices to please the spirits and pray for their blessings, with a certain degree of ritual violence. Characteristic of the practice were "bureaucratic" ancestral sacrifices, in which each desired outcome was regarded as falling within the jurisdiction of particular royal ancestors, who in turn required a unique sacrificial package. Sacrifices to royal ancestors was a crucial obligation of the king, who by the 11th century BC had to perform such rituals every day. The demand for sacrificial materials spurred technological innovations for Shang society.
Non-living sacrificial offerings were mainly bones, stones and bronzes. Some of the bone products were shaped into hairpins or arrowheads, and there are instances of ivory found in elite tombs. Stone objects such as jade were moulded into decorative ritual objects, such as those discovered in the Tomb of Fu Hao. Offering ceremonies involved bronze vessels with short inscriptions, such as the ding, of which access seemed to be exclusively granted to the king and heirs partaking in rituals. There were also accepted minor materials like ceramics, the designs on which were inherited from earlier cultures.
Animal sacrifice constituted an important part of Shang ritual, with the known recipients being royal ancestors and the nature spirits. Faunal offerings were subjected to certain colour principles and, in funerary contexts, rules of completeness and location. Predominant sacrificial animals included pigs, which featured heavily in Early Shang contexts, horses, which were the most commonly sacrificed during the Late period, and dogs. The latter were usually sacrificed in a flexible manner, with intentions ranging from their serving as food for ancestors to acting as their postmortem attendants. Other major animals include sheep and cattle, which were sacrificed to both the ancestors and nature powers. The Shang also sacrificed millet, ale, and grains alongside the animals.
The Shang practised large-scale human sacrifice, a practice deriving from their belief in the afterlife. At least 14,197 human victims were mentioned in inscriptions, although 1,145 inscriptions do not mention exact figures. Victims were often enemy prisoners, such as the Qiang who were either captured or sent as gifts by the Shang's neighbours. While some prisoners were spared, many, including women, were sacrificed. A single ritual sacrifice could involve hundreds or thousands of victims. Different methods were used to kill victims depending on the recipients; for example, they were drowned for sacrifices to the River Power, buried alive for the Earth Power, cut into pieces for the wind spirits, and burned to death for sky spirits.

Sacrificial names

The oracle bone inscriptions contain a rich sacrificial vocabulary. It includes terms such as 'females', 'dependent women', and 'servants', all of which referred to objects of sacrifice. Another term observed in inscriptions is 'minor servants', indicating that the Shang even sacrificed minor officers.
Shang texts refer to methods of sacrifice, including dou, which refers to methods for the sacrificial killing of humans in bronze vessels, shan denoting single human sacrifice, or shi referring to ritualised offering at temples. Inscriptions also name sacrifices such as liao, mao, chen, and da yu, which all fall within the group of exorcist sacrifices conducted to counteract negative forces. Particularly, the Shang ritual verb yong continued to be used in classical texts where the phrase yongren was employed to refer to human sacrifice.

Cycle of sacrifice

The Late Shang ritual system features a liturgical cycle of regular sacrifices, with the recipients comprising ancestral kings and ancestress associated with mainline kings. The cycle consisted of five consecutive sacrificial rituals: ji, zai, xie, yong, and yi. Each ancestor received only one of the five rituals at one time. At the beginning of each sacrificial round, a ceremony honouring all recipients called gongdian was held, and in every weekend, priests would make an inscription announcing the sacrifices for the next day. The basic sequence started with yi and ended with yong, although some believe that ji was the opening round.
The five sacrifices constituted alternating 36- and 37-week cycles, with only one "rest week" dedicated to preparations for the next offering cycle. Since a Shang week is 10 days, a full cycle approximated a solar year, and was sometimes used as a term for a year itself. This calendar terminology was occasionally employed in more secular contexts, as in this excerpt from a bronze inscription:
Shang kings sometimes conducted additional, irregular sacrifices to ancestors who caused them misfortune. Supplemental rituals, such as wine offerings, were occasionally conducted the night before the commencement of one among the five cyclical ceremonies. Due to the fall of the Shang, the last two kings did not receive sacrifices.

Shamanism

Many oracle bone inscriptions reveal that the Shang communicated with the spirit world through rituals such as yi, described as a process of spiritual metamorphism and empowerment, and bin which involved the king hosting Di or one of his ancestors. The hosting ritual may be considered non-shamanic, as it did not involve ecstatic communion or commingling within the king's body; however, some sinologists including Kwang-chih Chang state that this is not a satisfactory interpretation, and that the Shang dynasty's religion must have embraced shamanism. According to Chang et al., the king himself acted as a shaman to connect with the spirits.
The oracle bone script features an ancient form of the character for wu. While the role of wu in Shang religion is not fully understood, they were seemingly a profession that made use of prayer and astrology to act as a medium between humans and spirits. Wu were worshipped after death alongside other Shang spirits. It is uncertain whether the wu of the Shang were shamans per se, or if they used other means to communicate with spirits. Evidence suggests that non-Shang peoples could reasonably serve as wu; the sinologist Victor H. Mair supported the view that the occupation was indirectly connected to that of the magus, Zoroastrian priests who communicated with spirits via ritual and the manipulative arts, rather than through shamanic techniques such as trance and mediation. David Keightley also disagreed with the interpretation of wu in the Shang context as meaning 'shaman'.
More recent investigation has demonstrated a lack of convincing evidence for shamanism in the Shang religion. As such, the arguments of Chang et al. for a shamanic theory ultimately relied on data from later Zhou religious practice that was being conflated with that of Shang. Furthermore, their theory seemingly did not account for the methods by which the Shang perpetuated their rule – i.e. discerning the High God, a figure that is not addressed by the theory's proponents.

Funerary practices

Royal tombs of the Early Shang period have not been discovered. Most Early-period burials were small, scattered graves, with less complexity and elaboration than those of later phases. During the Late Shang, a royal cemetery emerged at Xibeigang, located in the northern area of the capital. The cemetery was designed according to Shang cosmology, and was split into two zones for political purposes. Xibeigang was home to nine tombs of kings, with seven in its western zone, but did not house Fu Hao's tomb which was situated within the palace complex. Over time, Xibeigang tombs have been looted of most of their contents, hindering the identification of the nine tombs with particular kings.
In a royal funeral, the king's tomb could be constructed before or after his death, while his coffin and furnishings were prepared elsewhere. The king, in his coffin, would be buried in a supine position within a wooden chamber in the central shaft. The chamber was then sealed, and the tomb refilled with earth as additional rituals were performed. Also found in Shang contexts are numerous smaller tombs for the political elites, and there is even a family grave of a diviner. The orientation of the dead in both capital and local settlements remained consistent throughout the Early to Late phases, being a deviation of 10 to 20 degrees northeast.
Grave goods of the Early Shang include bronze items and ceramics, although many burials of this period feature neither of them. In Late-period contexts, the Shang enriched royal tombs with animals, human death attendants, and bronze items such as vessels and weapons, all to accompany the king in his afterlife. Elite tombs feature ceramics, bronzes, farming tools, but usually not coffins – especially if the tomb owners were low-ranked. Weapons were included in graves of both the Early and Late periods, suggesting the existence of a warrior class and their military ethos.
After funerals, relatives of the deceased usually engaged in mortuary feasting at their gravesides, presumably to transform the deceased into new ancestral spirits. The Xibeigang cemetery itself served for the purpose of rituals, even to ancestors not buried there, with on-site ancestral shrines and possibly an offering hall.
More than 1,200 burials of sacrificial humans have been excavated at the Xibeigang cemetery, with particular concentration around one royal tomb. Unlike royal burials, the interment of these victims were oriented east–west, and there are some individuals without heads. It was once thought that they were victims killed during royal funerals, but more recent archaeology suggests that they were sacrificed after such ceremonies.

Posthumous naming

Each of the Shang ancestor spirits was given a posthumous name that contains one of the 10-cycle Heavenly Stems. The sole exception to this convention is Wang Hai, the ancestor-like Former Lord whose name instead incorporates the twelfth Earthly Branch instead of one of the ten Stems. It seems that the ritualised process of assigning day-names to the dead involved divination, which would allow deterministic elements as well as human manipulation. Explanations have been given as to why the calendar was used for naming ancestors, but none is supported by direct evidence.
The American sinologist David Nivison has speculated about seemingly inherent patterns in the naming tradition, such as naming after first day of inaugural year, restraint from naming gui for dynastic kings, and avoiding the same name as the previous king. The Shang seemed to have a naming bias toward three stems – yi, ding, and jia – when naming male ascendants. Shang female ancestors were often accorded xin, ren, and gui as their posthumous names, conforming to principles that differ from those applied to their male counterparts. The stem-name of an ancestral spirit tended to dictate his or her day of receiving sacrifices – for example: out of 90 dates taken from a sample, Zu Yi received sacrifices on the yi day 53 times.
Posthumous names of some kings might be related to Shang cosmology, especially names with stems jia, ding and yi, which were probably projections of the celestial square. As such, the spirits referred to by these stem-names became perceived as powerful gods whose will significantly affected the living realm.
As there were more spirits than stems, the Shang added epithet-like prefixes to their names. Some prefixes indicate the specific familial relationship between the addressed ancestor and the reigning ruler; the characters are often used for a much broader range of meanings than their modern equivalents:

Relatives senior to the reigning king by two or more generations were referred to as zu and bi.
Relatives of the generation prior to the reigning king were referred to as fu and mu. For example, the sons of the then-ancestor Wu Ding referred to him as. Reigning kings sometimes replaced fu with di, the name of the High God, to refer to their deceased fathers.
For relatives of the same generation, only the graph for males has been attested, which is xiong.
Spouses of the reigning king were referred to as fu.
Sons and nephews of the reigning king were referred to as zi. Some interpret this word as the royal surname, while others interpret it as a designation of the eldest son who led a family. It can be also be translated as 'lord'.

Other prefixes applied to Shang names include Da and Xiao, which were used to differentiate mainline and collateral spirits sharing the same stem-name, and there are three kings – Jian Jia, Qiang Jia and Yang Jia – whose prefixes are of uncertain meaning. Since ancestors' posthumous names varied with their generational relationship with the worshipper, some ancestors received multiple posthumous names. The Former Lords such as Yi Yin seemed to possess implicit posthumous names not reflected by their appellations in Shang inscriptions.

Dances

Dance was an integral part of the Shang religion, with a degree of significance possibly greater than commonly perceived. The Shang incorporated their dynastic name into the name of one particular dance ritual, suggesting that dancing was an alternative way for them, especially before the appearance of oracle bone inscriptions, to represent their religion. In addition, dances were possibly associated with the zoomorphic motifs in Shang ritual art, and possibly also with the wu mediums.

Pilgrimage

The Shang may have engaged in pilgrimage, with the most likely destinations located in Chifeng, Hanzhong, Sichuan, and along the middle Yangtze River. Hoards of ritual paraphernalia found in those sites suggest that they were consecrated places, where Shang pilgrims made sacrifices and conducted ritual gatherings with local cultures' representatives. Those destinations served to ritually connect the Shang and other polities, with each possibly making their claim to religious association with certain pilgrimage sites.

Distribution

Although Shang spiritual worship was most notably conducted by the king, it had at least been adopted by the general Shang population by the Late period. Rituals constituted a feature that the king shared with the various lineage-based communities with scattered residence outside of his royal centre. The royal cult, however, stood out due to its massive expenditure of resources unseen in other Shang traditions.

Ritual centres

Characterised by heavy ritualisation, Early Shang royal centres at Zhengzhou and Yanshi shared many religious traditions with the last one at Yinxu. Shortly before the abandonment of Zhengzhou, its ruling class probably sponsored considerable rituals in attempts to keep the settlement habitable. Shang rulers then turned to a short-lived ritual centre at the modern site of Xiaoshuangqiao, most of whose ritual remains were looted after its own demise. The emergence of literacy at the last capital Yin came with first-time textual mentions of religious leaders, including the king, who acted as a "thearch", together with royals such as princes and queen consorts, who accompanied the king in divination and sacrifices.
Specialised diviners already existed at Zhengzhou, while about 120 diviners from the last capital city are known. Late Shang inscriptions also name specialist groups serving the king, such as the scribes, liturgists, and the wu. Some of these groups appear to have gone through institutionalised ritual education before their official employment, despite debates on the nature of this education. These specialists were organised in a manner suggestive of an incipient bureaucracy, and it seems as well that they played a central role in the Shang government. Sacrificial rituals also featured commoners, who participated in these activities as part of their service to Shang kings.

Attested lineage practices

The core area of the Late Shang state comprised regions in and around the capital Yin administered by members of the various royal lineages, with the nature and extent of Shang control over further lands being difficult to fully discern and varying over time. Religious practice by these elites, as observed in Late Shang inscriptions, exhibit significant differences from the royal tradition, in that they rarely worshipped the predynastic and nature powers, and they also never divined about the High God Di. Each of the Shang lineages, however, was equipped with its own ritual staff, similar to the king.
An example among such traditions was that of the Wu Ding-era princely lineage associated with the Huayuanzhuang oracle bones, who appears to have administered a conquered region called Rong. Huayuanzhuang inscriptions attest to the lineage worship of the same ancestors seen in royal texts, on whom this lineage conferred the same posthumous stem-name as the royal tradition but with their own distinct prefixes. The patron of these inscriptions ordered the construction of temples in Rong, made sacrifices with both local and imported materials, and authorised accomplices to participate in common rituals. This prince acted as a diviner himself, and his recurring topics include the construction of temples, relations with Wu Ding and the royal family, and matters of war. His ritual activities were in part facilitated by Wu Ding, whom the Huayuanzhuang texts describe as supplying the prince's estate with sacrificial materials.
Royal leaders stationed along the western frontier worshipped more distant members of the mainline ancestral pantheon. Shang inscriptions also refer to Zi, a lineage territory sometimes sanctioned to perform sacrifices, and Lu, a royal territory near the capital which the Huayuanzhuang prince used as a sacrificial place. Even the leader of the Gu – textually mentioned as a non-Shang lineage polity whose status fluctuated between enemy and ally – could perform sacrifices to Shang deities.

Predynastic Zhou homeland

Knowledge of Shang religion spread to the area of Zhouyuan in the Guanzhong Basin, home to the Predynastic Zhou which existed as a Shang ally but eventually conquered the Shang to establish the Zhou dynasty. Hundreds of inscribed oracle bones have been unearthed in Zhouyuan – mostly produced during the reigns of the last two Shang kings, with the inscriptions being of a distinct form and calligraphic style. These writings mention Zhou worship of Shang royal ancestors, especially the kings nearest to their time. For example, one fully surviving Zhouyuan oracle bone inscription reads:
The Predynastic Zhou ritual leader recorded in this inscription is assumed to be King Wen, who appears to have maintained shrines for Shang ancestors, and who was himself traditionally regarded as the son-in-law of the penultimate Shang king Di Yi. Modern scholarship still disagree about the nature of the Zhouyuan inscriptions. Some scholars suspect that the Zhouyuan bones were actually produced by the Shang people, despite excavations of several bones that confirm their Predynastic Zhou origins.

Other archaeological sites

Remains of Shang ritual are found at the sites of Panlongcheng and Daxinzhuang, probably pre-literate Shang military outposts that maintained strong ties to the contemporaneous centre at Zhengzhou. The site of Daxinzhuang later featured traces of Late Shang ritual literacy, with excavated oracle bone inscriptions that exhibit both local variations and direct influence from royal practices. Readings of these inscriptions indicate that the Daxinzhuang people upheld beliefs and rituals observed in the royal tradition, albeit with differences such as the absence of specialised diviners. Also at Zhengzhou during the Late period when Yin was the capital, four pieces of oracle bone were discovered with short inscriptions possibly dating to the reign of Wu Ding.
Non-elite burials outside of the Late Shang capital area often lacked grave goods. The Subutun site features a four-ramped tomb which was the only one of that type discovered outside the capital, and may have housed either a local rival or a favourite of the Shang king. Another burial site at Tianhu features a mix of Late Shang and indigenous elements, and served as the cemetery of a Shang lineage related to a consort of Wu Ding. The details of sacrificial practice conducted by non-royals are unclear, as such sacrifices are rarely mentioned in inscriptions. Human sacrifice of the Shang style have been identified at Qiuwan, which Shang inscriptions refer to as Dapeng.
At the Shang village site of Guandimiao, burials closely following the layout of Yinxu elite tombs have been excavated. Guandimiao features considerable ritual remains, including oracle bones used for divination, although they are without inscriptions. These oracle bones show similarities to the uninscribed corpus found at Yinxu, and their use probably involved the participation of a local diviner. These remains are suggestive of Guandimiao's rich ritual life, which has challenged the modern assumption that Shang elites ruled with a religious monopoly.

Arts and culture

Ritual art

Shang art was predominantly religious in its nature, being an effective means of conveying the religious landscape to the Shang – most of whom were probably illiterate. Shang artistic expressions bear no explicit relations to the pantheon described in oracle bone texts; rather, their art manifested evolving spiritual meanings through zoomorphic images.
Various religious principles guided Shang ritual art. One such basis was the dualistic outlook of Shang cosmology, which seemed to influence the symmetry often seen in Shang visual representations. Impersonalisation of Shang ancestor worship was also espoused with the art avoiding depiction of ancestors in direct human form. In addition, Shang art shows signs of influence from the concept of yi metamorphism, probably manifested in animal images found on vessels and sculptures.
Characteristic of Shang ritual art is the taotie animal face mask, a bronze motif that appears in both the Early and Late Shang periods. Taotie typically represents a central ridge surrounded by various animal beings, including deer, horses, dragons, and phoenixes, often blended with human features.
The taotie alluded to the spirit world probably in a general rather than specific manner. More specific meanings of this motif have been proposed, including an early projection of the celestial pole in Shang cosmology, a symbol of ancestor spirits in disguise, or the spirits of Shang ritual animals. The latter has been rejected by Ladislav Kesner, who instead states that the taotie was a theriomorphic image that gradually acquired spiritual association with monsters.
The use of colour appears to have been an embellishment of Shang ritual, with the particular combination of red and black seen as embodying mystical, magical, and cosmological essence. Main colourants include lacquer, from which came paintings that adorn coffins of kings and even those of Shang military leaders stationed faraway from royal centres. Red and black pigments also seem to have been applied to divination, either as written by brushes or filled in carved characters. Cinnabar, another main colourant that produced red shades, was used to fill in bone cracks and graphs, such as in the case of Huayuanzhuang lineage divinations.

Cuisine

The Shang considered sacrificial animals such as cattle to be preferable food, possibly because eating them helped to forge closer connections with the ancestors who were thought to consume the same food. Scholars disagree on whether the Shang practised ritual cannibalism by eating sacrificial humans, or such acts were prohibited.
The consumption of psychoactive agents seemed to be a part of Shang religious culture, with traces of millet wine found in a he vessel, along with evidence for the use of cannabis. These ingredients may have helped induce image distortions that enabled participants to experience the true meaning of artistic motifs on Shang bronzes – resulting in them able to engage in practices that involved spiritual communication. Therefore, visual art and psychoactive cuisine together formed a means of religious facilitation.

Music

Traditional literature speaks of Shang temple hymns that were preserved after the fall of the dynasty. Shang musical instruments include bells, alligator drums, and chimestones, with animal iconography and vermillion decorating the latter. Such objects were placed within burials and ritual constructions, and they might also accompany sacrificial victims. Several instruments were used for religious purposes, although they may have as well been utilised for entertainment and warfare. Particularly, Shang inscriptions mention instrumental music accompanying sacrificial rituals.

Sacral architecture

Sacral architecture – also called religious architecture – existed as early as the first phase of the Shang, with ritual constructions identified within both the Early-period settlements at Zhengzhou and Yanshi and the Middle-period centre of Xiaoshuangqiao. The Late period saw the emergence of a ritual complex on a hill near the Huan River, with the original layout being difficult to discern. Most scholars agree that the complex's innermost central area, called Yi, was the primary locus for religious constructions, while smaller ritual buildings were situated to the south.
In oracle bone inscriptions, temples are generally described as including elevated halls, courtyards and gates. Their design may have been inspired by Shang cosmological principles, such as the celestial pole and the notion of sifang. These temples were dedicated to the Former Lords, the nature spirits, the royal ancestresses, and individual ancestors starting from Da Yi. Temples named for the mainline ancestors were maintained continuously through generations, while those for collateral kings were scarcely recorded and tended to be dismantled after a certain period. The Shang housed in their temples spirit tablets used for ancestor commemoration, though no unequivocal remains of such tablets have been attested.
The Shang also constructed altars, many of which are open-air and located within several ritual loci in the capital. At the locus Yi, a central open-air pyramidal altar stood together with colonnaded halls and bridges. Modern academics identify this altar with the beng, which Shang inscriptions describe as the altar for worshipping Di as well as the nature and ancestor spirits. Altars of the other loci were modelled after the Yi design.
Access to religious buildings was probably reserved only for the elites, serving as the place where they dedicated cult to royal ancestors. Shang inscriptions suggest that the king routinely prayed to invoke in the temples, assuming a kneeling posture while holding ritual objects in his hands. Sacrificial ceremonies also seem to occur in certain areas of a temple, such as the "Great Hall" and the "Blood Hall", which they sometimes referred to.

Acts of violence

As prominent means of Shang violence, war and hunting were strongly influenced by religious beliefs and practices. Warfare was seen as both a form of world pacification which the Shang viewed as service to the ancestral order, as well as a cultural practice motivated by the nature of sacrificial rituals. Closely linked to warfare is the frequent activity of hunting, which served to demonstrate royal authority, mystical power, the mastery of animal spirits, and the connection that hunting drew between the Shang and the spirit world. Hunting was not confined to the king alone, but extended to the allies and the lineage leaders.

Ritual economy

The Shang perpetuated their religion by institutionalising an economic sector – called the ritual economy – to support the ceremonial structure, possibly with care from specialists. The high frequency of Shang rituals has caused modern scholarship to estimate their resulting economic cost at considerable levels, contributing to a ritual expense which might make up 10% of ancient China's total gross domestic product. Such investments in religion may have motivated Shang labourers with promised reciprocal blessings from the deities.
Most divinations concerning economic activities focus on the provisioning of sacrifices. The Late-period ritual economy is estimated to have provided the practitioners with up to 500,000 cattle individuals, together with even larger numbers of pigs and sheep. Their ritual consumption also functioned as a mechanism for Shang food redistribution. Cattle herding contributed to the supplying of oracle bones, which may number up to millions even only during the Late period.
At the Late Shang capital Yinxu, the demand for sacrificial bronzes led to millions of labour hours with the input possibly comprising hundreds of tonnes of metal, the sources of which may include lands beyond the domain of direct Shang control. Late Shang human sacrifice is described as contributing to a significant decrease in the working population, as the human victims possibly had been under forced labour when waiting for their final ritual executions. The loss of such economic power during the 200 years of Late Shang is variously estimated as ranging from 10,000 to 200,000 sacrificed labourers, most of whom were probably not recorded in Shang inscriptions.
The state ritual economy was augmented by similar, smaller versions commissioned by Shang elites. An external exchange network was maintained from the Early to Late periods, supplying ritual items through trade, gifting, and tribute. In particular, inscriptions record tributary polities such as Que providing the Shang with oracle bones, and there are ritual cowries obtained through long trade routes that extended to the Indian Ocean.

Political effects

Shang religion served as a source of political power and legitimation for the governing elite. One source of ruling legitimacy was probably the worship of the ancestor-like Former Lords such as Kui and Wang Hai, who may have been either non-royal Shang deities incorporated into the pantheon, or spirits adopted from the religions of local cultures absorbed by the Shang. By venerating them as part of the royal religion, the Shang kings might secure their right to rule over the peoples whose deities were adopted. In addition, worship of the Sun might have been a way for the king to hold sway over lineages other than his, by inviting them to participate in state rituals.
The Shang also derived their political power from divinations. In this practice, the living king seemed to acquire his political prestige from the fact that divinatory inscriptions always verify his prognostications, a strategic move whereby failed predictions were censored from such texts. Aside from divination, the institution of royal sacrifices also played an influential role in shaping both state and royal authority.
Akin to how male ancestors were prioritised in Shang worship, men were considered to be more important than women in Shang political affairs. The birth of boys by royal consorts was seen as auspicious; many inscriptions express concern about such events, particularly that of Fu Hao.

History

Prehistoric precursors

Before the emergence of the Shang, China was inhabited by various prehistoric cultures. These cultures practised spiritual communication through a variety of methods – including prayers, grave goods, and animal sacrifice. Academics such as Kwang-chih Chang propose the existence of shamanic practices in Neolithic Chinese traditions, but their theory is not supported by any clear evidence. The prehistoric Chinese already engaged in pyromantic divination with oracle bones, namely scapulae from cattle, sheep, pigs, and deer. The use of ritual jades in spiritual communication was also a Neolithic tradition transmitted to the Shang religion.
Shang cosmology may have its origin in earlier prehistoric cultures, of which some produced artefacts bearing an anthropo-zoomorphic motif – a possible ancestor of the Shang's visual taotie designs. The pattern is likely a Neolithic projection of the same celestial pole that the Shang observed. A connection possibly exists between the anthropo-zoomorphic motif and the Shang tradition of ancestor worship, since the motif itself may have represented Neolithic ancestral spirits, or at least a spiritual object of worship that offered protection to humans. A rectangular design from the northern Qijia culture may also be the origin for the motif found on Shang ritual bronzes.
According to traditional Chinese historiography, the tradition of venerating deities was already current before the Shang period. For example, the second sovereign of the Xia dynasty, Qi, was described in multiple texts as a spirit-medium who communicated with Shangdi and performed sacrifices to the deceased. The Book of Documents also mentions Emperor Shun – one of the legendary Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors whose reign predated even the Xia – conducting rituals such as divination and sacrifices to Shangdi. Although these periods are often considered mythical, their corresponding site of Erlitou offers evidence of religious activities making use of bronze that were later adopted and developed by the Shang dynasty, such as the use of scapulae for divination.

Early to Late Shang

A large amount of oracle bones appear in pre–Late Shang sites, suggesting the prevalence of divination by the elites, although it was also probably practised by non-royal people. Early Shang pyromancy already involved pretreatment of oracle bones, but they were without systematic standardisation. Cattle bones then seemed to be accorded high status, and were likely associated with certain diviners. The Early Shang was also characterised by the prevalence of communal rituals, along with the institution of ritual violence.
The Middle Shang saw the emergence of a more complex ritual system unseen in the Early period, with divination, sacrifices, and funerary practices more developed and systematic than their predecessors. Excavations at the Middle Shang site of Taixi have revealed departures from earlier traditions, including the burial of death attendants with tomb owners, together with a decline in the number of tombs without grave goods. Taixi, however, was yet to feature clear separations between ritual and residential space.
Shang religion underwent changes as it transitioned to the Late Shang, a period that witnessed the earlier cult system being transformed into a massive and sophisticated ritual structure, accompanied by the unprecedented rise of the ritual economy. Wu Ding – as the first Late Shang ruler – already initiated ritual formalisation attempts, which his son Zu Jia later developed into a series of reform, resulting in a disciplined cult structure that entitled the Shang to more control over spiritual communications. Zu Jia's reforms most prominently included the official institution of the five-sacrifice ritual schedule. Under the succeeding reigns of Lin Xin and Geng Ding, the practice of binary divination charges common during Wu Ding's era was neglected, especially with divinations on the five sacrifices.
By the final years of the Shang, the nature of Shang religion had changed significantly. The high god Di and nature spirits frequently appeared in divinations during Wu Ding's reign, but were rarely mentioned during the last reigns when ancestors became dominant. The Shang also switched their worship between the Former Lords, such as Huang Yin – whose cult was prevalent during the reign of Wu Ding – being replaced by Yi Yin during the reign of Wu Yi. The period of Di Yi and Di Xin likely witnessed significant secularisation, with humans increasingly believed to be able to control the world without the need for Di and the spirits.
Decades after Zu Jia's reign, the five-ritual sacrificial cycle seemed to fall into disuse, or it was still practised but no longer recorded. Possibly during this time, a new sacrificial schedule began to be employed. Later during the last Shang reigns, the king acted as the sole diviner. Divination topics of this period were largely confined to royal hunts and cyclical sacrifices, with other concerns virtually abandoned. These divinations tended to be optimistic and were not likely to request actions from ancestors, suggesting that the Shang changed their beliefs about the ability of the living to communicate with spirits through divination.

Continuation under the Zhou dynasty

Around 1046 BC, the Shang under the king Di Xin collapsed, and were replaced by the Zhou dynasty following the Zhou victory in the Battle of Muye. To ensure their own legitimacy, the Zhou then co-opted many Shang traditions. Zhou historiography denounces Di Xin, not only for his purported licentiousness and drunkenness, but also for his alleged ignorance of ancestor worship.
The Zhou royals enfranchised Di Xin's son Wu Geng to continue overseeing Shang ancestor worship, and after Wu Geng's death in his rebellion, the Zhou king enfeoffed another Shang aristocrat named Weizi as the new patron of Shang religious practice. Other Shang elites who survived the Zhou conquest continued the Shang religion as Zhou royal scribes, observing sacrifices to spirits such as Wen Ding. Some early Western Zhou tombs near modern Beijing were constructed in accordance with Shang burial customs, suggesting that these could have been tombs for later members of the Shang line following their usurpation.
The Shang liturgical calendar was adopted by the Zhou, although it is uncertain whether the new regime reset the day count following its establishment. The Zhou replaced si – the Shang word denoting a ritual cycle – by the term nian, and they gradually developed a bias towards the 24th sexagenary day dinghai. The calendar underwent its final major diversification during the Warring States period with the increasing cultural distinctions between Chinese states. A new system of posthumous names for dead relatives was devised, although some early Zhou individuals were still assigned stem-names, including royal lineage members.
During the Western Zhou, the notion of Di was integrated with that of Tian. Di and Tian were sometimes used interchangeably in inscriptions, such as in the one attested on the Fu gui tureen. Yet, the Zhou still conceived of Di differently from Tian, in that the latter could inflict calamities while the former was always a divine protector. Di presided over Zhou royal ancestors and supported the existence of their dynasty. Already during King Wu of Zhou's reign, Zhou liturgists made an inscription on the Tian Wang gui tureen about the king pleasing Di with sacrifices.
The early Zhou retained their prior Predynastic pyromantic tradition, with Zhou oracle bone records of cult dedicated to Shang ancestor deities such as Di Yi – owing to their former recognition of Shang suzerainty. Zhou pyromancy was modelled after the Shang practice, in that it was also interconnected with political power, and that later Zhou divinations still kept the Shang text format of the preface, charge, prognostication and verification. The logic of auspicious and ominous weekdays that the Shang often concerned in their divinations formed the basis for later development of Eastern Zhou hemerology, including the Wuxing philosophy. Bronze vessels central to Shang ritual, such as the ding and gui, continued to be employed in Zhou contexts as an extension of the Shang bronze tradition and its religious values.
Despite their inheritance of the Shang religion, the dynastic Zhou also instituted their own distinct cult practices, with Shang ancestors gradually replaced by Zhou royal spirits as the major sacrificial recipients, together with the Former Lords and nature powers virtually vanishing from the Zhou religious landscape. Shang human sacrifice declined through time, although the Western Zhou did in fact integrate Shang sacrificial rituals to their ancestor cult. The Zhou did not document oracle bone records as extensively as the Shang, and they also cultivated their separate divinatory practices through texts such as the Zhou Changes.

Imperial and modern legacy

The later Chinese god Shangdi, appearing as the supreme deity in Confucian and Taoist classics of the Eastern Han, was derived from the Shang theology of their high god Di. The word Shangdi is sometimes used to refer to the Jade Emperor of Taoism, and it may also be employed as the Chinese name for the Christian God – a tradition initiated by Matteo Ricci in the 16th century AD.
The worship of the first Shang dynastic ancestor, Da Yi, only terminated with the start of the Eastern Han. Some Shang nature spirits including the Mother of the West and Mother of the East possibly evolved into Han deities, such as the Taoist Queen Mother of the West and King Father of the East. They might also have evolved into Changxi and Xihe, whom Han lore mentioned as wives of the purported Shang progenitor Di Jun.
The Shang practice of pyromantic divination continued to the Han era and lasted even further, with an oracle bone dated to the Tang period. The Shang sexagenary cycle persisted for over three millennia in China, and, due to their former status as client states of China, countries such as Vietnam, Korea and Japan also adopted the system. The legacy of the particular significance afforded to males by the Shang can be seen in contemporary Chinese culture, with families expecting sons more than daughters.
During the reign of the Song dynasty emperor [Emperor Emperor Huizong of Song|Huizong of Song|Huizong], the imperial government initiated attempts to revive the Shang-Zhou ritual system. Particularly, emperor Huizong opened up state institutions for manufacturing bronze vessels modelled after that of the Shang ritual bronzes, which had been excavated by Song antiquarians earlier.
Other legacies that the Shang left to later periods include ancestor worship, the role of divination in politics, as well as the patrimonial state where religion and politics were interwoven together. Their religion exerted considerable influence even on the secular sphere during Imperial times.

In later accounts

Ancient Chinese literature from the Eastern Zhou and Han periods is frequently employed by Chinese archaeologists to explain Bronze Age traditions that predated these eras by centuries. Linear projections of history espoused by those ancient texts often picture Shang religion as prefiguring many later elements of Chinese ideologies. However, what these narratives offer about the Shang is considerably different from that attested in oracle bone inscriptions, indicating that their authors had limited knowledge about the Shang world.

Zhou period accounts

One of the Chinese classics written during the Zhou dynasty, the Book of Documents, contains moral discourses on Shang traditions, including the belief that the Shang ancestor Tang would send down calamities on unworthy men. The text also includes an oblique description of Shang pyromancy, with a reference to Pan Geng lauding those who did not "presumptuously oppose the decision of the tortoise". However, Zhou writers generally focused on criticising the lavish lifestyle and ignorance of the final Shang kings, and did not initially mention either the Shang practice of human sacrifice or their recognition of royal consorts. In addition, the Zhou description that the Shang associated human virtue with the supreme deity is nowhere confirmed in Shang oracle bone inscriptions.
The Book of Documents chapter Gaozong rongri may contain an implicit mention of the Shang ritual structure's five cyclical sacrifices, albeit with considerably vague evidence for verification. The philosopher Confucius is believed to have said that Zhou-era records of the state of Song – the successor state of the Shang – were not sufficient to reconstruct the Shang ritual system as a whole.

Sima Qian's description

The Han dynasty historian Sima Qian, writing a millennium after the Shang's fall, discoursed about their religion. Sima claimed that the Shang were marked by their utmost devotion to divination and sacrifices, and had decayed from the mark of piety into a state of superstition, which Burton Watson considered substantiated claims that resonate with evidence collected from modern archaeology. Sima Qian appeared to be informed about some Shang divinatory practices, including the disposal of used oracle bones. Sima's posthumous names in terms of both stem and prefix for Shang kings largely match those given by the Shang inscriptions. However, his description of the Shang religion is not without flaw, as it was coloured with characteristics of the Han dynasty during which Sima lived.
Zu Jia's ritual reforms are never mentioned in Sima Qian's writings – which describe his reign as one of disorder and immorality – suggesting that his reforms were unknown to the composers of the traditional accounts who lived centuries after Zu Jia. Sima Qian's accusation of disorder might have originated from propaganda of the Predynastic Zhou who possibly regarded Zu Jia's ritual reforms as a threat, or from that of Zu Jia's opponents who were against his empowerment of mainline kings.

Jin dynasty accounts

References to the Shang tradition of yearly ritual cycles are found in a fourth-century commentary to the Erya, written by the Jin dynasty scholar Guo Pu. The account claims that the Shang conducted the major sacrificial cycle si which lasted for 'four seasons', suggesting that knowledge of the Shang ritual calendar and its association with a solar year was preserved to the Imperial era.