Shi (personator)

The shi (Chinese: 尸; pinyin: shī; Wade–Giles: sh'ih; literally: "corpse") was a ceremonial "personator" who represented a dead relative during ancient Chinese ancestral sacrifices. In a shi ceremony, the ancestral spirit supposedly would enter the descendant "corpse" personator, who would eat and drink sacrificial offerings and convey messages from the spirit. James Legge (1895 IV:135), an early translator of the Chinese classics, described shi personation ceremonies as "grand family reunions where the dead and the living met, eating and drinking together, where the living worshipped the dead, and the dead blessed the living." In modern terms, this ancient Chinese shi practice would be described as necromancy, mediumship, or spirit possession.

The word shi 尸 "corpse; personator; inactive; lay out; manage; spirit tablet" can be discussed in terms of Chinese character evolution, historical phonology, semantics, and English translations.

The modern character for shi "corpse; personator" is a graphic simplification of ancient pictographs showing a person with a bent back and dangling legs. The first records of shi are on oracle bones dating from the late Shang Dynasty (ca. 1600–ca. 1046 BCE). The oracle bone script for shi 尸 "corpse" was used interchangeably for yi "barbarian; non-Chinese people (esp. eastern, see Dongyi); at ease; level". The bronze script for shi 尸, found in Chinese bronze inscriptions dating from the Shang and Zhou Dynasty (ca. 1045 BCE-ca. 256 BCE), had a more curved back and legs. The graphically reduced seal script for shi, standardized during the Qin Dynasty (221-207 BCE), resembles the regular script 尸.

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