Deity Sentence Examples

He was Death, after all, a deity in his own right.

Without the senses of a deity, she was unaware of him.

A bad deal by a deity or its mate will ruin the universe.

As a deity, she had few real emotions.

At least she had the mind of a deity still, the memories and … She froze.

No deity or Immortal or living human ever welcomed or accepted Death, but the souls always had.

As the deity who brought you back from the dead-dead, you are obligated to me, she reminded him.

It was the Deidre, the deity who ruled over Death's domain before turning it over to Gabriel.

In the meantime, Wynn was trapped in a room that felt way too small with the deity he meant to kill instead of the human he almost succeeded in killing.

Was the oldest … deity remaining.

How is a sociopathic deity better at ruling the underworld than a compassionate human? he returned with no heat.

But, if an Immortal or human or deity corners you, and you aren't able to summon me, you need to know how to defend yourself, Darkyn started.

A familiar face appeared from the words, the golden-skinned deity she nicknamed Mr. Checkmate the first time they met at the Immortal Sanctuary.

She didn't know what the former deity sensed, but she wasn't going to stick around too long to find out.

Maybe having the former deity as a mate wasn't so bad.

Like every other deity I meet.

She wiped her face then dressed, too distracted to feel the warmth of a certain deity as he appeared.

She blinked, not registering the deity was behind her until he spoke.

It was beyond Wynn's control, but maybe, somehow, another deity was able to save Deidre from Darkyn, who was not likely to be merciful, even to his mate.

You are a deity without a domain or source of power, which means you have nothing I could possibly want, Darkyn said.

I mean, I couldn't leave Hell with any deity powers and um, basically only one of us left.

As a deity, it was not so.

He wanted to be a deity, and he wanted what he couldn't have.

They'd be completely cut off from either deity in the underworld.

She wasn't an Immortal or deity.

The second most powerful deity and the second most restricted.

Her Gabriel, who spent his life a part of the shadows, radiated the quiet power of a deity that reached her from across the room.

It never sat well with him that those charged with enforcing Death's mission served not out of choice but obligation to the deity that stole their souls.

Unless you're using magic on her, there's no way any woman – Immortal, deity or human – would ever choose to stay with you.

Gabriel guessed the deity considered his work done and was no longer concerned.

Each of the great gods was said to be lord or master of Maat; but from another point of view she " knew no lord or master," and the particular quality of deity was expressed in the phrase anx em maat, " living by Maat," which was applied to the gods of the physical world, the sun and moon, the days and hours, as well as to the divine king.

My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that "for yesterday, today, and tomorrow they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward for yesterday forward for tomorrow, and overhead for the passing day."

To understand in what this dependence consists it is necessary to reinstate another omitted condition of every command proceeding not from the Deity but from a man, which is, that the man who gives the command himself takes part in the event.

He was different than the last deity she'd slept with.

Her skin was prickling the way it did when another deity used magic around her, the fair hair on her arms standing on end.

But I want to be the first demon to taste a deity.

She'd never felt pain as a deity.

When I was reincarnated, the human I created became the only deity's mate without a deity.

I'm a former deity.

I know what you were capable of as a deity.

You'll pay for it later, Death, came the deity's amused response.

The deity you were in a past life started the chain of events that put us here by breaking laws from the time-before-time.

And you're a deity?

She wished she had a moment to talk to Gabriel, the deity charged with protecting the dead, to make sure she wasn't doing something wrong.

Deidre took a deep breath and faced the deity previously known as Death.

Kris didn't answer, not wanting to think of how that conversation would go with the deity.  He tested his power again.  Kiki was right; they had none.

The deity revealed himself in a new name, Yahweh, and with signs and wonders fortified Moses for his task.

Ceremonies of initiation are the means by which the alliance is established between the deity and the young man, when the latter enters upon the rights of manhood; and the supposed bond of kinship is thus regarded as an artificial union from the outset, so far as the individual is concerned, although Robertson Smith still maintains the theory of the fatherhood of the god, where it is a question of the origin of the totem-kin.

The Dharm raja succeeds as an incarnation of the deity.

In this temple, however, each cell, instead of being the residence of a monk, is occupied by an image of Parswanath, and over the door, or on the jambs of each, are sculptured scenes from the life of the deity.

Haquin Spegel (1645-1714), the famous archbishop of Upsala, wrote a long didactic epic in alexandrines, God's Labour and Rest, with an introductory ode to the Deity in rhymed hexameters.

Hence, when one approached a deity with an inquiry as to the outcome of some undertaking, the reading of the signs on the liver afforded a direct means of determining the course of future events, which was, according to current beliefs, in the control of the gods.

For the ancients these questions were solved by a belief in the direct participation of the Deity in human affairs.

Raised by the Dark One, the only other deity capable of reviving a dead-dead soul.

She wished with all her heart she could package them back up and put them back wherever they'd been when she was a deity.

She slowed, hating that she no longer had the heightened senses of a deity.

I wanted you to understand what it was like to be a deity.

Why did Darkyn choose to keep the human over the deity?

He did it by pushing the only button that seemed to work on the deity.

I cared enough to let Darkyn strip the powers of a goddess when every other deity in the worlds wanted her dead-dead.

It was not every day he was summoned by a deity.

Wynn met the deity's gaze, which flickered between all the colors in the universe.

The deity dragged Wynn here to warn him against altering his plan for revenge.

What kind of deity added a smiley face to its messages?

Considering she lived for hundreds of millennia and her status as a deity, she didn't own anything fancy.

I mean, the deity we knew would never dye her hair the color of a water sprite's.

Would the deity shed light on what Gabriel was doing wrong?

Turning in a full circle, Gabe waited for a sign the deity still sought him.

Even Rhyn had a reason to hate the deity.

That she was a deity, Death, who lived for thousands of years … None of that made sense.

More sense than the idea she was a deity for thousands of years.

Or maybe it was all her fault, created by bad karma she built up when she was some crazy deity in a past life she had no memory of.

I find out I was a sociopathic deity.

Meaning the soul of the deity we know is likely somewhere else.

Controlling a deity would bring incredible power to the demon lord at a time when Rhyn was struggling to battle demons already.

My thought was that it was a like a time bomb, awaiting the right moment for our dear deity to reemerge, Wynn said.

After a moment, the deity continued.

The result of a deity breaking one of the three is basically the destruction of the world.

Only the deities can force another deity to resign.

Everything about the deity screamed careful control.

This drew the deity's attention.

No. You are the preordained mate of a deity, just as I am.

There are strings attached to anyone raised from the dead-dead, but these are of no concern to a deity like they might be to a little human like you.

She needed to get out of here, to warn him before the deity did something horrible to Gabriel.

The deity originally preordained to be his mate.

Deidre clenched her fists, uncertain what game the deity played with her.

If, therefore, one understood the signs noted on a particular liver, one entered, as it were, into the mind - as one of the manifestations of soul-life of the deity who had assimilated the being of the animal to his own being.

The long-promised abolition of the grist tax was not explicitly mentioned, opposition to the railway redemption contracts was transformed into approval, and the vaunted reduction of taxation replaced by lip-service to the Conservative deity of financial equilibrium.

One could hardly expect that a colourless deity of this description, so completely the product of priestly speculation, could ever have found a place in the hearts of the people generally.

He therefore appealed to the Indian goddess Aditi or Immensity, a deity connected with a set of personal gods called Adityas.

An anthropomorphic deity, Puluga, is the cause of all things, but it is not necessary to propitiate him.

Its first emanation as plastic nature contains the original soul or deity out of which all individual souls issue.

It is true he sets out with a transcendent Deity, and follows Plato in viewing the creation of the cosmos as a process of descent from the more to the less perfect according to the distance from the original self-moving agency.

All things are said to be developed out of an original being, which is at once material (fire) and spiritual (the Deity), and in turn they will dissolve back into this primordial source.

The speculations of the fathers respecting the origin and course of the world seek to combine Christian ideas of the Deity with doctrines of Greek philosophy.

The cosmology of this period consists for the most part of the Aristotelian teleological view of nature combined with the Christian idea of the Deity and His relation to the world.

The transition from the 4 Zeller observes that this scale of decreasing perfection is a necessary consequence of the idea of a transcendent deity.

The original substance of the world is the materia primo-prima, which is the immediate creation of the Deity.

Thus he suggests that man has not eyes of a microscopic delicacy, because he would receive no great advantage from such acute organs, since though adding indefinitely to his speculative knowledge of the physical world they would 1 Yet he leaves open the question whether the Deity has annexed thought to matter as a faculty, or whether it rests on a distinct spiritual principle.

Demosthenes (De corona, p. 313) mentions various ceremonies practised during the celebration of the mysteries of this deity.

Whether he was the same as Sozon, a marine deity of southern Asia Minor, is doubtful.

There can be no doubt that Aurelius believed in a deity, although Schultz is probably right in maintaining that all his theology amounts to this - the soul of man is most intimately united to his body, and together they make one animal which we call man; and so the deity is most intimately united to the world or the material universe, and together they form one whole.

We find in the Meditations no speculations on the absolute nature of the deity, and no clear expressions of opinion as to a future state.

The remainder, divided into eighteen portions, was cooked; seven fell to the sacrificer, after an invocation, which made them sacred by calling the deity to descend into the offering and thus sanctify the sacrificer.

Chemosh (Moab) and Milk (Milcom), the god of Ammon, and in the case of Edom a deity known from the inscriptions as KOs (in Assyrian Kaus).

The tribal names Gad and Asher are suggestive of the worship of a deity of fortune (Gad) and of the male counterpart of the goddess, Asherah.

Yahweh now becomes the supreme deity of the Hebrew people, and an ark analogous to the Egyptian and Babylonian arks portrayed on the monuments' was constructed as embodiment of the rumen of Yahweh and was borne in front of the Hebrew army when it marched to war.

In the desert he was worshipped as an atmospheric deity, who manifested himself in thunder and lightning, whose abode was in the sky, whose sanctuary was on the mountain summit of Horeb-Sinai, and whose movable palladium was the ark of the covenant.

The name Baal might therefore be used for any deity such as Milk (Milcom) or Shemesh (" sun ") who was the divine owner of the spot.

It was simply a covering epithet, and like the word "god" could be transferred from one deity to another.

For when Yahweh gradually became Israel's local Baal he became worshipped like the old Canaanite deity, and all the sensuous accompaniments of Kedeshoth,' as well as the presence of the asherah or sacred pole, became attached to his cult.

Prophetic personality now moved in a larger sphere than that of divination, important though that function be in the social life of the ancient state as instrumental in declaring the will of the deity when any enterprise was on foot.

According to the dominating popular conception, the destruction of the national power by a foreign army meant the overthrow of the prestige of the national deity by the foreign nation's god.

If Assyria finally overthrew Israel and carried off Yahweh's shrine, Assur (Asur), the tutelary deity of Assyria, was mightier than Yahweh.

This problem of religion was solved by Amos and by the prophets who succeeded him through a more exalted conception of Yahweh and His sphere of working, which tended to detach Him from His limited realm as a national deity.

Compacts with a powerful foreign state, under whose aegis Israel was glad to shelter, involved covenants sealed by sacrificial rites in which the deity or deities of the foreign state were involved as well as Yahweh, the god of the weaker.

The word holiness (qodesh) in primitive Hebrew usage partook of the nature of taboo, and came to be applied to whatever, whether thing or person, stood in close relation to deity and belonged to him, and could not, therefore, be used or treated like other objects not so related, and so was separated or stood apart.

This group of ideas culminated in the Logos of Philo, expressing the world of divine ideas which God first of all creates and which becomes the mediating and formative power between the absolute and transcendent deity and passive formless matter, transmuted thereby into a rational, ordered universe.

According to Farnell, the meaning of the epithet is to be looked for in the original conception of Erinys, which was that of an earth-goddess akin to Ge, thus naturally associated with Demeter, rather than that of a wrathful avenging deity.

The subdivisions of the as had also the ship's prow on one side, and on the other the head of some deity.

The union with transcendent deity is not so much knowledge or vision as ecstasy, coalescence,.

An intermediate step between Anu viewed as the local deity of Erech (or some other centre), Bel as the god of Nippur, and Ea as the god of Eridu is represented by the prominence which each one of the centres associated with the three deities in question must have acquired, and which led to each one absorbing the qualities of other gods so as to give them a controlling position in an organized pantheon.

For Nippur we have the direct evidence that its chief deity, En-lil or Bel, was once regarded as the head of an extensive pantheon.

A consort Antum (or as some scholars prefer to read, Anatum) is assigned to him, on the theory that every deity must have a female associate, but Antum is a purely artificial product - a lifeless symbol playing even less of a part in what may be called the active pantheon than Anu.

It is suggested that Hylas was a harvest deity and that the ceremony gone through by the Kians was a harvest festival, at which the figure of a boy was thrown into the water, signifying the dying vegetation-spirit of the year.

The first part of Mihiragula seems to be the name of the Persian deity Mithra, but his patron deity was Siva, and he left behind him the reputation of a ferocious persecutor of Buddhism.

The chief god of the Palmyrenes was a solar deity, called Samas or Shamash (" sun "), or Bel, or Malak-bel,' whose great temple is still the most imposing feature among the ruins of Palmyra.

Another deity whose name occurs in votive inscriptions, is Baal-shamim, i.e.

The old South Arabian phonetic equivalent `Athtar is, however, a male deity.

Among Drew's lesser writings are a Life of Dr Thomas Coke (1817), and a work on the deity of Christ (1813).

The general analogy shows itself further in the idea of the deity as the husband (ba'al) of his worshippers or of the land in which they dwell.

In Babylonia, from a very early period, Baal became a definite individual deity, and was identified with the planet Jupiter.

The antagonism of Elijah was not against Baalism in general, but against the introduction of a rival deity.

The whole locality was the seat of the ancient cult of this deity, afterwards styled " Hypacraeus," with which was associated the legend of Creiisa and the birth of Ion.

He is not identical with any known Babylonian deity, but he is the god of a people belonging to the Babylonian culture circle, probably of the inhabitants of the Red Sea littoral.

The object is of Egyptian workmanship, representing this powerful deity of the foreign sea people with whom the predynastic Nilotes no doubt often fought.

The Egyptians had, of course, ascribed deity by old custom to their kings, and were ready enough to add Alexander to the list.

Plutarch speaks of his intercourse with the deity, and compares him with Lycurgus and Numa (Numa, 4).

An alternative designation for deity in the Rig-Veda is asura.

With some, of course - such as the god of fire - the connexion with the good deity was a priori indissoluble.

But the Buddha is now forgotten there, and the bas relief is reverenced only for the figure of the mother, who has been turned into a tutelary deity of the place.

Such marks had often a religious significance, and denoted that the bearer was a follower of a particular deity.

The cardinal doctrines of the Kabbalah embrace the nature of the Deity, the Divine emanations or Sephiroth, the cosmogony, the creation of angels and man, their destiny, and the import of the revealed law.

Now the wish to become manifest and known, and hence the idea of creation, is co-eternal with the inscrutable Deity, and the first manifestation of this primordial will is called the first Sephirah or emanation.

And, though it exhibits the Deity in less splendour than its Sephiric parents exhibit the En Soph, because it is farther removed from the primordial source of light than the Sephiroth, still, as it is God manifested, all the multifarious forms in the world point out the unity which they represent.

Hence it is most intimately allied to the Deity, and is perfect and immutable.

Jewish orthodoxy found itself attacked by the more revolutionary aspects of mysticism and its tendencies to alter established customs. While the medieval scholasticism denied the possibility of knowing anything unattainable by reason, the spirit of the Kabbalah held that the Deity could be realized, and it sought to bridge the gulf.

The book is absolutely monotheistic, and the character ascribed to the deity is ethically pure with the exception mentioned above.

Their national deity was Molech or Milcon.

The necessity of a constant protest against polytheism led to a tenacious insistence on the divine unity, and the task was to reconcile this unity with the deity of Jesus Christ.

The great opponent of their Christology, which was known as Nihilianism, was the German scholar Gerhoch, who, for his bold assertion of the perfect interpenetration of deity and humanity in Christ, was accused of Eutychianism.

These logic must seize upon and develop as far as they will go; for the breach of some trifling consequence of a rule might mean the loss of the deity's favour.

He was thus a deity of the realms of air and light, and, by transfer to the moral realm, the god of truth and loyalty.

The second group represents, first, the birth of Mithras; then the god nude, cutting fruit and leaves from a fig-tree in which is the bust of a deity, and before which one of the winds is blowing upon Mithras; the god discharging an arrow against a rock from which springs a fountain whose water a figure is kneeling to receive in his palms; the bull in a small boat, near which again occurs the figure of the animal under a roof about to be set on fire by two figures; the bull in flight, with Mithras in pursuit; Mithras bearing the bull on his shoulders; Helios kneeling before Mithras; Helios and Mithras clasping hands over an altar; Mithras with drawn bow on a running horse; Mithras and Helios banqueting; Mithras and Helios mounting the chariot of the latter and rising in full course over the ocean.

It is a logical consequence that Nergal is pictured also as the deity who presides over the nether-world, and stands at the head of the special pantheon assigned to the government of the dead, who are supposed to be gathered in a large subterranean cave known as Aralu or Irkalla.

He is the tutelary deity of women and presides over marriage ceremonies.

In their collective capacity the Gandharva share the duties allotted to the single deity.

On the other hand, there is an epithet Asir or Ashir ("overseer") applied to several gods and particularly to the deity Asur, a fact which introduced a third element of confusion into the discussion of the name Assur.

Numerous bronze images of a kneeling god at Telloh give him only a loin-cloth, and often the deity, like the monarch, has only a skirt.

In Egypt the king was regarded as the incarnation of the deity, his son and earthly likeness.

Religious dress (whether of priests or worshippers) was regulated by certain fundamental ideas concerning access to the deity and its consequences.

In several old Babylonian representations the priests or worshippers appear before the deity in a state of nature.'

Where the king is the human representative of the Deity he is theoretically and officially the priesthood, although the priests carry on the ordinary subordinate functions.

Since Bel signifies the "lord" or "master" par excellence, it is, therefore, a title rather than a genuine name, and must have been given to a deity who had acquired a position at the head of a pantheon.

En-lil is associated with the ancient city of Nippur, and since En-lil with the determinative for "land" or "district" is a common method of writing the name of the city, it follows, apart from other evidence, that En-lil was originally the patron deity of Nippur.

From Meroe to Memphis the commonest subject carved or painted in the interiors of the temples is that of some contemporary Phrah or Pharaoh worshipping the presiding deity with oblations of gold and silver vessels, rich vestments, gems, the firstlings of the flock and herd, cakes, fruits, flowers, wine, anointing oil and incense.

Thus the name of the deity, which enters as an element in a large proportion of the proper names,' was almost invariably written with the sign or signs representing this deity, and it is only exceptionally that the name is spelled phonetically.

The god Nebo appears as PA - the sign of the stylus, which is associated with this deity as the originator and patron of writing and of knowledge in general, - or it is written with a sign AK, which describes the god as a " creator."

Similarly in the case of the sign MU, which, besides signifying " name " as above pointed out, is also the Sumerian word for " give," and therefore may be read iddin, " he gave," from nadanu, or may be read nadin, " giver "; and when, as actually happens, a name occurs in which the first element is the name of a deity followed by MU-MU, a new element of doubt is introduced through the uncertainty whether the first MU is to be taken as a form of the verb nadanu and the second as the noun shumu, " name," or vice versa.

It is not the purpose of this note to set forth the principles underlying the formation of proper names among the Babylonians and Assyrians, but it may not be out of place to indicate that by the side of such full names, containing three elements (or even more), we have already at an early period the reduction of these elements to two through the combination of the name of a deity with a verbal form merely, or through the omission of the name of the deity.

The attempts to connect the name Yahweh with that of an Indo-European deity (Jehovah-Jove, &c.), or to derive it from Egyptian or Chinese, may be passed over.

Thus Delitzsch formerly derived the name from an Akkadian god, I or Ia; or from the Semitic nominative ending, Yau; 7 but this deity has since disappeared from the pantheon of Assyriologists.

And though he did not believe in the Incarnation, yet he held deity to be in a sense manifest in humanity; its saints and heroes became, in spite of innumerable frailties, after a sort divine; man underwent an apotheosis, and all life was touched with the dignity and the grace which it owed to its source.

As his share in the controversy, Martineau published five discourses, in which he discussed " the Bible as the great autobiography of human nature from its infancy to its perfection," " the Deity of Christ," " Vicarious Redemption," " Evil," and " Christianity without Priest and without Ritual."' He remained to the end a keen and vigilant apologist of the school in which he had been nursed.

But most probably this deity had another less abstract name, and the horrible worship offered in the one temple which he really had under the Incas, accorded with his true cosmic significance as the god of the subterranean fire.

In obedience to these they often travelled hundreds of miles in company with, or in the wake of, their intended victims before a safe opportunity presented itself for executing their design; and, when the deed was done, rites were performed in honour of that tutelary deity, and a goodly portion of the spoil was set apart for her.

Sometimes again, as in the case of the Lupercalia, the attribution is so indefinite that it is hard to discover who was the special deity concerned; in other cases, such as those of the Robigalia and the Meditrinalia, the festival seems at first to have been addressed generally to any interested numina and only later to have developed an eponymous deity of its own.

Some of the old cults passed away altogether, others survived in name and form, but were so wholly devoid of inner meaning that even the learning of a Varro could not tell their intention or the character of the deity with whom they were concerned.

Hence we find various expedients adopted in the Targums for avoiding any reference to the Deity, which might be misunderstood by the people, or which involved apparent irreverence.

From this it is a short step to say with the Quicumque vult that the Spirit proceeds from the Son, while guarding the idea that the Father is the one fountain of Deity.

Ciriaco, is said to occupy the site of a temple of Venus, who is mentioned by Catullus and Juvenal as the tutelary deity of the place.

He seems to admit, however, that the Deity might make certain particles of matter indivisible in this sense, that no creature should be able to divide them.

These particles, however, would be still divisible by their own nature, because the Deity cannot diminish his own power, and therefore must retain his power of dividing them.

Probably the original tradition goes back to a time when Yahweh was recognized as a deity of a circle of connected tribes of which the Israelite tribes formed a part.

The market hall (macellum) (compare the similar buildings at Pompeii and elsewhere), generally known as the temple of Serapis, from a statue of that deity found there, was excavated in 1750.

The Greeks recognized Hercules in an Egyptian deity Chons and an Indian Dorsanes, not to mention personages of other mythologies.

The Christian idea of a special providence is nonsense, an insult to the deity.

It is much more reasonable to believe that each part of the world has its own special deity; prophets and supernatural messengers had forsooth appeared in more places than one.

Sun-worship seems to have been peculiar to the Sabaeans and Hamdanites; and, if the Sabis of Sabota (Pliny) was in fact the sun deity Shams, this must be ascribed to Sabaean influence.

Its meaning varies (a) according to the various definitions of deity, and especially (b) according as it is (i.) deliberately adopted by a thinker as a description of his own theological standpoint, or (ii.) applied by one set of thinkers to their opponents.

Voltaire himself, speaking as a practical man rather than as a metaphysician, declared that if there were no God it would be necessary to invent one; and if the analysis is only carried far enough it will be found that those who deny the existence of God (in a conventional sense) are all the time setting up something in the nature of deity by way of an ideal of their own, while fighting over the meaning of a word or its conventional misapplication.

As the giver of luck he became a deity of gain and commerce (KEpS ios, 6.yopa70s), an aspect which caused his identification with Mercury, the Roman god of trade.

According to the Hebrew consonants it might simply be read "the king" (melek), an appellation for the supreme deity of a Semitic state or tribe.

It is indeed plain that such a sacrifice - for we have here to do, not with human victims in general, but with the sacrifice of the dearest earthly thing - could only be paid to the supreme deity; and Manasseh and his people never ceased to acknowledge Yahweh as the God of Israel..

It is true that childsacrifice in connexion with fire prevailed among the Phoenicians, and, according to the Greeks, the deity honoured with these grisly rites was Kronos (identified with the Phoenician El, "God").

For purposes of ritual, however, the Pleiades, with Agni or " Fire " as their presiding deity, continued to be the first sign.

Many of the terms in common use in them were employed in connexion with the Christian rites, and many of the conceptions, particularly that of sharing in immortality by communion with deity, became an essential part of Christian doctrine.

In this case too a combination was effected, the idea of Christ as the incarnation of the Logos or Son of God being retained and yet his deity being preserved by the assertion of the deity of the Logos.

The recognition of Christ as the incarnation of the Logos was practically universal before the close of the 3rd century, but his deity was still widely denied, and the Arian controversy which distracted the Church of the 4th century concerned the latter question.

At the council of Nicaea in 325 the deity of Christ received official sanction and was given formulation in the original Nicene Creed.

The assertion of the deity of the Son incarnate in Christ raised another problem which constituted the subject of dispute in the Christological controversies of the 4th and following centuries.

Now, as the conjurations were addressed to the deity, asipu, according to the definition given above, comes more reasonably under the category of priest.

This high-priestly office towards the tutelary deity of the nation appears to have belonged to the king by virtue of his royal rank.

The highest nobility in the nome sought the honour of priesthood in the service of the local deity.

These acts required no priestly aid; each man slew his own victim and divided the sacrifice in his own circle; the share of the god was the blood which was smeared upon or poured out beside stone (nosb, ghabghab) set up as an altar or perhaps as a symbol of the deity.

Denying the existence of a deity, and refusing to admit as evidence all a priori arguments, Holbach saw in the universe nothing save matter in spontaneous movement.

Like her brothers, the Dioscuri, she was a patron deity of sailors.

We may also note the resemblance between the names Sheth, Set, the Egyptian god of war, and the Hittite deity Suteh.

The latter has been supposed to be a Hyksos or Semitic deity and to have some connexion with Sheth; but Cheyne and Muller reject this view.

The Babylonian deity Nabu (in Old Testament Nebo) is a contraction from Na-bi-u, which thus corresponds closely with the Hebrew nablti a and originally signified the speaker or proclaimer of destiny.

The interpretation which Isaiah puts on this fact depends on the circumstance that at that date religion had never been conceived as a relation between God and individuals, or as a relation between God and a purely spiritual society, but always as a relation between a deity and some natural social group - a stock, a tribe, a nation.

Every early religion seeks to realize such an intercourse with the object of worship as shall be two-sided; when the worshipper approaches the deity he desires to have an answer assuring him of acceptance and divine aid.

The revelation thus looked for may be found in natural omens, in the priestly lot or some similar sacral oracle, or, finally, in the words of a seer who is held to be in closer contact with the deity than common men.

Recent grail researches have made it most probable that that mysterious talisman was originally the vessel of the ritual feast held in honour of a deity of vegetation, - Adonis, or another; if the Round Table also, as Dr Mott suggests, derives from a similar source, we have a link between these two notable features of Arthurian tradition, and an additional piece of evidence in support of the view that behind the Arthur of romance there lie not only memories of an historic British chieftain, but distinct traces of a mythological and beneficent hero.

A god Hadad who was a prominent deity in ancient Syria is identical with Adad, and in view of this it is plausible to assume - for which there is also other evidence - that the name Adad represents an importation into Assyria from Aramaic districts.

Whether the same is the case with Ramman, identical with Rimmon, known to us from the Old Testament as the chief deity of Damascus, is not certain though probable.

In Syria Hadad is hardly to be distinguished from a solar deity.

But the later adherents of the, school did not possess this confidence'; they based their philosophy on revelations of the Deity, and they found these in the religious traditions and rites of all nations.

Why did it not provide for its mixed multitude of divinities by founding a universal church, in which all the gods of all nations might be worshipped along with the one ineffable Deity?

Thus the Gnostic systems make great use of the idea of a fall of the Deity himself; by the fall of the Godhead into the world of matter, this matter, previously insensible, is animated into life and activity, and then arise the powers, both partly and wholly hostile, who hold sway over this world.

Gnosticism is to a great extent dominated by the idea that it is above all and in the highest degree important for the Gnostic's soul to be enabled to find its way back through the lower worlds and spheres of heaven ruled by the Seven to the kingdom of light of the supreme deity of heaven.

With the Toltecs is associated the tradition of Quetzalcoatl, a name which presentsitself in Mexican religion as that of a great deity, god of the air,.

The criminal laws were of extreme severity, even petty theft being punished by the thief being enslaved to the person he had robbed, while to steal a tobacco pouch or twenty ears of corn was death; he who pilfered in the market was then and there beaten to death, and he who insulted Xipe, the god of the goldand silversmiths, by stealing his precious metal, was skinned alive and sacrificed to the offended deity.

Among the accounts of the Mexican religion are some passages referring to the belief in a supreme deity.

It is related that Nezahualcoyotl, the poet-king of Tezcuco, built a ninestoried temple with a starry roof above, in honour of the invisible deity called Tloquenahuaque, " he who is all in himself," or Ipalnemoani, " he by whom we live," who had no image, and was propitiated, not by bloody sacrifices, but by incense and flowers.

He was plainly an ancient deity of the race, for attributes of many kinds are crowded together in him.

Between him and Quetzalcoatl, the ancient deity of Cholula, there had been old rivalry.

In Easter Island a form of the house-god is the lizard; it is also a tutelary deity in Madagascar.

The rattlesnake was worshipped in the Natchez temple of the sun; and the Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl was a serpent-god.

In Europe the corn spirit sometimes immanent in the crop, sometimes a presiding deity whose life does not depend on that of the growing corn, is conceived in some districts in the form of an ox, hare or cock, in others as an old man or woman; in the East Indies and America the rice or maize mother is a corresponding figure; in classical Europe and the East we have in Ceres and Demeter, Adonis and Dionysus, and other deities, vegetation gods whose origin we can readily trace back to the rustic corn spirit.

The representatives of the extreme monotheistic view, which while regarding Christ as Redeemer, clung tenaciously to the numerical unity of the Deity, were called Monarchians, a term brought into general use by Tertuliian.

Picumnus, a rustic deity (like Picus) and husband of Pomona, is specially concerned with the manuring of the soil and hence called Sterquilinus, while Pilumnus is the inventor of the pounding of grain, so named from the pestle (pi/um) used by bakers.

It has been justly remarked of the Pauline view, that- " The union with the Lord Himself, to which those who partake of the Lord's Supper have, is compared with the union which those who partake of a sacrifice have with the deity to whom the altar is devoted - in the case of the Israelites with God, of the heathen with demons.

This idea that to partake of sacrifice is to devote oneself to the deity, lies at the root of the ancient idea of worship, whether Jewish or heathen; and St Paul uses it as being readily understood.

The combination points to the amalgamation of the district in which Ninib was worshipped with the one in which Bel was the chief deity.

At the same time, the possibility of a confusion between Ninib and Nergal must be admitted, and perhaps we are to see the solution of the problem in the recognition of two diverse schools of theological speculation, the one assigning to Ninib the role of the spring-tide solar deity, the other identifying him with the sun of the summer solstice.

His policy was evidently to find a deity that should win the reverence alike of Greeks and Egyptians.

The Pharaoh is hostile, and Yahweh, the Israelite deity, is moved to send a deliverer; on the events that followed see Exodus, Book Of; Moses.

Thus the early kings of Assyria were priests of Assur (Asur), the tutelary deity of Assyria.

It is likely, however, that Attis, like the Great Mother, was indigenous to Asia Minor, adopted by the invading Phrygians, and blended by them with a deity of their own.

If the result was satisfactory, he was admitted, but before partaking of the common meal he was required to swear awful oaths, that he would reverence the deity, do justice to men, hurt no man voluntarily or at the command of another, hate the unjust and assist the just, and that he would render fidelity to all men, but especially to the rulers, seeing that no one rules but of God.

He may be the deity whom Tacitus called " Hercules."

Their god Dagan had a temple at Tirqa (near `Ishara, a little below Circesium), the capital of Khana (several kings of which we now know by name), probably taking the place of an earlier deity.

There was no one particular god called Baal; the word is not a proper name but an appellative, a description of the deity as owner or mistress; and the same is the case with Milk or Melek, 'Adon, 'Amma, which mean king, lord, mother.

Sometimes the god received a distinguishing attribute which indicates an association not with any particular place, but with some special characteristic; the most common forms are Ba'al-bamman, the chief deity of Punic north Africa, perhaps " the glowing Ba'al," the god of fertilizing warmth, and Baal-shamem, " Baal of the heavens."

A tendency to form a distinct deity by combining the attributes of two produced such curious fusions as Milk-`ashtart, Milk-ba'al, Milk-'osir, Eshmunmelqarth, Melqarth-resef, &c. As in the case of art and industries, so in religion the Phoenicians readily assimilated foreign ideas.

After spending the winter in Nicomedia, he proceeded in 219 to Rome, where he made it his business to exalt the deity whose priest he was and whose name he assumed.

The Syrian god was proclaimed the chief deity in Rome, and all other gods his servants; splendid ceremonies in his honour were celebrated, at which Heliogabalus danced in public, and it was believed that secret rites accompanied by human sacrifice were performed in his honour.

The first is the type of a certain a priori view, then regarded as the safest bulwark against infidelity, of which the main tenets were that the being of God was capable of a priori proof, and that, owing to the finitude of our faculties, the attributes and modes of operation of deity were absolutely incomprehensible.

For Philo lays stress upon the weakness of the analogical argument, points out that the demand for an ultimate cause is no more satisfied by thought than by nature itself, shows that the argument from design cannot warrant the inference of a perfect or infinite or even of a single deity, and finally, carrying out his principles to the full extent, maintains that, as we have no experience of the origin of the world, no argument from experience can carry us to its origin, and that the apparent marks of design in the structure of animals are only results from the conditions of their actual existence.

Philo, however, pushing his principles to their full consequences, shows that unless we assumed (or knew) beforehand that the system of nature was the work of a benevolent but limited deity, we certainly could not, from the facts of nature, infer the benevolence of its creator.

It fell with its thousands, for the king had "devoted" it to the deity 'Ashtar-Chemosh.

The ages of the world are seven in number, each of these having its own manifestation of deity.

Mysticism may broadly be described as the effort to give effect to the craving for a union of the soul with the Deity already in this life; and asceticism as the effort to give effect to the hankering after an ever-progressive purification of the soul and an atoning for sin by renunciation and self-denial in things lawful.

Ammon, Amen-RE, or Amenrasonther ("Ammon-Re king of the gods") was its deity, with his consort Mut and their child Khons.

Mont also was a local deity and Hathor presided over the western cliffs of Thebes.

The tax probably originated in a tribute levied by a conqueror or ruler upon his subjects, and perhaps the custom of dedicating a tenth of the spoils of war to the gods led to the religious extension of the term, the original offerings to deity being "firstfruits."

The plan is curious, and deviates much from the ordinary type; the internal arrangements are adapted for the performance of the peculiar rites of this deity.

In his work on the doctrine of the Divinity of Christ (Die Lehre von der Gottheit Christi, 1881) he follows the method of Ritschl, and contends that the deity of Christ ought to be understood as the expression of the experience of the Christian community.

Though Seth was an Egyptian god, as god of the Hyksos he represents some Asiatic deity.

He was, to begin with, the local deity of Thebes, when it was an unimportant town on the east bank of the river, about the region now occupied by the temple of Karnak.

The derivation of the name is obscure, but there is no reason to doubt that she was a genuine Greek deity.

Gruppe, we understand the air-goddess as a storm deity; some of the arguments in support of the two other theories will be examined in this article.

Whether Hera was also worshipped by the early Dorians is uncertain; after the Dorian invasion she remained the chief deity of Argos, but her cult at Sparta was not so conspicuous.

On the other hand it must be remembered that the patron deity of a Greek state had very wide functions; and it is not surprising to find that Hera (whatever her origin may have been) assumed an agricultural character among her own people whose occupations were largely agricultural.

For this reason it is often hard to tell where the primitive cult-centre of a particular deity is to be sought; thus Horus seems equally at home both at Buto in the Delta and at Hieraconpolis in Upper Egypt,, and the earliest worship of Seth appears to have been claimed no less by Tanis in the north than by Ombos in the south.

The less important priesthoods were glad to enhance the reputation of the deity they served by identifying him with some more important god.

The new deity was a personification of the suns disk.

The Hyksos, in whom Josephus recognized the children of Israel, worshipped their own Syrian deity, identifying him with the Egyptian god Seth, and endeavoured to establish his cult throughout Egypt to the detriment of the native gods.

Of the old deities Ammon represented by far the wealthiest and most powerful interests, and against this long favored deity the Pharaoh hurled himself with fury.

In a general sense, all Greek temples and altars were inviolable, that is, it was a religious crime to remove by force any person or thing once under the protection of a deity.

But it was only in the case of a small number of temples that this protecting right of a deity was recognized with common consent.

In the first centuries of the Christian era, apostasy was most commonly induced by persecution, and was indicated by some outward act, such as offering incense to a heathen deity or blaspheming the name of Christ.'

It was probably the name of a tribe or deity, or both.

The fundamental conception is always that the Deity resides - or exercises a peculiarly powerful influence - in some definite locality; and to this locality the devout repair, either in reverence of their god, or in quest of his assistance and bounty.

Just as the inhabitants of each town honoured their tutelar deity by solemn processions to his temple, so, at the period of the Olympic games, the temple of Zeus at Olympia formed the goal of multitudes from every Hellenic country.

In regard to the contest with Athena, it is probable that Poseidon is really Erechtheus, a local deity ousted by Athena and transformed into an agricultural hero.

Originally like Marduk a solar deity with the winged disk - the disk always typifying the sun 8 - as his symbol, he becomes as Assyria develops into a military power a god of war, indicated by the attachment of the figure of a man with a bow to the winged disk.

At Nineveh, which remained the capital till the fall of the Assyrian empire in 606 B.C., Assur had as his rival Ishtar, who was the real patron deity of the place, but a reconciliation was brought about by making Ishtar the consort of the chief god.

She too, like Assur, was viewed as a war deity, and to such an extent was this the case that at times it would appear that she, rather than Assur, presided over the fortunes of the Assyrian armies.

Philosophy alone sees God revealing Himself in the ideal organism of thought as it were a possible deity prior to the world and to any relation between God and actuality; in the natural world, as a series of materialized forces and forms of life; and in the spiritual world as the human soul, the legal and moral order of society, and the creations of art, religion and philosophy.

The teaching was not necessarily presented in the form of an over-elaborated moral lesson, but was associated with conceptions familiar to the land; and when these conceptions are examined from the anthropological standpoint, they are found to contain much that is strange and even abhorrent to modern convictions of a purely spiritual deity.

There is a ferocity and fanaticism which manifests itself in the belief that war was a sacred campaign of deity against deity.

The inveterate local, one may perhaps say immediate, powers are felt to be nearer at hand than the national deity, who is more closely bound up with the changing national fortunes and with current philosophy.

Whether he was also, like Hephaestus, the deity of smiths, is very doubtful; his surname Mulciber may rather be referred to his power to allay conflagrations.

Corresponding to the states into which we find the country divided before 2250 B.C., we have a various number of religious centres such as Nippur, Erech, Kutha (Cuthah), Ur, Sippara (Sippar), Shirgulla (Lagash), Eridu and Agade, in each of which some god was looked upon as the chief deity around whom there were gathered a number of minor deities and with whom there was invariably associated a female consort.

The jurisdiction of this chief god was, however, limited to the political extent or control of the district in which the main seat of the cult of the deity in question lay.

Mild attempts, to be sure, to group the chief deities associated with the most important religious and political centres into a regular pantheon were made - notably in Nippur and later in Ur - but such attempts lacked the enduring quality which attaches to Khammurabi's avowed policy to raise Marduk - the patron deity of the future capital, Babylon - to the head of the entire Babylonian pantheon, as 1 Even in the case of the "Semitic" name of the famous Sargon I., whose full name is generally read Sharru-kenu-sha-ali, and interpreted as "the legitimate king of the city," the question has recently been raised whether we ought not to read "` Sharru-kenushar-ri" and interpret as "the legitimate king rules" - an illustration of the vacillation still prevailing in this difficult domain of research.

The older incantations, associated with Ea, were re-edited so as to give to Marduk the supreme power over demons, witches and sorcerers; the hymns and lamentations composed for the cult of Bel, Shamash and of Adad were transformed into paeans and appeals to Marduk, while the ancient myths arising in the various religious and political centres underwent a similar process of adaptation to changed conditions, and as a consequence their original meaning was obscured by the endeavour to assign all mighty deeds and acts, originally symbolical of the change of seasons or of occurrences in nature, to the patron deity of Babylon - the supreme head of the entire Babylonian pantheon.

The strong tendency towards concentrating in one deity - Marduk - the attributes of all others was offset by the natural desire to make the position of Marduk.

Edmund Law, Dugald Stewart, Lord Brougham, and many other writers, have, in consequence, represented Clarke as arguing from the existence of time and space to the existence of Deity.

On the fourth day of the sixth month a feast is held in honour of Sahrevar, the deity presiding over mountains and mines.

On the sixteenth day of the seventh month a feast is held in honour of Mithra, the deity presiding over and directing the course of the sun, and also a festival to celebrate truth and friendship. On the tenth day of the eighth month a festival is held in honour of Farvardin, the deity who presides over the departed souls of men.

Among other Teutonic peoples, however, he seems at one time to have been a deity of considerable importance.

The Roman deity corresponding to the Greek Hestia is Vesta.

The Maenads (" mad ones ") or Bacchae, the women attendants of Dionysus, with their snake-accompaniments, are only one of the various snake-features associated with the cult of a deity who was also a god of healing.

In Laodicea he apparently replaced an older deity with serpent attributes.

There is an obvious development from the serpent qua reptile to the deity or the devil, and that the original theriomorphic form is not at once forgotten can be seen in Zeus Meilichios, Aesculapius Amynos, in the Cretan snake-goddesses, or in the Buddhist topes illustrated by Fergusson.

Sacrifice was believed to exert an influence on the deity which is quasiphysical, and in sacrificial feasts God and worshipper are in mysterious union.

Sometimes, indeed, such contact with deity is thought to be dangerous, and the rites indicate avoidance (tabu), and sometimes it is thought desirable.

Further, it is difficult not to accept Cicero's statement that Anaximenes made air a conscious deity; we are, at all events, justified in regarding Anaximenes as a link (perhaps an unconscious link) between crude Hylozoism and definitely metaphysical theories of existence.

In the Stubbenitz and elsewhere Huns' or giants' graves are common; and near the Hertha Lake are the ruins of an ancient edifice which some have sought to identify with the shrine of the heathen deity Hertha or Nerthus, referred to by Tacitus.

In 1802 he published Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity collected from the Appearances of Nature, his last, and, in some respects, his most remarkable book.

The argument of these books, however, depends in turn upon the assumption of a benevolent Creator desirous of communicating with His creatures for their good; and the Natural Theology, by applying the argument from design to prove the existence of such a Deity, becomes the foundation of the argumentative edifice.

The Apollo of the Iliad has the character of a local Asiatic deity - " ruler of Chryse and goodly Cilla and Tenedos."

That the theory of the triple manifestation of the deity was indeed only a compromise between Brahmanical aspirations and popular worship, probably largely influenced by the traditional sanctity of the number three, is sufficiently clear from the fact that, whilst Brahma, the creator, and at the same time the very embodiment of Brahmanical class pride, has practically remained a mere figurehead in the actual worship of the people, Siva, on the other hand, so far from being merely the destroyer, is also the unmistakable representative of generative and reproductive power in nature.

But despite the artificial character of the Trimurti, it has retained to this day at least its theoretical validity in orthodox Hinduism, whilst it has also undoubtedly exercised considerable influence in shaping sectarian belief, in promoting feelings of toleration towards the claims of rival deities; and in a tendency towards identifying divine figures newly sprung into popular favour with one or other of the principal deities, and thus helping to bring into vogue that notion of avatars, or periodical descents or incarnations of the deity, which has become so prominent a feature of the later sectarian belief.

In the estimation of these people "Siva and Vishnu may be more dignified beings, but the village deity is regarded as a more present help in trouble, and more intimately concerned with the happiness and prosperity of the villagers.

At the same time, many of the deities themselves are of quite recent origin, and it is easy to observe a deity in making even at the present day."

In their theory of a triple manifestation of an impersonal deity, the Brahmanical theologians, as we have seen, had indeed elaborated a doctrine which might have seemed to form a reasonable, authoritative creed for logy.

Both these divine figures have grown out of Vedic conceptions - the genial Vishnu mainly out of a not very prominent solar deity of the same name; whilst the stern Siva, i.e.

The co-ordination of the two gods in the Trimurti does not by any means exclude a certain rivalry between them; but, on the contrary, a supreme position as the true embodiment of the Divine Spirit is claimed for each of them by their respective votaries, without, however, an honourable, if subordinate, place being refused to the rival deity, wherever the latter, as is not infrequently the case, is not actually represented as merely another form of the favoured god.

The theory of Avataras which makes the deity - also variously called Narayana, Purushottama, or Vasudeva - periodically assume some material form in order to rescue the world from some great calamity, is fully developed; the ten universally recognized" descents "being enumerated in the larger poem.

Though himself, like most Brahmans, apparently by predilection a follower of Siva, his aim was the revival of the doctrine of the Brahma as the one self-existent Being and the sole cause of the universe; coupled with the recognition of the practical worship of the orthodox pantheon, especially the gods of the Trimurti, as manifestations of the supreme deity.

Not that there is any evidence of Buddhists ever having been actually persecuted by the Brahmans, or still less of Sankara himself ever having done so; but the traditional belief in some personal god, as the principal representative of an invisible, all-pervading deity, would doubtless appeal more directly to the minds and hearts of the people than the colourless ethical system promulgated by the Sakya saint.

In fact, the respectable Hindu, whilst owning special allegiance to one of the two gods as his ishta devata (favourite deity), will not withhold his tribute of adoration from the other gods of the pantheon.

It is not, however, so much the original figure of the god himself that enlists the sympathies of his adherents as the additional elements it has received through the theory of periodical" descents "(avatara) or incarnations applied to this deity.

Whilst the Saiva philosophers do not approve of the notion of incarnations, as being derogatory to the dignity of the deity, the Brahmans have nevertheless thought fit to adopt it as apparently a convenient expedient for bringing certain tendencies of popular worship within the pale of their system, and probably also for counteracting the Buddhist doctrines; and for this purpose Vishnu would obviously offer himself as the most attractive figure in the Brahmanical trinity.

And accordingly it is exactly in connexion with these two incarnations of Vishnu, especially that of Krishna, that a new spirit was infused into the religious life of the people by the sentiment of fervent devotion to the deity, as it found expression in certain portions of the epic poems, especially the Bhagavadgita, and in the Bhagavatapurana (as against the more orthodox Vaishnava works of this class such as the Vishnupurana), and was formulated into a regular doctrine of faith in the Sandilya-sutra, and ultimately translated into practice by the Vaishnava reformers.