Shang religion centered on Shangdi, the Lord on High, a remote high god who governed weather, harvest and war but who was approached only indirectly, through the spirits of the royal ancestors. The king functioned as chief diviner and priest, and the oracle bone inscriptions are overwhelmingly royal divinations addressed first to dead kings and queens, asking whether a sacrifice would please them, whether a campaign would succeed or whether the king's toothache had been sent by an aggrieved ancestor. Ancestors were ranked in a fixed ritual calendar and offered wine, grain and meat in bronze vessels cast in animal and abstract patterns, chiefly the taotie mask, whose meaning is still debated among scholars.
Divination itself was a technical and repeatable procedure: a diviner applied heat to a prepared bone or shell, interpreted the resulting crack, and a scribe recorded the question, sometimes the answer and occasionally whether the prediction had come true, giving the corpus an unusually verifiable structure for a Bronze Age religious archive. Human sacrifice, generally of war captives, accompanied major royal burials and some ancestral rites, a practice the Zhou conquerors later cited to justify their overthrow of the dynasty as morally corrupt. The Shang ancestor cult and the concept of a supreme but distant high god, later merged with the Zhou's idea of Tian, or Heaven, both passed into later Chinese religion and remained points of reference for the ritual reforms of the Zhou and the ethical reinterpretations of Confucius centuries afterward.