Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 14.djvu/331

* NATUBE-WORSHIP. 287 NATURE- WORSHIP. sun as a swift horse or as a winged bull, or of sijriii<» as a winged snake. Of all forms of beast- worship, ophiolatry or serpent-worship seems to ' be must widespread. Other animals, horse, ass, reindeer, bear, tiger, boar, together widi a few cases of divine fishes are worshiped by dilfercnt raecs; but the snake appears to have been wor- .shi])ed in every land, either as a soul-reeeptacle or friendly house-snake, in whose body resides the soul of an ancestor (as in Rome and India), or as a healing and mantie power of wisdom (as in the cults of Babylon and Greece), or as an evil spirit, world-snake or dragon. The negroes of Africa, the Dravidians and redskins among savages, the Mexicans and Peruvians on a liigher ])lane, and the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and Semites (in- cluding Hebrews) regarded the snake in one or another of these forms as a divine animal. Some- times the same snake is conceived difTerently at different times. In Sayce's opinion, Nina, the Babylonian serjient daughter of Ea, the water- god of Hisd<un, was at first typical only of divine wisdom, and the transference to the conception of the guile-loving evil serpent was due to the influence of the parallel conception of Tiamat, the dragon monster of chaos and evil. The drag- on of the Eddas is evil, he is the Midgardswurni that embodies destruction, like the rain-prevent- I ing dragon Vritra of the Rig-Veda, but beside I the latter stands the figure of the 'Dragon of the Deep,' to whom the Vedic Aryan prays as to a beneficent divinity. So Apollo as a healing god is associated with .-Esculapius's snake, but destroys the Pytho dragon. Among the Jlon- goloid Naga tribes, as among the Chinese, the dragon-snake is a world-divinity. Special aspects of snake-worship are the close connection with tree and phallic worship, as found among certain Dravidian tribes, who worship snakes with phallic rites, and the ditch-snake or mound-snake, a sym- bolic snake among the American wild tribes. Further, and perhaps most fundamental, is to be noticed the close connection between snakes and treasures, which they secrete or guard, as in the case of the Hesperides and many fairv-stories in the West and East. So in Egypt, Osiris in snake- form is associated with wealth, as is the Chaldean Hoa. This trait may be due to the fdet that serpents actually hoard jewels and other bright objects. Probabl.y the beauty, poison, and un- canny motion of the snake all combined to make it revered. Under zoijlatry must also be noticed the worship of birds, according to more or less definite racial lines of demarcation. Thus the dove is Semitic, and is Greek onlv as belong- ing to a Semitic deity: the goose is the most universall.v revered bird, being worshiped Ijy the Egyptians (sacred to the god Seb), the Japanese, the early Britains. the Romans, and especially by the Dravidians, from the remotest antiquity. Among the Arvans it .yielded to the eagle (also the Hittite emblem), but it is still regarded as emblematic of the highest soul in the races to the east of India (Chinese and .lapanese). whereas in India itself it has been displaced among the higher classes by the swan. The cock also was widely revered and was sacred to Mars, ^seulapius, Osiris, and to the Hindu battle-god, Kartikeya. Anthropoi^atrt. Man is worshiped like other animals. Some forms of anthropolatry. however, represent decadent aspects of theism. Thus in Finland and in Persia the national heroes are ilccayed goils, and get a sort of secondary rever- ence iu their new guise. Ordinarily any hero or great man is revered as being more powerful than other men, and in the primitive mind wor- ship and respect are synonymous. So priests are divine and all kings ipso facto are divine in India, China, and Japan to-day as they became in Rome, and are said to be among the South Sea Islanders. Sacrifices made to men who have be- come gods are recognized in the old Hindu law- books. The only rarity in anthropolatry is where the man-god conception embraces former beast- gods and is enlarged to that of an all-god. Thus Krishna in India amalgamates with animal ava- tars of Vishnu to make an all-god who appeals in human or aninuil form. AsTROLATRY. This 'worship of the heavenly bodies' is a general term (here including for convenience the worship of heaven itself) for what used to be called Sabaism. Sun and moon gods are not always early divinities. They were unknown, for example, to the older Roman cult, though the Romans worshiped earth and sky. The Arvan Hindu worsliiped the sin before he did the moon; the Dravidian feared the sun as a malignant demon: while his Miuida neighbor worsliiped the same power as a beneficent divinity. The Babylonians perhaps worshiped Sin, the moon, before Bel, the sun ; the Hot- tentots worshiped the moon and not the sun, though they revered Dawn. On the other hand, reversing the Roman order, the Aztecs and American Indians wor.shiped the sun and not the sky. There is no general principle of pro- gression, such as has often been sought. The stars, again, are in some cases the last of the heavenly bodies to be worshiped: in other eases, a stellar m.ytholog.y antedates solar or lunar gods. It is especially in connection with star-worship that the wildest theories of mythologists have been evolved. According to some scholars, all Semitic and Aryan mythology reverts to star- worship, and this is supposed to have been the chief religion of the Accadians and Hit- tites. about whose religion, however, we know in fact very little. It is often claimed that sun- worship is posterior to ghost-worship, and in some cases it is probable that a fully developed sun-worship was superimposed upon a more primitive cult, as among the Aztecs; but the Polynesian sun-light spirit is as antique as any god in the South Pacific, and sun-wor- ship appears not only among the earliest Hindus, but also among the savage Jlongoloid ilunda tribes. Probabl.y in some races sun-worship was as early as any form of nature-worship, and may be as old as ghost-worship. The beginnings of the worship of heavenly phennnu^na ma.v be seen even among the Central Australians, who in- voke the sun and liglitning as living ])owers. The most remarkable development of sun-wor<hip is to be found among the Mexicans and the Peru- vians, where it has eclipsed all other forms: the Babylonians, where the highest gods were identi- fied with the sun and moon : the Dravidians, among whom, as among the related .Mongolians, sun-worship is generally found; and the Persians, especiall.y in the Mithracult developed out of decadent Zoroastrianism. In Greece sun-worship is represented by Apollo, and in India by Vishnu, but in a rather perfunctor.y wa.v. Neither of these gods can be said to be worshiped as the sun, tiiough both retain traces of their earlier