There's an active cult in the area.

Much prominence is also given to the cult of saints and martyrs.

The cult of the Baal of Tyre followed Jezebel to the royal city Samaria and even found its way into Jerusalem.

The nurse's assertion about there being some sort of cult made more sense.

A universal outburst of veneration followed; indeed his cult had already begun, and after ' With the title of Nicopolis in partibus.

The cult of St Lawrence has spread throughout Christendom, and there are numerous churches dedicated to him, especially in England, where 228 have been counted.

Although images of the divinities were certainly known, the principal objects of cult in the Minoan age were of the aniconic class; in many cases these were natural objects, such as rocks and mountain peaks, with their cave sanctuaries, like those of Ida or of Dicte.

And indeed, whilst in theoretic theology Brahma has retained his traditional place and function down to our own days, his practical cult has at all times remained extremely limited, the only temple dedicated to the worship of this god being found at Pushkar (Pokhar) near Ajmir in Rajputana.

It is a primitive cult similar to that of Early Canaan, illustrated by the pillow stone set up by Jacob, which was literally " Bethel " or the " House of God."

We are justified in supposing that the cult of the moon-god was brought into Babylonia by the Semitic nomads from Arabia.

His ritual and mysteries (Sacra Savadia) gained a firm footing in Rome during the 2nd century A.D., although as early as 139 B.C. the first Jews who settled in the capital were expelled by virtue of a law which proscribed the propagation of the cult of Jupiter Sabazius.

At all stages of religious development, however, and more especially in the case of the more primitive types of cult, prayer as thus understood occurs together with, and shades off into, other varieties of observance that bear obvious marks of belonging to the same family.

It is probable that necromancy, like the worship of Asherah and `Ashtoreth, as well as the cult of graven images, was a Canaanite importation into Israel's religious practices.

Nevertheless, these places of cult remained some 300 years until almost the close of the monarchy, when their destruction is attributed to Josiah (§ 16).

The change from the dynasty of Omri to that of Jehu has been treated by several hands, and the writers, in their recognition of the introduction of a new tendency, have obscured the fact that the cult of Yahweh had flourished even under such a king as Ahab.

Marillier sacrifice was, at its origin, essentially a magical rite - the liberation by the effusion of a victim's blood of a magical force which was to bend the gods to the will of man; from this arose, under the influence of cult of the dead, the gift theory of sacrifice.

To one who favoured simplicity of cult the new worship was a desecration of Yahweh, and, braving the anger of the king and queen, he foreshadowed their fate.

The central object of cult in this shrine was apparently a marble cross.

That particular dish has developed quite a cult following.

The Pan-Ionian sanctuary of Poseidon on the Asiatic promontory of Mycale was regarded as perpetuating a cult from Peloponnesian Achaea, and the league of twelve cities which maintained it, as imitated from an Achaean dodecapolis, and as claiming (absurdly, according to Herodotus i.

The cella of the temple of Heracles underwent considerable modifications in Roman times, and the discovery in it of a statue of Asclepius seems to show that the cult of this deity superseded the original one.

The ritual books of our Pentateuch were not then in existence, and the sacrificial cult might be treated with contempt as not authoritative.

His chief publications are: Cretan Pictographs and Prae-Phoenician Script (1896); Further Discoveries of Cretan and Aegean Script (1898); The Mycenaean Tree and Pillar Cult (1901); Scripta Minoa (1909 et seq.); and reports on the excavations at Knossos.

The religion and language have both died out, being only preserved by a few priests of the old cult; but even among them the tradition of the pronunciation of the language has been lost.

It is said that he gave a great impetus to the dramatic representations which belonged to the Dionysiac cult, and that it was under his encouragement that Thespis of Icaria, by impersonating character, laid the foundation of the great Greek drama of the 5th and 4th centuries.

Other accounts of his death are: that he killed himself from grief at the failure of his journey to Hades; that he was struck with lightning by Zeus for having revealed the mysteries of the gods to men; or he was torn to pieces by the Maenads for having abandoned the cult of Dionysus for that of Apollo.

But we have in addition to the animal sacrifices, vegetable offerings of meal, oil and cakes (massoth, ashishah and kawwan, which last is specially connected with the `Ashtoreth cult: Jer.

This temple was cared for, and the cult attended, by women only, and the same was the case at a second celebration at the beginning of December in the house of a magistrate with imperium, which became famous owing to the profanation of these mysteries by P. Clodius in 62 B.C., and the political consequences of his act.

Every religion has its customary cult and ritual, its recognized times, places and persons for the observance.

The Sabbath was to him an actual cult.

This frame of mind, however, is mainly symptomatic of the lower levels of cult.

When we come to consider the moral quality of the act of prayer, this contrast between the spirit of public and private religion is fundamental for all but the most advanced forms of cult.

Even in the 3rd century the cult of Celtic deities (Hercules Magusanus, Deusoniensis, &c.) were revived, the Celtic leuga reintroduced instead of the Roman mile on official milestones, and a brief effort made to establish an independent, though romanized, Gaul under Postumus and his short-lived successors (A.D.

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.

The remains of several shrines within the building, and the religious element perceptible in the frescoes, show that a considerable part of the Palace of Cnossus was devoted to purposes of cult.

The principal Philistine tribe is indeed known in the biblical records as the Cherethims or Cretans, and the Minoan name and the cult of the Cretan Zeus were preserved at Gaza to the latest classical days.

His name is preserved in the Sicilian Minoa, and his tomb was pointed out in the neighbourhood of Agrigentum, with a shrine above dedicated to his native Aphrodite, the lady of the dove; and in this connexion it must be observed that the cult of Eryx perpetuates to much later times the characteristic features of the worship of the Cretan Nature goddess, as now revealed to us in the palace of Cnossus and elsewhere.

Near this domestic quarter was found a small shrine of the Double Axes, with cult objects and offertory vessels in their places.

The chest is of limestone coated with stucco, adorned with life-like paintings of offertory scenes in connexion with the sacred Double Axes of Minoan cult.

Owing to its position, the Persian state, when it from time to time became a conquering empire, overlapped Asia Minor, Babylon and India, and hence acted as an intermediary for transmitting art and ideas, sending for instance Greek sculpture to India and the cult of Mithra to western Europe.

Anu is so prominently associated with the city of Erech in southern Babylonia that there are good reasons for believing this place to have been the original seat of the Anu cult.

the cult of a Divine Principle, resident in dominant features of nature (sun, stars, mountains, trees, &c.) and controling fertility.

Evans, "Mycenaean Tree and Pillar Cult" in Journ.

Paphos owes its ancient fame to the cult of the "Paphian goddess" llacNaFavavaa, or 7) IIacaia, in inscriptions, or simply n 8ea), a nature-worship of the same type as the cults of Phoenician Astarte, maintained by a college of orgiastic ministers, practising sensual excess and self-mutilation.'

The Greeks identified both this and a similar cult at Ascalon with their own worship of Aphrodite, 3 and localized at Paphos the legend of her birth from the sea foam, which is in fact accumulated here, on certain winds, in masses more than a foot deep. 4 Her grave also was 1 E.

Old Roman formula of prayer mention a Hora Quirini, his female cult associate, afterwards identified with Hersilia, the wife of Romulus.

In 399 the exercise of the pagan cult was prohibited, and the revenues of the temples, which were to be appropriated for the use of the public or pulled down, were confiscated to defray the expenses of the army.

These legends show how closely the heroine is associated with the cult of Artemis, and with the human sacrifices which accompanied it in older times before the Hellenic spirit had modified the barbarism of this borrowed religion.

On the influence of her cult upon that of the Virgin Mary, see Rusch, Studien u.

Each community could speak of its own baal, although a collection of allied communities might share the same cult, and naturally, since the attributes ascribed to the individual baals were very similar, subsequent syncretism was facilitated.

9), violent and ecstatic exercises, ceremonial acts of bowing and kissing, the preparing of sacred mystic cakes, appear among the offences denounced by the Israelite prophets, and show that the cult of Baal (and Astarte) included the characteristic features of heathen worship which recur in various parts of the Semitic world, although attached to other names.5 By an easy transition the local gods of the streams and springs which fertilized the increase of the fields became identified with 2 Compounds with geographical terms (towns, mountains), e.g.

pp. The extent to which elements of heathen cult entered into purer types of religion is illustrated in the worship of Yahweh.

The sacred cakes of Astarte and old holy wells associated with her cult were later even transferred to the worship of the Virgin (Ency.

The idea which has long prevailed that Baal was properly a sky-god affords no explanation of the local character of the many baals; on the other hand, on the theory of a higher development where the gods become heavenly or astral beings, the fact that ruder conceptions of nature were still retained (often in the unofficial but more popular forms of cult) is more intelligible.

There is strong evidence at all events that many of the conceptions are contrary to historical fact, and the points of similarity between native Canaanite cult and Israelite worship are so striking that only the persistent traditions of Israel's origin and of the work of Moses compel the conclusion that the germs of specific Yahweh worship existed from his day.

The earliest certain reaction against Baalism is ascribed to the reign of Ahab, whose marriage with Jezebel gave the impulse to the introduction of a particular form of the cult.

Firenze, Florence); the patron goddess, Athena, was probably called after the place of her cult.

Another enclosure, a little to the south, is proved by an inscription to have been a sanctuary of the hitherto unknown hero Amynos, with whose cult those of Asclepius and the hero Dexion were here associated; under the name Dexion, the poet Sophocles is said to have been worshipped after his death.

549), in which the cult of the goddess was associated with that of Erechtheus; the Homeric temple is identified by Furtw.ngler with the " compact house of Erechtheus " (Od.

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.

The wide extension of the cult is attributable largely to Syrian merchants; thus we find traces of it in the great seaport towns; at Delos especially numerous inscriptions have been found bearing witness to its importance.

Peet, resulted in interesting discoveries, some of which tend to show that the cult of the Aten or Solardisk was not so rigidly enforced by the heretic king Akhenaton as has been supposed, and that ordinary people were allowed to worship other gods than the sun-disk, at any rate in connexion with funerary ceremonies.

Rev. ii., 188 7, p. 317 seq.; Niese, Historische Zeitschrift, lxxix., 18 97, p. 1, seq.); even the explicit statement in Arrian as to Alexander and the Arabians is given as a mere report; but we have wellauthenticated utterances of Attic orators when the question of the cult of Alexander came up for debate, which seem to prove that an intimation of the king's pleasure had been conveyed to Athens.

One may notice that the first Ptolemy himself made a contribution of some value to historical literature in his account of Alexander's campaigns; the fourth Ptolemy not only instituted a cult of Homer but himself published tragedies; and even Ptolemy Euergetes II.

At Alexandria the state cult of him seems to have been instituted by the second Ptolemy, when his body was laid in the Sema (Otto, Priester u.

The first proved instance of a cult of the latter kind is that instituted at.

So far we can point to no instance of a cult of the living sovereign (though the cities might institute such locally) being established by the court for the realm.

After this the cult of the reigning king and queen was regularly maintained in Greek Egypt, side by side with that of the dead Ptolemies.

(261-246) a document shows us a cult of the reigning king in full working for the Seleucid realm, with a high priest in each province, appointed by the king himself; the document declares that the Queen Laodice is now to be associated with the king.

The Antigonid dynasty, simpler and saner in its manners, had no official cult of this sort.

There does not seem any clear proof that the surnames which the Hellenistic kings in Asia and Egypt bore were necessarily connected with the cult, even if they were used to describe g.Surnames.

The cult of the saint, who came to be regarded as the special patron of lepers, beggars and cripples, spread very extensively over Europe, especially in.

The title Belit was naturally transferred to the great mother-goddess Ishtar after the decline of the cult at Nippur, and we also find the consort of Marduk, known as Sarpanit, designated as Belit, for the sufficient reason that Marduk, after the rise of the city of Babylon as the seat of his cult, becomes the Bel or "lord" of later days.

trans., 1906), where he comes to the conclusion that "instead of being the sixth rex of Rome, he was originally the rex serous, the priest of the cult of Diana Aricina transferred to the Aventine, the priest of the protecting goddess of fugitive slaves"; C. Pascal, Patti e legende di Roma antica (Florence, 1903); also O.

The objects found in these researches are in the museum, the most notable being a great basalt bull, probably once an object of cult in the Serapeum.

The authentic doctrine of the Gathas had no room either for the cult of Mithra or for that of the Haoma.

Both parts of the book ignore the Jewish sacrificial cult.

change of cult.

16 sqq.), but strangers know not "the cult of the God of the land" (2 Kings xvii.

The cult of Athena Itonia, whose earliest seat appears to have been amongst the Thessalians, who used her name as a battle-cry, made its way to Coronea in Boeotia, where her sanctuary was the seat of the Pamboeotian confederacy.

His morality is not yet separated from his religion; and religion for him means the cult of some superior being - the king or priest of his tribe - whose person is charged with a kind of sacred electricity.

The translation of his relics to Soissons in 826 made that town a new centre of his cult.

- The cult goes back to a period before the separation of the Persians from the Hindus, as is shown by references in the literatures of both stocks, the Avesta and the Vedas.

As a god who gave victory, he was prominent in the official cult of Persia, the seventh month and the sixteenth day of other months being sacred to him.

Modified though never essentially changed, (1) by contact with the star-worship of the Chaldaeans, who identified Mithras with Shamash, god of the sun,(2) by the indigenous Armenian religion and other local Asiatic faiths and (3) by the Greeks of Asia Minor, who identified Mithras with Helios, and contributed to the success of his cult by equipping it for the first time with artistic representations (the famous Mithras relief originated in the Pergamene school towards the 2nd century B.C.), Mithraism was first transmitted to the Roman world during the 1st century B.C. by the Cilician pirates captured by Pompey.

Towards the close of the 2nd century the cult had begun to spread rapidly through the army, the mercantile class, slaves and actual propagandists, all of which classes were largely composed of Asiatics.

275, when Dacia was lost to the empire, and the invasions of the northern peoples resulted in the destruction of temples along a great stretch of frontier, the natural stronghold of the cult.

The emperors, however, favoured the cult, which was the army's favourite until Constantine destroyed its hopes.

and the cult monuments.

Two altars, to the Sun and the Moon, stood before the former, and cult statues along the latter.

No women were in any way connected with the cult, though the male sex could be admitted even in childhood.

The cult was supported mainly by voluntary contribution.

NERGAL, the name of a solar deity in Babylonia, the main seat of whose cult was at Kutha or Cuthah, represented by the mound of Tell-Ibrahim.

The cult of Nergal does not appear to have been as widespread as that of Ninib.

In later times the cult of a god Satrapes occurs in Syrian inscriptions from Palmyra and the Hauran; by Pausanias vi.

25, 6, Satrapes is mentioned as the name of a god who had a statue and a cult in Elis and is identified with Korybas.

The origin of this god is obscure; perhaps it arose from a cult connected with a statue or a tomb of some satrap.

It was not till almost the 6th century that the word became a title of honour specially given to the dead whose cult was publicly celebrated in the churches.

The essential form of the cult of the martyrs was that of the honours paid to the illustrious dead; and these honours were officially paid by the community.

The cult of the saints early met with opposition, in answer to which the Church Fathers had to defend its lawfulness and explain its nature.

The undoubted abuses which grew up, especially during the middle ages, raised up, at the time of the Reformation, fresh adversaries of the cult of the saints.

4 He adduces it as a sort of reductio ad absurdum of Christians who would model life and cult on Christ and his apostles, unencumbered by later church traditions.

17-23) actually used the clothing peculiar to some deity, nor is it quite clear what is meant when a Babylonian ritual text refers to the magical use of the linen garment of Eridu (seat of the cult of Ea).

But it is more probable that the name was given to the island owing to the establishment there by the first settlers of a special cult of Artemis (the name Ortygia appears in Homer, Odyssey, v.

The chief seat of her cult, however, was Thessaly, which was always regarded as the home of magic. As time went on her character was less favourably described.

Fraktin or Farakdin (probably anc. Das-tarkon); sculptured rock-panel showing two groups of figures in act of cult, with hieroglyphs in relief.

Alpheus was recognized in cult and myth as the chief or typical river-god in the Peloponnesus, as was Achelous in northern Greece.

The honour paid to her in Delphi and Delos might be explained as part of the cult of her son Apollo; but temples to her existed in Argos; in Mantineia and in Xanthus in Lycia; her sacred grove was on the coast of Crete.

Lycia, one of the chief seats of the cult of Apollo, where most frequent traces are found of the worship of Leto as the great goddess, was probably the earlier home of her religion.

The special cult of Krishna with which the neighbourhood is associated seems to be of comparatively late date.

" Four-god-city"), an ancient town in Adiabene, the capital in Assyrian and pre-Assyrian times of the country between the greater and lesser Zab, and seat of an important cult of Ishtar.

It was at this period, while present at a festival of St Felix of Nola, that he entered upon his lifelong devotion to the cult of that saint.

The worship was a relic of the Phoenician cult of Astarte.

In ancient Greece, the heroes were the object of a special cult, and as such were intimately connected with its religious life.

Instances no doubt occur of gods being degraded to the ranks of heroes, but these are not the real heroes, the heroes who are the object of a cult.

But neither in Homer nor in Hesiod is there any trace of the idea that the heroes after death had any power for good or evil over the lives of those who survived them; and consequently, no cult.

Like the gods, the cult heroes were supposed to exercise an influence on human affairs, though not to the same extent, their sphere of action being confined to their own localities.

In addition to persons of high rank, poets, legendary and others (Linus, Orpheus, Homer, Aeschylus and Sophocles), legislators and physicians (Lycurgus, Hippocrates), the patrons of various trades or handicrafts (artists, cooks, bakers, potters), the heads of philosophical schools (Plato, Democritus, Epicurus) received the honours of a cult.

The cult of the heroes exhibits points of resemblance with that of the chthonian divinities and of the dead, but differs from that of the ordinary gods, a further indication that they were not " depotentiated " gods.

Superhuman qualities and powers, too, are commonly ascribed to both, an important difference, however, being that whatever worship may have been paid to the Teutonic heroes never crystallized into a cult.

The origin of this particular form of worship can scarcely be sought in Egypt; the Apis which was worshipped there was a live bull, and image-worship was common among the Canaanites in connexion with the cult of Baal and Astarte (qq.v.).

24 sqq.), and even to Moses himself was attributed the bronze-serpent whose cult at Jerusalem was destroyed in the time of Hezekiah (2 Kings xviii.

But neither Elijah nor Elisha raised a voice against the cult; then, as later, in the time of Amos, it was nominally Yahweh-worship, and Hosea is the first to regard it as the fundamental cause of Israel's misery.

The latters magnum opus, Kojikiden (Exposition of the Record of Ancient Matters), declared by Chamberlain to be perhaps the most admirable work of which Japanese erudition can boast, consists of 44 large volumes, devoted to elucidating the Kojiki and resuscitating the ShintO cult as it existed in the earliest days.

Cult.

The name Eupatridae survived in historical times, but the Eupatridae were then excluded from the cult of the "Semnae" at Athens, and also held the hereditary office of "expounder of the law" (7yii-r17s) in connexion with purification from the guilt of murder.

de Heredia, mosaistes who have at heart the cult of antique and pagan beauty, of "pure art" and of "objective poetry."

Anubis was the principal god in the capitals of the XVIIth and XVIIIth nomes of Upper Egypt, and secondary god in the XIIIth and probably in the XIIth nome; but his cult was universal.

The cult of Anubis must at all times have been very popular in Egypt, and, belonging to the Isis and Serapis cycle, was introduced into Greece and Rome.

For cult see L.

c. 2908) holds that the reference here is purely figurative; " Judah has dealt falsely with the wife of his youth, the covenant religion, and is wedding a strange cult."

In the cult and ritual of Rome there are enshrined many survivals from a very early form of religious thought prior to the development of the characteristic Roman attitude of mind.

The boundarystones between properties (termini) were also the objects of cult at the annual festival of the Terminalia, and the "god Terminus," the symbolic boundary-stone, shares with Jupiter the great temple on the Capitol.

This conception of the nature of the numina and man's relation to them is the root notion of the old Roman religion, and the fully-formed state cult of the di indigetes even at the earliest historical period, must have been the result of long and gradual development, of which we can to a certain extent trace the stages.

The household is thus at once the logical starting-point of religious cult, and throughout Roman history the centre of its most real and vital activity.

The Lar familiaris has been regarded' as the embodiment of all the family dead and his cult as a consummation of ancestor-worship, but a more probable explanation regards him as one of the Lares (q.v.; numina of the fields worshipped at the compita, the places where properties marched) who had special charge of the house or possibly of the household servants (familia); for it is significant that his worship was committed to the charge of the vilica.

The established worship of the household then represents the various members of the family and the central points of the domestic activity; but we find also in the ordinary religious life of the family a more direct connexion with morality and a greater religious sense than in any other part of the Roman cult.

There had consequently grown up within the state a large artisan class, excluded from the old patrician gentes and therefore from the state cult: at the same time the beginnings of commerce had opened relations with neighbouring peoples.

(b) Secondly, in war and peace Rome formed relations with her neighbours of Latium, and, as a sign of the Latin league which resulted, the cult of Diana was brought from Aricia and established on the Aventine in the "commune Latinorum Dianae templum" (Varro, Ling.

The same spirit continues to show itself in the almost reckless introduction of Greek deities even within the walls of the pomoerium and their ready identification with gods of the old religion, whose cult they in reality superseded.

Thus we hear of temples dedicated to Juventas=Hebe (191 B.C.), Diana=Artemis (179 B.C.), Mars=Ares (138 B.C.), and find even such unexpected identifications as that of the Bona Dea - a cult title of the ancient Fauna, the female counterpart of the countryside numen Faunus - with a Greek goddess of women, Damia.

At the same time the new acquaintance with Greek art introduces the making of cult statues, in which the identified Greek type is usually adopted without change, with such curious results as the representation of the Penates under the form of the Dioscuri.

In the train of the Magna Mater came the secret Oriental cult of Bacchus, which grew to such proportions in deities .

In the general wreck of the old religion, little survived but the household cult, protected by its own genuineness and vitality.

In the same spirit, he established a new shrine of Vesta Augusta within the palace, a private cult at first, but destined to be a serious rival of the ancient worship in the forum.

The deification of Julius Caesar was one important step: another was the natural prominence in the palace of the cult of the Genius of the emperor himself.

In the succeeding centuries Augustus's intentions were realized with a fullness which he would hardly have wished, and the cult of the imperial house practically superseded the state religion as the official form of worship.

The publication of the Allgemeine and General-Reformation der ganzen weiten Welt (Cassel, 1614), and the Fama Fraternitatis (Cassel, 1615) by the theologian Johann Valentin Andrea (1586-1654), caused immense excitement throughout Europe, and they not only led to many re-issues, but were followed by numerous pamphlets, favourable and otherwise, whose authors generally knew little, if anything, of the real aims of the original author, and doubtless in not a few cases amused themselves at the expense of the public. It is probable that the first work was circulated in MS. about 1610, for it is said that a reply was written in 1612 (according to Herder), but if so, there was no mention of the cult before that decade.

We are startled to find him telling Tacitus of his interest in hunting the wild boar, but he is careful to add that, while the beaters were at work, he sat beside the nets and was busily taking notes, thus combining the cult of Minerva with that of Diana (i.

8), a reference by Tertullian (De cult.

His cult survived the metamorphosis of the ancient Vedic nature-worship into modern Hinduism, and there still are in India fire-priests (agnihotri) whose duty is to superintend his worship. The sacred fire-drill for procuring the temple-fire by friction - symbolic of Agni's daily miraculous birth - is still used.

11 a art in cult; they may equally explain its genesis and rise in certain ages and countries.

In certain cases the wish to carry elsewhere the cult of a favourite or ancestral cult, may have dictated the manufacture of images that declare themselves and reveal at a glance whose they are.

Thus a Phoenician colonist might desire to carry abroad the cult of a certain Baal or Astarte who lived in a conical stone or pillar.

These two gods belonged to the old popular religion of the Iranians, but had until then been neglected by the true Zoroastrians; now they were introduced into the official worship much in the way in which the cult of the saints came into the Christian religion.

He ordered the establishment of a temple and cult in honour of his adoptive father, but he did not come to Rome.

His cult is as celebrated as his history is obscure.

It is more especially, however, from the time of the removal of his body to Bari, in Apulia, that his cult became popular.

i.p. 363, London, 1881), and the cult appears to have survived until the beginning of the 10th century, although it ceased to be a political force after 1834.

This redactor, moreover, was the first who gave to the Apocalypse the character of an attack on the Roman Empire and the imperial cult by means of a series of small additions.

In this chapter we have the two beasts 2 which symbolize respectively Rome and the Roman provincial priesthood of the imperial cult.

The second beast, signifying the pagan priesthood of the imperial cult, called "the false prophet" in xvi.

This was before the pressure of the imperial cult was felt by the Christian church.

North-east of the entrance is a "Birth House" for the cult of the child Harsemteu, and behind the temple a small temple of Isis, dating from the reign of Augustus.

The consecration of material objects and in general their use in religion and cult was consistently avoided by the Manicheans; not because they failed to share the universal belief of earlier ages that spirits can be inducted by means of fitting prayers and incantations into inanimate things, but because the external material world was held to be the creation of an evil demiurge and so incapable of harbouring a pure spirit.

It is true that Gentile converts carried over into the new religion many ideas and habits of cult contracted under the old; this was inevitable, for no one lightly changes his religious habits and categories.

But in the 4th century this puritanic zeal gave way; and this and other pagan feasts were taken over by the Church; a century earlier in Asia Minor Gregory the Thaumaturge was actively transforming into shrines and cult of martyrs the temples and idolatrous rites of heroes and demigods.

Written language was largely hierographic and heroic. The drama, the cult image, the pictograph, the synecdochic picture, the ideaglyph, were steps in a progress without a break.

The latter were worshipped in the house by the family alone, and the household Lar (familiaris) was conceived of as the centre-point of the family and of the family cult.

The funerary cult of Khufu and Khafre was practised under the twenty-sixth dynasty, when so much that had fallen into disuse and been forgotten was revived.

Quite distinct was the Idaean Hercules, a Cretan Dactyl connected with the cult of Rhea or Cybele.

His worship, introduced from the Greek colonies in Etruria and in the south of Italy, seems to have been established in Rome from the earliest times, as two old Patrician genies were associated with his cult and the Fabii claimed him as their ancestor.

Tibur was a special seat of his cult.

The storming of their favourite positions - stockades strengthened with rifle-pits - was often costly; and a strange anti-Christian fanaticism, the Hau-Hau cult, encouraged them to face the white men's bullets and bayonets.

The extreme licence of the Heliopolitan worship is often animadverted upon by early Christian writers, and Constantine, making an effort to curb the Venus cult, built a basilica.

All theories of religion which give prominence to ancestor worship and the cult of the dead are to a certain extent Euhemeristic. But as the sole explanation of the origin of the idea of gods it is not accepted by students of comparative religion.

The earliest centres of his cult were Arcadia, where Mt.

If he was evolved from the wind, his character had become so anthropomorphic that the Greeks had practically lost the knowledge of his primitive significance; nor did Greek cult ever associate him with the wind.

Although the motive came from within, the form taken by the cult has appeared to many to be of non-Israelite origin.

On the other hand, the seat of the cult appears to have been at Jerusalem, and the period during which it flourished does not favour any strong Phoenician influence.

Again, the form of the word Tophet and Ahaz's association with Damascus might point to an Aramaean origin for the cult; but it would not be safe to support this view by the statements and names in 2 Kings xvii.

It was not till ten years later, in 1685, that the festival was first celebrated at Paray, and not till after the death of Marguerite, on the 17th of October 1690, that the cult of the Sacred Heart, fostered by the Jesuits and the subject of violent controversies within the church, spread throughout France and Christendom.

Louis David painted "Marat Assassinated," and a veritable cult was rendered to the Friend of the People, whose ashes were transferred to the Pantheon with great pomp on the 21st of September 1794 - to be cast out again in virtue of the decree of the 8th of February 1795.

Amulets and ornaments in the form of the figure or mask of Bes are common after the New Kingdom; he is often associated with children and with childbirth and is figured in the "birth-houses" devoted to the cult of the child-god.

From the number of colossal figures of Nebo discovered here it would appear that the cult of Nebo was a favourite one, at least during the later period.

Out of this grew up in the 3rd or 4th century what is known as the arcani disciplina, or secret discipline of the Church, involving the concealment from the uninitiated and unholy of the more sacred parts of the Christian cult, such as baptism and the eucharist, with their various accompaniments, including the Creed and the Lord's Prayer.

If the modus operandi was akin to soothsaying it was only because that special form of soothsaying was peculiar to the particular cult of that god, and even this as a secondary development.

Tradition regarded it as the punishment of his transference of the cult of Hercules from the Potitii.

4, 5), and regarded by him as the real seat of the cult of the goddess, the Pietas of the sanctuary dedicated by Glabrio being a Greek goddess.

p y P rather than by any special cult of the form of the classical languages.

Like the teraphim it was part of the common stock of Hebrew cult; it is borne (rather than worn) by persons acting in a priestly character (Samuel at Shiloh, priests of Nob, David), it is part of the worship of individuals (Gideon at Ophrah), and is found in a private shrine with a lay attendant (Micah; Judg.

Zion is now not the centre of a mere national cult, but the centre of all true religion for the whole world; and more than once the prophet indicates not obscurely that the necessary issue of the great conflict between Yahweh and the gods of the heathen must be the conversion of all nations, the disappearance of every other religion before the faith of the God of Israel.

To judge from analogous instances of a double nomenclature, the two names revert to two different centres for the cult of a storm-god, though it must be confessed that up to the present it has been impossible to determine where these centres were.

On the other hand the cult of a specific storm-god in ancient Babylonia is vouched for by the occurrence of the sign Im - the "Sumerian" or ideographic writing for Adad-Ramman - as an element in proper names of the old Babylonian period.

The meaning of this cult is, of course, reinterpreted in the Gnostic sense: by this unbridled prostitution the Gnostic sects desired to prevent the sexual propagation of mankind, the origin of all evil.

Reitzenstein has shown (p. 81 seq.) that very probably the system of the Naasseni described by Hippolytus was originally derived from purely pagan circles, which are probably connected in some way with the mysteries of the Attis cult.

The most i m important developments of the cult are in East Asia p p among the Siberian tribes; among the Ainu of Sakhalin a young bear is caught at the end of winter and fed for some nine months; then after receiving honours it is killed, and the people, who previously show marks of grief at its approaching fate, dance merrily and feast on its body.

Whether this feature or a cult of the hunting type was the primary form, is so far an open question.

There is a good deal of evidence to connect the Greek goddess Artemis with a cult of the bear; girls danced as "bears" in her honour, and might not marry before undergoing this ceremony.

Less widespread was the cult of the Mnevis, also consecrated to Osiris.

==Dog== Actual dog-worship is uncommon; the Nosarii of western Asia are said to worship a dog; the Kalangs of Java had a cult of the red dog, each family keeping one in the house; according to one authority the dogs are images of wood which are worshipped after the death of a member of the family and burnt after a thousand days.

The cult of the white elephant is also found at Ennarea, southern Abyssinia.

In the temples of Apollo and Aphrodite were sacred fish, which may point to a fish cult.

In North Borneo we seem to see the evolution of a god in the three stages of the cult of the hawk among the Kenyahs, the Kayans and the sea Dyaks.

The cult of the leopard is widely found in West Africa.

==Lizard== The cult of the lizard is most prominent in the Pacific, where it appears as an incarnation of Tangaloa.

The cult of the serpent is found in many parts of the Old World; it is also not unknown in America; in Australia, on the other hand, though many species of serpent are found, there does not appear to be any species of cult unless we include the Warramunga cult of the mythical Wollunqua totem animal, whom they seek to placate by rites.

By the conquest of Whydah the Dahomeyans were brought in contact with a people of serpent worshippers, and ended by adopting from them the cult which they at first despised.

==Tiger== The tiger is associated with Siva and Durga, but its cult is confined to the wilder tribes; in Nepal the tiger festival is known as Bagh Jatra, and the worshippers dance disguised as tigers.

==Wolf== Both Zeus and Apollo were associated with the wolf by the Greeks; but it is not clear that this implies a previous cult of the wolf.

With the rise of species, deities and the cult of individual animals, the path towards anthropomorphization and polytheism is opened and the respect paid to animals tends to lose its strict animistic character.

Animistic in many of their features too are the temporary gods of fetishism, naguals or familiars, genii and even the dead who receive a cult.

With the rise of a belief in departmental gods comes the age of polytheism; the belief in elemental spirits may still persist, but they fall into the background and receive no cult.

Two animistic theories of the origin of religion have been put forward, the one, often termed the "ghost theory," mainly associated with the name of Herbert Spencer, but also maintained by Grant Allen, refers the beginning of religion to the cult of dead human beings; the other, put forward by Dr E.

They may, it is true, be associated with ghost gods, but in Australia it cannot even be asserted that the gods are spirits at all, much less that they are the spirits of dead men; they are simply magnified magicians, super-men who have never died; we have no ground, therefore, for regarding the cult of the dead as the origin of religion in this area; this conclusion is the more probable, as ancestor-worship and the cult of the dead generally cannot be said to exist in Australia.

There is no evidence of the existence of a cult of Caelus, the occurrence of the name in dedicatory inscriptions being due to Oriental influences, the worship of the sky being closely connected with that of Mithras.

The chief feature in the religious life of the towns was the important position they occupied as centres for the cult of the emperor.

Caesar-worship as an organized cult developed spontaneously in many provincial towns during the reign of Augustus, and was fostered by him and his successors as a means of promoting in these centres of vigour and prosperity a strong loyalty to Rome and the emperor, which was one of the firmest supports of the latter's power.

The name Nina, was borne also by the goddess Ishtar, whose worship was the special cult of Nineveh, and Ninua may well be a hypocoristicon of Nina,.

The Lord also is jealous of them, if any one attempt to combine their cult with his, for to do so is to doubt the supremacy of his name above all names.

ANCESTOR-WORSHIP, a general name for the cult of deceased parents and forefathers.

Such cruel customs were, of course, and still are associated in many lands with the cult of the dead; but, on the other hand, there are gentler and more beneficial aspects observable to-day in China and Japan.

A man only shared in house, tribe and state, so far as he was descended from particular ancestors and eponymous heroes, and due cult of these illustrious dead was the condition of his enjoying any rights or inheriting any property.

Ancestor-worship has its parallels in Christian cults of the dead and of the saints; it must be remembered, however, that a saint is not as a rule an ancestor, and that his cult is not based upon family feeling and love of kinsmen, nor tends to stimulate and encourage the same.

Elect are these - Jesus and Vahman."The above examples bear out Mani's own declaration, as reported by the Fihrist, that his faith was a blend of the old Magian cult with Christianity.

Since the visions of Bernadette Soubirous, their authentication by a commission of enquiry appointed by the bishop of Tarbes, and the authorization by the pope of the cult of Our Lady of Lourdes, the quarter on the left bank of the Gave has sprung up and it is estimated that 600,000 pilgrims annually visit the town.

The final act of the cult, the "exaltation" of the fig, with which Reinach compares the "exaltation" of the ear of corn by the hierophant at the Eleusinian mysteries, was performed by the sycophant.

As the cult of the Phytalidae sank into insignificance beside the greater mysteries, the term sycophant survived in popular language in the sense of an informer or denouncer, whose charges deserved but little consideration.

On the other hand, the lightning is not associated with him in literature or cult, and his connexion with volcanic fires is so close as to suggest that he was originally a volcano-god.

The Lemnian version is due to the prominence of his cult at Lemnos in very early times; and his fall into the sea may have been suggested by volcanic activity in Mediterranean islands, as at Lipara, and Thera.

Except in Lemnos and Attica, there are few indications of any cult of Hephaestus.

In Sicily, however, the volcanic nature of the god is prominent in his cult at Etna, as well as in the neighbouring Liparaean isles.

But we have little record of his cult in this aspect, except at Athens, where his worship was of real importance, belonging to the oldest stratum of Attic religion.

This temple has been identified, not improbably, with the so-called "Theseum"; it contained a statue of Athena, and the two deities are often associated, in literature and cult, as the joint givers of civilization to the Athenians.

But the importance of Prometheus is mainly mythological; the Titan belonged to a fallen dynasty, and in actual cult was largely superseded by Hephaestus.

The cult of Ninib can be traced back to the oldest period of Babylonian history.

Special interest attaches to this trace of their earlier origin, because of the famous cult of Diana Nemorensis, whose temple in the forest close by Aricia, beside the laces Nemorensis, was served by "the priest who slew the slayer, and shall himself be slain"; that is to say, the priest, who was called rex Nemorensis, held office only so long as he could defend himself from any stronger rival.

This cult, which is unique in Italy, is picturesquely described in the opening chapter of J.

On the anthropological aspect of the cult, see also A.

The oldest traces of the cult in Greek countries are found in Cyprus.

It appears no longer as the object of a special cult, but limited to the homage of certain sects, expressed by superstitious rites of obscure significance.

Of still later date are the popular developments of the modern cult of Krishna associated with Radha, as found in the Vishnu Purana.

In Armenia and the Caucasus the cult of such sacred trees and pillars passed without break into that of the cross, which was hallowed as follows.

Tradition at all events uniformly points to Upsala as the original home of his cult.

Their father, Niiir6r, the god of wealth, who is a somewhat less important figure, corresponds in name to the goddess Nerthus (Hertha), who in ancient times was worshipped by a number of tribes, including the Angli, round the coasts of the southern Baltic. Tacitus describes her as " Mother Earth," and the account which he gives of her cult bears a somewhat remarkable resemblance to the ceremonies associated in later times with Frey.

Chadwick, The Cult of Othin (Cambridge, 1899); E.

On the one hand, the Greeks were unwilling to abandon their religion and national cult, and scarcely recognized the ecclesiastical supremacy of the papacy.

The old cult of sacred stones and trees by an easy transition became cross-worship, but a cross was not sacred until the Christ had been, by priestly prayer and invocation, transferred into it.

She represented the principle of fertility and generation; references to her cult at Gebal, Sidon, Ashkelon, in Cyprus at Kition and Paphos, in Sicily at Eryx, in Gaulus, at Carthage, are frequent in the inscriptions and elsewhere.

As the wealthiest of Roman provinces it had most to gain by the pax Romana, and therefore welcomed the empire, and established and maintained the most devout cult of Augustus by means of the organization known as the Koinon or Commune, a representative council, meeting in the various metropoleis.

In this cult the emperor came to be associated with the common worship of the Ephesian Artemis.

Whatever the difficulties raised by his Acta, the cult of St Januarius, bishop and martyr, is attested historically at Naples as early as the 5th century (Biblioth.

The close connexion of the Hyperboreans with the cult of Apollo may be seen by comparing the Hyperborean myths, the characters of which by their names mostly recall Apollo or Artemis (Agyieus, Opis, Hecaergos, Loxo), with the ceremonial of the Apolline worship. No meat was eaten at the Pyanepsia; the Hyperboreans were vegetarians.

His cult early disappeared; in Arcadia his place was taken by Poseidon.

The annual festival, probably held on the 28th and 29th of Hecatombaeon (about the middle of August), consisted solely of the sacrifices and rites proper to this season in the cult of Athena.

Much valuable evidence is to be obtained also from the survival of ancient forms of cult in Moab I See G.

Brindaban is one of the most popular places of pilgrimage in India, being associated with the cult of Krishna as a shepherd.

The chief seat of her cult was an island which has not been identified.

This magnificent edifice had, however, been evidently overthrown by the earthquake of 63, and is in its present condition a mere ruin, the rebuilding of which had not been begun at the time of the eruption,) so that the cult of the three Capitoline divinities was then carried on in the socalled temple of Zeus Milichius.

5 seq.), his wife was firmly attached to the worship of the Tyrian Baal, Melkart, and led by her he gave a great impulse to this cult by building a temple in honour of Baal in Samaria.

In the bosom of medieval society they were the last witness to a state of things that the regular development of Catholic cult had amplified and modified.

The leaders of the Achaean invasion were Pelops, who took possession of Elis, and Aeacus, who became master of Aegina and was said to have introduced there the worship of Zeus Panhellenius, whose cult was also set up at Olympia.

The origin of the cult of Serapis, which Ptolemy I.

Under the Roman empire the cult of Isis, now furnished with an official priesthood and elaborate ritual, became really popular in the Hellenistic world.

The cult of the supreme god spread throughout Egypt and was carried by the Egyptian conquerors into other lands, Syria, Ethiopia and Libya, and was accepted by the natives both in Ethiopia and in the Libyan cases, where civilization was low and Egyptian influence permanent.

This character of the offended wife was borrowed by later poets from the Greek epic; but it belongs to literature rather than to cult, in which the dignity and power of the goddess is naturally more emphasized.

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.

Among the islands of the Aegean, Samos was celebrated for the cult of Hera; according to the local tradition, she was born in the island.

The origin of the connexion may possibly be due to the fusion of two "Pelasgic" tribes, worshipping Zeus and Hera respectively; but speculation on the earliest cult of the goddess, before she became the wife of Zeus, must be largely conjectural.

In her general cult Hera was worshipped in two main capacities: (1) as the consort of Zeus and queen of heaven; (2) as the goddess who presided over marriage, and, in a wider sense, over the various phases of a woman's life.

So, although the warlike character of Hera was not elsewhere prominent, she assumed a militant aspect in her two chief cities; a festival called the Shield (iuriris, in Pindar ay Wv X6XKEos) was part of the Argive cult, and there was an armed procession in her honour at Samos.

The actual practices of the cult, both funerary and divine, are better known, and we are tolerably familiar with the doctrines as to the future state of the dead.

The temple ritual employed in the daily cult is ifiustrated by the scenes depicted on the inner walls of the great temples: the formulae recited during the performance of the ceremonies are recorded at length in the temple of Seti I.

Certain of the carri al gods early became identified with cosmic divinities, and inst latter thus became the objects of a cult; so, for instance, in t Horus of Edfu was a sun-god, and Thoth in Hermopolis as gna was held to be the moon.

Day riva or and night, the year, the seasons, eternity, and many to I ~s similar conceptions were each represented by a god by or goddess of their own, who nevertheless possessed cult but a shadowy and doubtful existence.

abstract ideas such as Fate, Destiny to I others; rather more clearly defined than the rest was Maat, aspi goddess of Truth and Right, who was fabled to be the daughter pop ~e and may even have had a cult.

His cult was revived and became popular in Ptolemaic times.

MONTH, a hawk-headed god of the Thebaid: in Thebes itself his cult was superseded by that of Ammon, but it persisted in Hermonthis.

His cult dates from the earliest times.

In historic times his cult was celebrated at Tanis Ind Ombos.

There was indeed a certain justification for this contention, even when a contrary theory vssigned to the divinity a place in the sky, as in the case of the, unar divinity Thoth; for in the inmost sanctuary stood a statue)f the god, which served as his representative for the purposes)f the cult.

As to the manual rites of the daily cult, all that can here be said is that incense, purifications and anointings with various Oils played a large part; the sacrifices consisted chiefly of slaughtered oxen and geese; burnt offerings were a very late innovation.

As the power of the Pharaohs increased, the maintenance of the cult became one of the most important affairs of state.

It became the theory that the temples were the gifts of the Pharaoh to his fathers the gods, and therefore in the scenes of the cult that adorn the inner walls it is always he who is depicted as performing the ceremonies.

The conception of the tomb as the residence of the dead is the fundamental notion that underlies all the ritual observahces in connection with the dead, just as the idea of the temple as the dwelling-place of the god is the basis of the divine cult.

Quite separate from this part of the tomb lay the rooms employed for the cult of the dead: their walls were often adorned with pictures from the earthly life of the deceased, which it was hoped he might still continue to enjoy after death.

theless almost entirely at the mercy of the living for his welfare in the other world: he was as dependent on a continued cult on the part of the surviving members of his family as the gods were dependent on the constant attendance of their priests.

It was, however, the ha alone to which the cult of the dead was directly addressed.

This cult was a positive duty binding on the children of a dead man, and doubtless as a rule discharged by them with some regularity and conscientiousness; at least, on feast-days offerings would be brought to the tomb, and the ceremonies of purification and opening the mouth of the deceased would be enacted.

But there could be little guarantee that later generations would perpetuate the cult.

Or again, contracts might be made with a neighboring temple, the priesthood of which bound itself to reserve for the contracting party some portion of the offerings that had already been used for the divine cult.

In spite of all the precautions they took and the contracts they made, the Egyptians could never quite rid themselves of the dread that their tombs might decay and their cult be neglected; and they sought therefore to obtain by prayers and threats what they feared they might lose altogether.

This notion became so popular, that beside it all other views of the dead sink into insignificance; it permeates the funerary cult in all its stages, and from the Middle Kingdom onwards the dead man is regularly called the Osiris so-~d-so, just as though he were completely identical with the god.

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.

Thrusting aside all the multitudinous deities of Egypt and all the mythology even of Heliopolis, he devoted himself to the cult of the visible sun-disk, applying to it as its chief name the hitherto rare word Aton, meaning sun; the traditional divine name Harakht (Horus of the horizon), given to the hawk-headed sun-god of Heliopolis, was however allowed to subsist and a temple was built at Karnak to this god.

The worship of the other gods was officially recognized until his fifth year, but then a sweeping reform was initiated by which apparently the new cult alone was permitted.

had established the cult of the Memphite Serapis in a GraecoEgyptian form, affording a common ground for native and Elellenistic worshippers.

This is all we know for certain about the goddess and her cult; but the name naturally suggested myth-making, and Anna became a figure in stories which may be read in Ovid (l.c.) and in Silius Italicus (8.50 foil.).

Thus, as the cult of a particular divinity spreads farther and farther, so the circle expands from which are drawn those who visit his sanctuary.

iv., where special attention is drawn to the ethnological aspect of the cult of Poseidon.

While the cult of the other great gods and goddesses of Babylonia was transferred to Assyria, the worship of Assur so overshadowed that of the rest as to give the impression of a decided tendency towards the absorption of all divine powers by the one god.

With the fall of Assyria the rule of Assur also comes to an end, whereas it is significant that the cult of the gods of Babylonia - more particularly of Marduksurvives for several centuries the loss of political independence through Cyrus' capture of Babylonia in 539 B.C. The name of Assur's temple at Assur, represented by the mounds of Kaleh Sherghat, was known as E-khar-sag-gal-kur-kurra, i.e.

On the removal of the seat of residence of the Assyrian kings to Calah (c. 1300 B.C.), and then in the 8th century to Nineveh, the centre of the Assur cult was likewise transferred, though the sanctity of the old seat at Assur continued to be recognized.

A better case might be made for Egypt; yet notwithstanding the presence of its colonies, the cult of its gods, the erection of temples or shrines, and the numerous traces of intercourse exposed by excavation, Palestine was Asiatic rather than Egyptian.

4 Whether they could be regarded as so many manifestations of a single deity or as really distinct entities, there were at all events similar and well understood relations between each and its group; and although the cult was nature-worship and was attended with a licentiousness which drew forth the denunciations of the prophets, this is only one aspect of the local deity's place in the religious conceptions of his circle.

The historical framework contains traditions of the reconstruction and repair of temple and cult, of the hostility of southern peoples and their allies, and of conflicts between king and priests.

In the first the general political history will be set forth; in the second a sketch will be given of the cult of the " holy places "; the third will contain some particulars regarding the history of modern colonization by foreigners, which, while it has not affected the political status of the country, has produced very considerable modifications in its population and life; and the fourth will consist of a brief notice of the progress of exploration and scientific research whereby our knowledge of the past and the present of the land has been systematized.

The country was nominally Christian; the only history it displays being that of the development The later of pilgrimage and of the cult of holy places and of Empire.

of the cult of holy places, and it is to the sacred shrines of christendom that we propose to confine our attention.

It is not easy to explain these survivals of an old cult.

At Ostia, where much of the corn was stored which fed the Roman population, the cult of this god became famous; and it is probable that the fixing of his festival in August by the early Romans had some reference to the danger to the newly harvested corn from fire in that month.

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.

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.

There are some reasons for believing that the oldest seat, and possibly the original seat, of the Anu cult was in Erech, as it is there where the Ishtar cult that subsequently spread throughout Babylonia and Assyria took its rise.

While Anu, with whom there was associated as a pale reflection a consort Antum, assigned to him under the influence of the widely prevalent view among the early Semites which conceived of gods always in pairs, remained more or less of an abstraction during the various periods of the Babylonian-Assyrian religion and taking little part in the active cult of the temples, his unique position as the chief god of the highest heavens was always recognized in the theological system developed by the priests, which found an expression in making him the first figure of a triad, consisting of Anu, Bel and Ea, among whom the priests divided the three divisions of the universe, the heavens, the earth with the atmosphere above it, and the watery expanse respectively.

The cult and ritual in the north likewise followed the models set up in the south.

So completely did this system in the course of time sway men's minds that the cult, from being an expression of animistic beliefs, took on the colour derived from the "astral" interpretation of occurrences and doctrines.

The first caliph who imposed humiliating conditions on the Dhimmis, or Covenanters, who, on condition of paying a certain not over-heavy tribute, enjoyed the protection of the state and the free exercise of their cult, was Omar II., but this policy was not continued.

The name appears in cult and in mythology as that of the typical river-god; a familiar legend is that of his.

His cult spread through Spain, France, Germany, Belgium and Italy.

Confucianism is the official cult, and all officials offer sacrifices and homage at stated seasons in the Confucian temples.

The popular cult is, however, the propitiation of demons, a modification of the Shamanism of northern Asia.

It is difficult to connect this historical event with the legend of St John of Nepomuk, who was canonized by the church of Rome in 1729, mainly by the influence of the Jesuits, who hoped that this new cult would obliterate the memory of Hus.

Kennett has argued in favour of the view that he was the founder of the cult at Bethel (Journ.

The story in fact may have arisen to explain the object of cult; in any case it illustrates a general belief.

s These heroes might become objects of cult and local divinities of healing; people would pass their tombs in awe, or resort thither for divination or for taking oaths."

Far more noteworthy is the cult of the Python Danh-gbi of Whydah, which after taking root in Dahomey, became the most remarkable example of a thoroughly organic serpent-cult.

Children who touch or are touched by one of the many templesnakes are sequestered for a year and learn the songs and dances of the cult.

The cult taken by slaves to America is the Vodu (Vaudoo or Vaudoux) worship of Haiti (Ellis, 29 seq.).

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.

The symbol of the Bacchic orgies was a consecrated serpent, and the snakes kept in the sacred cistae of the cult of Dionysus find a parallel among the sect of the Ophites where, at the sacramental rites, bread was offered to the living serpent and afterwards distributed among the worshippers.

2 Other developments may be illustrated from the cult of Aesculapius, who seems to have been merely a deified ancestor, like the Egyptian Imhotep (below) or the interesting Indian healer Sokha Baba (Crooke i.

Introduced into Athens about 421 B.C., Aesculapius inherited the older local cult of the serpent " protector " Amynos (Harrison, 346 seq.).

But sometimes there is a contest between the new tests wit fsh cult and the old.

For the serpent in the cult of Sabazius, see Harrison, Prol.

The rites, we may suppose, have become modified and more orthodox, but none the less they are a valuable testimony to the persistence of the cult among people who still claim power over serpents and immunity from their bite, and who live hard by the home of the ancient tribe which ascribed its origin to the son of Circe."

One may recall the old cult of Sabazios where 9 Cf.

A combination of a cult of the house-snake with that of the (Christian) saint of the master of the house is said to prevail in modern Greece (J.

One may even recall the cult of Dahomey.

For example, when one considers how often milk is used in the tending and propitiation of venerated snakes, it is noteworthy that in Roman cult the truly rustic deities are offered milk (Fowler), and it is no less singular that many of the old goddesses of Greece have serpent attributes (Harrison).'

When the Empire in the 4th century adopted it, its cult, organization and teaching were carried throughout the western world.

As a result, cult and organization and code hardened, forming a shell which proved strong enough to resist all disintegrating tendencies.

The relation of cult to creed is still undetermined.

But it is plausibly maintained that the reverse is true, namely, that theology rests on cult.

So unpurposed does cult grow up that it combines many elements of diverse origin, and is seldom precisely and wholly in accordance with the creed.