An impostor, a personator, a cheat, and I gave him place and rank.

Take for instance, this passage about the ceremony for the personator of the dead:

Scholars have differing hypotheses explaining why a grandchild would make the most suitable personator.

Shi meaning (2) "personator; sacrificial representative of a dead person's spirit" is discussed below.

"corpse") "personator, impersonator; ceremonial representative of a dead relative".

English translations of the ceremonial shi 尸 include personator, impersonator, representative, medium, and shaman.

Some Qing Dynasty scholars held a third opinion, namely, that the personator was bearer of the ancestral tablet.

Shi (personator)

This tells us that a grandson may be the personator of his deceased grandfather (at sacrifices), but a son cannot be so of his father."

Wolfram Eberhard (1968:338) explained that a child makes the best personator owing to the ancient Chinese believed that a soul is small.

The modern character 尸 for shi "corpse; personator" is a graphic simplification of ancient pictographs showing a person with a bent back and dangling legs.

The second opinion is that the personator was not the agent of the departed, but merely its metaphorical representative or shenxiang 神象 "image of the spirit".

During a shi ceremony, the ancestral spirit supposedly would enter the personator, who would eat and drink sacrificial offerings and convey spiritual messages.

Lothar von Falkenhausen contrasts the frequently recorded shi "personator" with the rarely noted wu 巫 "shaman; spirit medium".

Meaning (5) "manage; direct; ancestral tablet" links the representative shi (2) "personator" with the metaphorical replacement "ancestral tablet".

Ode 248 (Fuyi 鳧鷖 "Wild Ducks") describes another feast, which commentators say was held on the following day to reward the personator, and details sacrificial offerings and ancestral blessings.

The fourth opinion refutes the first three condemnations of personators as mere representatives or tablet-holders for the dead, and contends that a personator was temporarily the seat of a dead ancestor's soul.

During the Yin or Shang Dynasty (ca. 1600-1046 BCE), a personator would sometimes sit down without having contacted the spirit, and by the late Zhou Dynasty (1045-256 BCE), a personation ceremony became a revelry with several personators repeatedly making toasts and drinking sacrificial wines.