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Ancestral sin, generational sin, or ancestral fault (; προπατορικὸν ἁμάρτημα; προγονικὴ ἁμαρτία), is the doctrine that teaches that individuals inherit the divine judgement for the sin of their . It exists primarily as a concept in Mediterranean religions (e.g. in Christian hamartiology); generational sin is referenced in the Bible in . (1994). 9780802471307, Moody Press. ISBN 9780802471307
The classical scholar Martin West draws a distinction between an ancestral curse and an inherited guilt, punishment, adversity or dysgenics.
The doctrine of ancestral fault is similarly presented as a tradition of immemorial antiquity in ancient Greek religion by Celsus in his True Doctrine, a polemic against Christianity. Celsus is quoted as attributing to "a priest of Apollo or of Zeus" the saying that "the mills of the gods grind slowly, even to children's children, and to those who are born after them". The idea of divine justice taking the form of collective punishment is also ubiquitous in the Hebrew Bible, e.g. the Ten Plagues of Egypt, the destruction of Shechem, etc., and most notably the recurring punishments inflicted on the Israelites for lapsing from Yahweh.
The formalized Christian doctrine of original sin is a direct extension of the concept of ancestral sin (imagined as inflicted on a number of succeeding generations), arguing that the sin of Adam and Eve is inflicted on all their descendants indefinitely, i.e. on the entire human race. It was first developed in the 2nd century by Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyons, in his struggle against Gnosticism. Irenaeus contrasted their doctrine with the view that the Fall was a step in the wrong direction by Adam, with whom, Irenaeus believed, his descendants had some solidarity or identity.J. N. D. Kelly Early Christian Doctrines (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1978) p. 171, referred to in Daniel L. Akin, A Theology for the Church, p. 433
Ezekiel 18:19-23 states "the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son; the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him."
Saint Gregory Palamas taught that, as a result of ancestral sin (called "original sin" in the West), man's image was tarnished, disfigured, as a consequence of Adam's disobedience. A Discussion of the Orthodox Perception of the Nature of God The Greek theologian John Karmiris writes that "the sin of the first man, together with all of its consequences and penalties, is transferred by means of natural heredity to the entire human race. Since every human being is a descendant of the first man, 'no one of us is free from the spot of sin, even if he should manage to live a completely sinless day'. ... Original Sin not only constitutes 'an accident' of the soul; but its results, together with its penalties, are transplanted by natural heredity to the generations to come. And thus, from the one historical event of the first sin of the first-born man, came the present situation of sin being imparted, together with all of the consequences thereof, to all natural descendants of Adam." Archpriest Alexander Golubov: Rags of Mortality: Original Sin and Human Nature
The Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Greek translation of which uses "προπατορική αμαρτία" (literally, 'ancestral sin') where the Latin text has "peccatum originale", states: "Original sin is called 'sin' only in an analogical sense: it is a sin 'contracted' and not 'committed'—a state and not an act. Although it is proper to each individual, original sin does not have the character of a personal fault in any of Adam's descendants." Catechism of the Catholic Church, 404–405 Eastern Orthodox teaching likewise says: "It can be said that while we have not inherited the guilt of Adam's personal sin, because his sin is also of a generic nature, and because the entire human race is possessed of an essential, ontological unity, we participate in it by virtue of our participation in the human race. 'The imparting of Original Sin by means of natural heredity should be understood in terms of the unity of the entire human nature, and of the homoousiotitosThe correct word form is homoousiotes; the quoted text erroneously uses its Genitive case form homoousiotetos, and confusingly uses an 'i' instead of an 'e' in the penultimate syllable following a mixed Greek transliteration scheme with both modern and classical elements. of all men, who, connected by nature, constitute one mystic whole. Inasmuch as human nature is indeed unique and unbreakable, the imparting of sin from the first-born to the entire human race descended from him is rendered explicable: "Explicitly, as from the root, the sickness proceeded to the rest of the tree, Adam being the root who had suffered corruption" (Saint Cyril of Alexandria). Archpriest Alexander Golubov: Rags of Mortality: Original Sin and Human Nature quoting John Karmiris, A Synopsis of the Dogmatic Theology of the Orthodox Catholic Church, trans. from the Greek by the Reverend George Dimopoulos (Scranton, Pa.: Christian Orthodox Edition, 1973), p. 36
The Talmud rejects the idea that people can be justly punished for another person's sins and Judaism in general upholds the idea of individual responsibility. One interpretation is that, even though there is no moral guilt for descendants, they may be negatively impacted as a consequence of their forebear's actions.
Hinduism has family curses, elsewhere.
The House of Cadmus, who established and ruled over the city of Thebes, was one such house. After slaying the dragon and establishing Thebes upon the earth that the dragon terrorized, Ares cursed Cadmus and his descendants because of the dragon's sacredness to Ares. Similarly, after Hephaestus discovered his wife, Aphrodite, having a sexual affair with Ares, he became enraged and vowed to avenge himself for Aphrodite's infidelity by cursing the lineage of any children that resulted from the affair. Aphrodite later bore a daughter, Harmonia, the wife of Cadmus, from Ares' seed.
Cadmus, annoyed at his accursed life and ill fate, remarked that if the gods were so enamoured of the life of a serpent, he might as well wish that life for himself. Immediately Cadmus began to grow scales and change into a serpent. Harmonia, after realizing the fate of her husband, begged the gods to let her share her husband's fate. Of the House of Cadmus, many had particularly tragic lives and deaths. For example, King Minos of Crete's wife fall madly in love with the Cretan Bull and bore the Minotaur. Minos would later be murdered by his daughters whilst bathing. Semele, the mother of Dionysus by Zeus, was turned into dust because she glanced upon Zeus's true godly form. King Laius of Thebes was killed by his son, Oedipus. Oedipus later (unknowingly) marries the queen, his own mother, and becomes king. After finding out he gouges his eyes and exiles himself from Thebes.
Another dynasty that was cursed and was subject to tragic occurrences was the House of Atreus (also known as the Atreides). The curse begins with Tantalus, a son of Zeus who enjoyed cordial relations with the gods. To test the omniscience of the gods, Tantalus decided to slay his son Pelops and feed him to the gods as a test of their omniscience. All of the gods, save Demeter, who was too concerned with the abduction of her daughter Persephone by Hades, knew not to eat from Pelops's cooked corpse. After Demeter had eaten Pelops's shoulder, the gods banished Tantalus into Tartarus where he would spend eternity standing in a pool of water beneath a fruit-bearing tree with low branches. Whenever he would reach for a fruit, the branches would lift upward so as to remove his intended meal from his grasp. Whenever he would bend over to drink from the pool, the water would recedes into the earth before he could drink. The gods brought Pelops back to life, replacing the bone in his shoulder with a bit of ivory with the help of Hephaestus, thus marking the family forever afterwards.
Pelops would later marry Princess Hippodamia after winning a chariot race against her father, King Oenomaus. Pelops won the race by sabotaging of King Oenomaus’ chariot, with the help of the king's servant, Myrtilus. This resulted in King Oenomaus’s death. Later, the servant Myrtilus, who was in love with Hippodamia, was killed by Pelops because Pelops had promised Myrtilus the right to take Hippodamia's virginity in exchange for his help in sabotaging the king's chariot. As Myrtilus died, he cursed Pelops and his line, further adding to the curse on the House of Atreus.
King Atreus, the son of Pelops and the namesake of the Atreidies, would later be killed by his nephew, Aegisthus. Before his death, Atreus had two sons, King Agamemnon of Mycenae and King Menelaus of Sparta. King Menelaus's wife, Helen of Sparta, would leave him for Prince Paris of Troy, thus beginning the Trojan War. However, prior to their sailing off for the war, Agamemnon had angered the goddess Artemis by killing one of her sacred deer. As Agamemnon prepared to sail to Troy to avenge his brother's shame, Artemis stilled the winds so that the Greek fleet could not sail. The Divination Calchas told Agamemnon that if he wanted to appease Artemis and sail to Troy, he would have to sacrifice the most precious thing in his possession. Agamemnon sent word home for his daughter Iphigenia to come to him so that he may sacrifice her, framing it to her that she was to be married to Achilles. Iphigenia, honored by her father's asking her to join him in the war, complied. Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter and went off to war.
Clytemnestra, the wife of Agamemnon and mother to Iphigenia, was so enraged by her husband's actions that when he returned victorious from Troy, she trapped him in a robe with no opening for his head whilst he was bathing and stabbed him to death as he thrashed about. Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, was torn between his duty toward avenging his father's death and his sparing his mother. However. after praying to Apollo for consultation, Apollo advised him to kill his mother. Orestes killed his mother and wandered the land, ridden with guilt. Because of the noble act of avenging his father's at the expense of his own soul and reluctance to kill his mother, Orestes was forgiven by the gods, thus ending the curse of the House of Atreus.
Modern Western attitudes to personal individuality and to individual achievement do not always sit well with notions of inherited sin. Psychologists and philosophers tend to portray persistent human failings as part of human nature, rather than using "original sin" metaphors. Compare:
There is a family curse in The House of the Seven Gables.
In Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, it was thought that the Baskerville family had a legendary family curse, of a giant black hound, "... a foul thing, a great, black beast, shaped like a hound, yet larger than any hound that ever mortal eye has rested upon."
In the 2007 South Korean psychological-supernatural suspense horror film Someone Behind You, a young woman named Ga-In (Yoon-Jin-seo) sees families and friends slaughtering and attacking one another and realizes that she is followed by an inexplicable curse causing those around her to get rid of her. Despite all of this she is constantly reminded by an eerie student never to trust her family, her friends, or even herself. Ga-In has hallucinations of those who would attempt to attack her, then sees a disturbing vision of a monstrous being warning her that the bloodshed will intensify. The film was also released in America retitled as Voices.
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