Realistic though these advisers and their lords were in their thinking,
they did not dare to trample openly on the old tradition. The emperor
might in practice be a completely powerless figurehead, but he belonged
nevertheless, according to tradition, to a family of divine origin,
which had obtained its office not merely by the exercise of force but
through a "divine mandate". Accordingly, if one of the feudal lords
thought of putting forward a claim to the imperial throne, he felt
compelled to demonstrate that his family was just as much of divine
origin as the emperor's, and perhaps of remoter origin. In this matter
the travelling "scholars" rendered valuable service as manufacturers of
genealogical trees. Each of the old noble families already had its
family tree, as an indispensable requisite for the sacrifices to
ancestors. But in some cases this tree began as a branch of that of the
imperial family: this was the case of the feudal lords who were of
imperial descent and whose ancestors had been granted fiefs after the
conquest of the country. Others, however, had for their first ancestor a
local deity long worshipped in the family's home country, such as the
ancient agrarian god Huang Ti, or the bovine god Shen Nung. Here the
"scholars" stepped in, turning the local deities into human beings and
"emperors". This suddenly gave the noble family concerned an imperial
origin. Finally, order was brought into this collection of ancient
emperors. They were arranged and connected with each other in
"dynasties" or in some other "historical" form. Thus at a stroke Huang
Ti, who about 450 B.C. had been a local god in the region of southern
Shansi, became the forefather of almost all the noble families,
including that of the imperial house of the Chou. Needless to say, there
would be discrepancies between the family trees constructed by the
various scholars for their lords, and later, when this problem had lost
its political importance, the commentators laboured for centuries on the
elaboration of an impeccable system of "ancient emperors"--and to this