Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/82

 62 A HISTORY OF ART IN CHALD.KA AND ASSYRIA. the worship of spirits is at least an advance upon this. It pre- supposes a certain power of reflection and abstraction by which men were led to conclude that intelligence and will are not necessarily bound up with a body that can be seen and touched. Life has been mobilized, if we may use such a phrase, and thus we arrive at polydemonism ; by which we mean the theory that partitions the government of the world among a crowd of genii, who, though often at war among themselves, are always more powerful than man, and may do him much harm unless he succeeds in winning their help and good-will. The worship of stars is but one form of this religious con- ception. The great luminaries of night and day were of course FIG. 7. Demons. Louvre. invested with life and power by men who felt themselves in such complete dependence upon them. So far as we can judge, the primitive form of fetishism left but feeble traces in the religion of civilized Chaldaa and Assyria. The signs are few of that worship of sacred stones which played such an important part among the Semites of the west, and even among the Greeks, 1 neither can we find that either fear or 1 Francois LENORMANT, Les Bctyles (extracted from the Revue de r HLtoire des Religions, p. 12): "The cuneiform inscriptions mention the seven black stones worshipped in the principal temple of Urukh in Chaldaea, which personify the seven planets." In the same paper a vast number of facts are brought together which show how widely spread this worship was in Syria and Arabia, and with what persistence it maintained itself, at least until the preaching of Islamism. It would