Gods Sentence Examples

Surely the gods of chance have favored my brilliance!

The gods couldn't have molded a more perfect woman.

In my fancy the pagan gods and goddesses still walked on earth and talked face to face with men, and in my heart I secretly built shrines to those I loved best.

Gods help the girl, she trusted him of all people.

Gods, but he could smell her sweet scent!  Her large eyes seemed to see right through him.  He feared reaching out, in case she slid through his fingers like smoke.  He'd lost her in life; he wasn't going to risk losing her in his dreams.  He could imagine closing the distance between them, sweeping her up into his arms, and making love to her on the beach.

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.

Gods, Rhyn, take a minute to think before you act.  What's gotten into you anyway?

The eldest of any of the White Gods to mate, he'd been lauded with celebrations for days upon the announcement that he'd chosen a bride.

More importantly, she had to find out what Jonny's next step was, once the month-long truce between White and Black Gods was up.

The White Gods had a long tradition of finding and mating with Oracles.

Gods, Guardians, and Naturals can pass through, too.

What took two gods and two Original Beings to do in Ireland, Darian had done on his own.

Gods know I've done stupid shit in my life and seen people from all walks of life.

As the White and Black Gods of this earth, you are bound by the requirement to turn the violator over to us.

Darian asked, stepping into the center of the room beside the White and Black Gods.

In his time as White God, the obelisk had been the source and seat of power for the White Gods in the immortal world.

It would take the magic of the Original Beings and Gods to do it.

My gods, Darian, the world is falling apart!

May the gods give you strength, dark lady.

From this point, Xander was able to see most of the city, including the white dome of the palace at its center that marked the home of one of the three Gods that ruled the immortal realm.

Gods, it was better than I imagined!

I will be stronger than all three Gods combined.

One of the Gods tripped the wards he had set around his territory in southern California.

The Black God, Jonny, was one of the three Gods dwelling in the mortal realm.

He had no loyalties to any of the Gods, a fact that rendered him useful to all three of them when they were in pissing contests.

Gods, but he hated Oracles.

The two Gods kept each other in check.

The Gods now knew Xander's intention of claiming her; what they couldn't know was that he was also prepared to walk away, if she made the wrong decision.

His senses picked up on the Guardians and Gods gathered in the red barn.

In later times they were addressed not only to the gods, but to human beings.

The term properly implies a clear polytheistic conception of gods in contrast with men, while it recognizes that some men cross the dividing line.

Theocritus (Idyll 17) hails Ptolemy Philadelphus as a demigod, and speaks of his father as seated among the gods along with Alexander.

In China at the present day many Taoist gods are (or are given out as) men deified for service to the state.

According to the latter, some men may become gods.

According to the former, all gods are but men; or, some men have been erroneously supposed to become gods.

But whether the great gods of polytheism were really transfigured ancestors is very doubtful.

Thus (though earlier Indian and Bactrian coins do not show it) it is found with the gods on some of the coins of the Indian kings Kanishka, Huvishka and Vasudeva, 58 B.C. to A.D.

Violation of the duties of hospitality was likely to provoke the wrath of the gods; but it does not appear that anything beyond this religious sanction existed to guard the rights of a traveller.

To the native Egyptians Alexander appeared as a deliverer from the Persian tyranny, and he sacrificed piously to the gods of Memphis.

Not only is the whole atmosphere Christian in colouring, but we actually find the Greek gods in the guise of Enoch, Elijah, &c., while Philip is a Christian martyr, and Alexander himself a great apostle, even a saint; quotations from the Bible are frequent.

His strongest denunciation is directed against the religious practices of the time in Judea - the worship of the Canaanite local deities (the Baals), the Phoenician Tammuz, and the sun and other Babylonian and Assyrian gods (vi., viii., xvi., xxiii.); he maintained vigorously the prophetic struggle for the sole worship of Yahweh.

Probably he believed in the existence of other gods, though he does not express himself clearly on this point; in any case he held that the worship of other deities was destructive to Israel.

In the Timaeus (41 A) the immortality even of the gods is made dependent on the will of the Supreme Creator; souls are not in their own nature indestructible, but persist because of His goodness.

It is to this period that we must trace such designations of the god as "father of the gods," "chief of the gods," "creator of all things," and the like.

The question, however, still remains to be answered how people came to the belief or to the assumption that through the soul, or the seat of life of the sacrificial animal, the intention of the gods could be divined.

One of the chief names for the priest was baru - literally the "inspector" - which was given to him because of the prominence of his function as an inspector of livers for the purpose of divining the intention of the gods.

By the time the third stage, which placed the seat of soul-life in the brain, was reached through the further advance of anatomical knowledge, the religious rites of Greece and Rome were too deeply incrusted to admit of further radical changes, and faith in the gods had already declined too far to bring new elements into the religion.

He was free, but had to accept monetary compensation for corporal injuries, paid smaller fees and fines, even paid less offerings to the gods.

In Rome the pope gave way to popular clamour, granting one concession after another, and on the 8th of February he publicly called down Gods blessing on Italythat Italy hated by the Austrians, whose name it had hitherto been a crime to mention.

Brahma (n.) is the designation generally applied to the Supreme Soul (paramatman), or impersonal, all-embracing divine essence, the original source and ultimate goal of all that exists; Brahma (m.), on the other hand, is only one of the three hypostases of that divinity whose creative activity he represents, as distinguished from its preservative and destructive aspects, ever apparent in life and nature, and represented by the gods Vishnu and Siva respectively.

God is the soul of the world, although the gods of popular belief are (at least by the later Stoics) respectfully if exoterically acknowledged.

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

It suggests in every deed a personal but limited God, or a number of Gods - " Religions of spiritual Individuality," including, along with " Judaism," the anthropomorphic religions of Greece and Rome.

Marcus himself says, "To the gods I am indebted for having good grandfathers, good parents, a good sister, good teachers, good associates, good kinsmen and friends, nearly everything good."

Other ancient writers, however, speak of his visit to the underworld; according to Plato, the infernal gods only " presented an apparition" of Eurydice to him.

They dealt with such subjects as the origin of the gods, the creation of the world, the ritual of purification and initiation, and oracular responses.

The Orphic poems also played an important part in the controversies between Christian and pagan writers in the 3rd and 4th centuries after Christ; pagan writers quoted them to show the real meaning of the multitude of gods, while Christians retorted by reference to the obscene and disgraceful fictions by which the former degraded their gods.

He was a favourite of the gods, and an intimate friend of Achilles, to whom he was commissioned to announce the death of Patroclus.

The whole country was reduced to a desert, Susa was plundered and razed to the ground, the royal sepulchres were desecrated, and the images of the gods and of 32 kings "in silver, gold, bronze and alabaster," were carried away.

Among the principal examples are " Roman Triumphs " (not the same compositions as the Hampton Court pictures), " A Bacchanal Festival," " Hercules and Antaeus," " Marine Gods," " Judith with the Head of Holophernes," the " Deposition from the Cross," the " Entombment," the " Resurrection," the " Man of Sorrows," the " Virgin in a Grotto."

If, in the Gnostic systems, these become daemonic or semi-daemonic forces, this points to the fact that a stronger monotheistic religion (the Iranian) had gained the upper hand over the Babylonian, and had degraded its gods to daemons.

Thus it appears that the gift theory may after all be primitive; the worship of, or care for, the dead may have supplied in other areas the motive for the transition from offering to sacrifice or the evolution may have been due to the spiritualization of the gods.

In the former case the sacrificer is raised to a higher level; he enters into closer communion with the gods.

In the most developed forms, such as the offering of soma, they assumed a great importance; (r) the sacrificer had to pass from the world of man into a world of the gods; consequently he was separated from the common herd of mankind and purified; he underwent ceremonies emblematic of rebirth and was then subject to numberless taboos imposed for the purpose of maintaining his ceremonial purity.

The cord was drawn tight and the victim ceased to breathe; its spirit passed into the world of the gods.

Though the moralization of gods has only proceeded pari passu with the moralization of mankind, the deities of the more advanced nations are perhaps felt by them to be more terrible and more difficult of access than the divinities of lower races; herein lies one explanation of the power of the priesthood.

The corpse may be burnt, in part or as a whole; portions may be assigned to the priest, the sacrificer and the gods; the skull, bones, &c., may receive special treatment; the fat or blood may be set aside, and they or the ashes may be singled out as the share of the god, to be offered upon the altar; the skin of the victim may be employed as a covering for the idol or material representative of the god, either permanently or till the next annual sacrifice.

The victim was often kept in captivity and well fed; to transfer their sins people laid their hands upon him as he was led in procession, his head covered with ashes; on the way to the place of sacrifice were three enclosures, the second open to chiefs and priest only, the third to the officiant and his helper alone; the blood of the victim was offered to the gods.

The most strongly distinguishing feature of the code is the rigid exclusion of the worship of other gods than Yahweh.

The old gods were not to be at once discrowned of might.

Similarly in the earlier pre-exilian period of Israel's occupation of Canaanite territory the Hebrews were always subject to this tendency to worship the old Baal or `Ashtoreth (the goddess who made the cattle and flocks prolific).3 A few years of drought or of bad seasons would make a Hebrew settler betake himself to the old Canaanite gods.

But the prevalence of the worship of " other gods " and of graven images in these " high places," and the moral debasement of life which accompanied these cults, made it clear that the " high places " were sources of grave injury to Israel's social life.

Owing to its durability the wood was employed for mummy cases, and images of the gods; .....

She is rarely mentioned in Homer, nor is she included amongst the Olympian gods.

They believed in the existence of two gods, a good (whose son was Christ) and an evil (whose son was Satan); matter is the creation of the evil principle, and therefore essentially evil, and the greatest of all sins is sexual intercourse, even in marriage; sinful also is the possession of material goods, and the eating of flesh meat, and many other things.

In the approaching disruption writers saw the punishment for the king's apostasy, and they condemn the sanctuaries in Jerusalem which he erected to the gods of his heathen wives.

Cyrus on entering Babylon had even restored the gods to the cities to which they belonged.

In the Odyssey it is said that the gods disclosed the impiety.

The famous story of Herodotus, that the conqueror condemned Croesus to the stake, from which he was saved by the intervention of the gods, is quite inconsistent with the Persian religion.

Man is able to derive a measure of enjoyment from life in spite of the nonexistence of the orthodox gods; yet this enjoyment is on the whole negative, the avoidance of pain.

The doctrine once established remained an inherent part of the Babylonian-Assyrian religion and led to the more or less complete disassociation of the three gods constituting the triad from their original local limitations.

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.

His wife besought the gods below that he might be permitted to return to earth for the space of three hours.

In works of art there is considerable resemblance between the representations of Zeus, king of the gods, and Agamemnon, king, of men.

But just as gods are not necessarily spiritual, demons may also be regarded as corporeal; vampires for example are sometimes described as human heads with appended entrails, which issue from the tomb to attack the living during the night watches.

Another class of nocturnal demons are the incubi and succubi, who are said to consort with human beings in their sleep; in the Antilles these were the ghosts of the dead; in New Zealand likewise ancestral deities formed liaisons with females; in the Samoan Islands the inferior gods were regarded as the fathers of children otherwise unaccounted for; the Hindus have rites prescribed by which a companion nymph may be secured.

Side by side with the conception of the corn spirit as an animal is the anthropomorphic view of it; and this element must have predominated in the evolution of the cereal deities like Demeter; at the same time traces of the association of gods and goddesses of corn with animal embodiments of the corn spirit are found.

Sometimes the gods of an older religion degenerate into the demons of the belief which supersedes it.

In the folklore of European countries goblindom is peopled by gods and nature-spirits of an earlier heathendom.

Malak-bel has been explained as " messenger of Bel "; but more probably Malak is the common Babylonian epithet malik given to various gods, and means " counsellor "; Malak-bel will then be the sun as the visible representative of Bel.

Altogether about 22 names of gods are found in Palmyrene; some of them, however, only occur in compound proper names.

Diodorus informs us that a sacrifice acceptable to the gods must be attended by a Druid, for they are the intermediaries.

He was the traditional king of Sipylus in Lydia (or of Phrygia), and was the intimate friend of Zeus and the other gods, to whose table he was admitted.

Tantalus's betrayal of the secrets of the gods refers to the sun unveiling the secrets of heaven; the slaying of Pelops denotes the going-down of the sun, Pelops meaning the "` gray one," an epithet of the gloomy sky in which the last rays of the sun are extinguished.

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.

A specific Baal of the heavens appears to have been known among the Hittites in the time of Rameses II., and considerably later, at the beginning of the 7th century, it was the title of one of the gods of Phoenicia.

Some of its enactments are purely pagan - thus one paragraph allows the mother to kill her new-born child, and another prescribes the immolation to the gods of the defiler of their temple; others are purely Christian, such as those which prohibit incestuous marriages and working on Sunday.

The Hindus are fond of painting the outside of their houses a deep red colour, and of covering the most conspicuous parts with pictures of flowers, men, women, bulls, elephants and gods and goddesses in all the many forms known in Hindu mythology.

All that kind of pre-established harmony Wagner left behind him the moment he deserted the heroes and villains of romantic opera for the visionary and true tragedy of gods and demi-gods, giants and gnomes, with beauty, nobility and love in the wrong, and the forces of destruction and hate set free by blind justice.

The gods, as the giants plaintively admit, " rule by beauty"; hence the " Walhalla-motif."

Osiris and Isis are closely connected with Syria and the Lebanon in legend; the Ded or sacred pillar of Osiris is doubtless really a representation of a great cedar with its horizontally outspreading branches; 8 another of the sacred Egyptian trees is obviously a cypress; corn and wine are traditionally associated with Osiris, and it is probable that corn and wine were first domesticated in Syria, and came thence with the gods Osiris and Re (the sun god of Heliopolis) into the Delta.

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.

Especially to the gods of the conquered people Alexander showed respect.

None of the coins with Alexander's own image can be shown to have been issued during his reign; the traditional gods of the Greeks still admitted no living man to share their prerogative in this sphere.

As the consort of En -lil, the goddess Nin-lil or Belit belongs to Nippur and her titles as "ruler of heaven and earth," and "mother of the gods" are all due to her position as the wife of Bel.

In Homer, where they appear indifferently under the name of apirveac and 615EXAca, their function is to carry off those whose sudden disappearance is desired by the gods.

Having been deprived of his sight by the gods for his ill-treatment of his sons by his first wife (or for having revealed the future to mortals), he was condemned to be tormented by two Harpies, who carried off whatever food was placed before him.

Rohde (Rheinisches Museum, i., 1895) regards them as spirits of the storm, which at the bidding of the gods carry off human beings alive to the under-world or some spot beyond human ken.

He explained not only the gods but also the heroes Agamemnon, Achilles, Hector, as representing primary elements and natural phenomena.

A refuge from cruel treatment was afforded by the temples and altars of the gods and by the sacred groves.

Of the head nothing could be made but garlands for the shrines of the gods; but the wood of the root was employed in the manufacture of different utensils as well as for fuel.

According to the Avesta (Yasna, 9, 17),, Airyanem Vaejo, on the river Daitya, the old sacred country of the gods, was the home of Zoroaster, and the scene of his.

The daevas, unmasked and attacked by Zoroaster as the true enemies of mankind, are still, in the Gathas, without doubt the perfectly definite gods of old popular belief - the idols of the people.

He worships and serves false gods, being unable to distinguish between truth and lies.

For the great mass of the people Zoroaster's doctrine was too abstract and spiritualistic. The vulgar fancy requires sensuous, plastic deities, which admit of visible representation; and so the old gods received honour again and new gods won acceptance.

The Hortatory Address to the Greeks is an appeal to them to give up the worship of their gods, and to devote themselves to the worship of the one living and true God.

After eight years' wandering in the east, he landed on the island of Pharos, where Proteus revealed to him the means of appeasing the gods and securing his return.

See Esperandieu, Inscriptions de Lectoure (1892), pp. 94 ff.; Zippel, Festschrift zum Doctorjubilaeum, Ludwig Friedlander, 1895, p. 489 f.; Showerman, The Great Mother of the Gods, Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, No.

Their bodies lay for nine days unburied, for Zeus had changed the people to stone; on the tenth day they were buried by the gods.

The tragedians used her story to point the moral of the instability of human happiness; Niobe became the representative of human nature, liable to pride in prosperity and forgetfulness of the respect and submission due to the gods.

According to him, the myths arose from definite local (especially atmospheric and aquatic) phenomena, and represented the annually recurring processes of nature as the acts of gods and heroes; thus, in Achill (1853), the Trojan War is the winter conflict of the elements in that district.

He has ever been the patron saint of Mediterranean sailors, who regard St Elmo's fire as the visible sign of his guardianship. The phenomenon was known to the ancient Greeks, and Pliny in his Natural History states that when there were two lights sailors called them Castor and Pollux and invoked them as gods.

Finally, philosophy as well as politics contributed to the success of Mithraism, for the outcome of the attempt to recognize in the Graeco-Roman gods only forces of nature was to make the Sun the most important of deities; and it was the Sun with whom Mithras was identified.

With this monument as a basis, Franz Cumont has arranged the small Mithraic reliefs into two groups, one illustrating the legend of the origin of the gods, and the other the legend of Mithras.

From Heaven and Earth sprang the remaining members of a circle analogous to the Olympic gods.

If we are not prepared to say that the three Persons are one thing - in which case the Father and the Holy Ghost must have been incarnate along with the Son - then, did usage permit, he says, we ought to speak of three Gods.

In Aeschylus fate is powerful even over the gods.

As a unity Gandharva has no special attributes but many duties, and is in close relation with the great I gods.

He is the keeper of heaven's secrets and acts as messenger between gods and men.

The origin of the obelisk may be sought in sacred upright stones set up in honour of gods and dead, like the menhirs, and the Semitic Massebahs and bethels.

His ambitious attempt to ascend to the heavens on Pegasus brought upon him the wrath of the gods.

It occupies the site of the ancient Adranon, which took its name from Adranos, a god probably of Phoenician origin, in Roman times identified with Vulcan, whose chief temple was situated here, and was guarded by a thousand huge gods; there are perhaps some substructures of this building still extant outside the town.

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.

As worn by gods and men it was a long and rather loose kind of skirt suspended from a girdle.

It is worn by gods and men, and with the latter sometimes has ear-flaps (at Lachish, with other varieties, Ball, 190) or is surmounted by a feather or crest.

It resembles the sceptre curved at the end, which was carried by old Hittite gods.

The Pharaoh's characteristic crown (or crowns) symbolized his royal domains, the sacred uraeus marked his divine ancestry, and he sometimes appeared in the costume of the gods with their fillets adorned with double feathers and horns.

In Babylonia Naram-Sin in the guise of a god wears the pointed helmet and two great horns distinctive of the deities.3 This relationship between the gods and their human representatives is variously expressed.

Thus we perceive that ancient costume and toilet involves the relations between the gods and men, and also, what is extremely important, the political conditions among the latter.

Yet men imagine gods to be born, and to have raiment and voice and body, like themselves..

Even so the gods of the Ethiopians are swarthy and flat-nosed, the gods of the Thracians are fair-haired and blue eyed..

Even so oxen, lions and horses, if they had hands wherewith to grave images, would fashion gods after their own shapes and make them bodies like to their own.

The Greek gods being the powers of nature personified, pantheism lay nearer to hand than monotheism.

Thirdly, when Xenophanes himself says that theories about gods and about things are not knowledge, that his own utterances are not verities but verisimilitudes, and that, so far from learning things by revelation, man must laboriously seek a better opinion, he plainly renounces the "disinterested pursuit of truth."

Whilst it can hardly be allowed that Xenophanes, so far from denying, actually affirms a plurality of gods, it must be conceded to Freudenthal that Xenophanes's polemic was directed against the anthropomorphic tendencies and the mythological details of the contemporary polytheism rather than against the polytheistic principle, and that, apart from the treatise De Melisso Xenophane et Gorgia, now generally discredited, there is no direct evidence to prove him a consistent monotheist.

In his cosmogonic treatise on nature and the gods, called Hevr4tvxo (Preller's correction of Suidas, who has E7rTaµuXos) from the five elementary or original principles (aether, fire, air, water, earth; Gomperz substitutes smoke and darkness for aether and earth), he enunciated a system in which science, allegory and mythology were blended.

Chronos begat fire, air and water, and from these three sprang numerous other gods; Smoke and darkness appear in a later tradition.

Among the titles accorded to him are "king of lands," "king of heaven and earth" and "father of the gods."

Grouped around the main sanctuary there arose temples and chapels to the gods and goddesses who formed his court, so that E-Kur became the name for an entire sacred precinct in the city of Nippur.

Nippur continued to be a sacred city after it ceased to have any considerable political importance, while in addition the rise of the doctrine of a triad of gods symbolizing the three divisions - heavens, earth and water - assured to Bel, to whom the earth was assigned as his province, his place in the religious system.

Following Epicurus he sets before himself the aim of finally crushing that fear of the gods and that fear of death resulting from it which he regards as the source of all the human ills.

Although the title of the poem implies that it is a treatise on the "whole nature of things," the aim of Lucretius is to treat only those branches of science which are necessary to clear the mind from the fear of the gods and the terrors of a future state.

But his conception even of the ancient gods and of their indirect influence on human life is more worthy than the popular one.

The effect of unworthy conceptions of the divine nature is that they render a man incapable of visiting the temples of the gods in a calm spirit, or of receiving the emanations that "announce the divine peace" in peaceful tranquillity.

He appears to have had no great sense of natural beauty, in which point he resembled his generation (though one remarkable story is told of his being deeply affected by Alpine scenery); and, except in his passion for the stage, he does not seem to have cared much for any of the arts, Conversation and literature were, again as in Johnson's case, the sole gods of his idolatry.

The Ramayana and Mahabharata afford evidence of the employment of incense by the Hindus, in the worship of the gods and the burning of the dead, from the remotest antiquity.

Frankincense, however, though the most common, never became the only kind of incense offered to the gods among the Greeks.

Buddha lived in the centre of Hindu India and among the many gods of the Brahmans.

Elsewhere we see the victorious prince beating down a vanquished enemy, and superintending the execution of other prisoners who are being sacrificed to the gods, while in one curious scene he is striking with his mace a sort of wicker-work cage filled with naked men.

Six of the statues bore special names, and offerings were made to them as to the statues of the gods.

Cyrus now claimed to be the legitimate successor of the ancient Babylonian kings and the avenger of Bel-Merodach, who was wrathful at the impiety of Nabonidus in removing the images of the local gods from their ancestral shrines to his capital Babylon.

One of the first acts of Cyrus accordingly was to allow these exiles to return to their own homes, carrying with them the images of their gods and their sacred vessels.

His palace was more sumptuous than the temples of the gods, from which it was quite separate.

In the first book an account is given of the creation of the world out of the primeval deep and the birth of the gods of light.

Then comes the story of the struggle between the gods of light and the powers of darkness, and the final victory of Merodach, who clove Tiamat asunder, forming the heaven out of one half of her body and the earth out of the other.

Hades, the abode of Nin-erisgal or Allat, had been entered by Nergal, who, angered by a message sent to her by the gods of the upper world, ordered Namtar to strike off her head.

Besides the conventional use of certain signs as the indications of names of gods, countries, cities, vessels, birds, trees, &c., which, known as " determinants," are the Sumerian signs of the terms in question and were added as a guide for the reader, proper names more particularly continued to be written to a large extent in purely " ideographic " fashion.

In most cases, however, these belong to the category of minor deities or represent old local gods assimilated to some more powerful god, who absorbed, as it were, the attributes and prerogatives of these minor ones.

In many cases they will probably turn out to be descriptive epithets of gods 3 The Assyrian language is practically identical with the Babylonian, just as the Assyrians are the same people as the Babylonians with some foreign admixtures.

Winckler has adduced evidence from names of local gods to show that there was an Indo-European racial element in Mitanni; but none for a similar element in the Hatti, whose chief god was Teshub.

According to tradition the male and female gods lived in mountains whence they descended to hear the prayers of the people.

Sacred things, according to Gaius, were those things that had been definitely consecrated to the gods - and so had come to partake of their holiness.

Very many of them are votive inscriptions and contain little more than the names of gods and princes or private men.

Among these remains are altars, and bases for statues of gods or for golden images of animals dedicated to gods.

At the same time the facts that the inscriptions are undated until a late period, that few are historical in their contents, and for the most part yield only names of gods and rulers and domestic and religious details, and that our collection is still very incomplete, have led to much serious disagreement among scholars as to the reconstruction of the history of Arabia in the pre-Christian centuries.

Besides Truth, and the book Of the Gods which caused his condemnation at Athens, Diogenes Laertius attributes to him treatises on political, ethical, educational and rhetorical subjects.

Pliny says that their wood was everlasting, and therefore images of the gods were made of it; he makes mention also of the oil of cedar, or cedrium, distilled from the wood, and used by the ancients for preserving their books from moths and damp; papyri anointed or rubbed with cedrium were on this account called ced ati libri.

A formal treaty was then concluded, which the Slavonians swore to observe in the names of their gods Perun and Volos.

Modern scholars have sometimes found in the name the expression of the aseity 14 of God; sometimes of his reality, in contrast to the imaginary gods of the heathen.

The combination of Yah with Ea, one of the great Babylonian gods, seems to have a peculiar fascination for amateurs, by whom it is periodically " discovered."

During the persecution under Maximinus she sought an interview with the emperor, upbraided him for his cruelties, and adjured him to give up the worship of false gods.

The view most commonly held is that they were degraded or " depotentiated " gods, occupying a position intermediate between gods and men.

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.

The cult-heroes were all persons who had lived the life of man on earth, and it was necessary for the degraded gods to pass through this stage.

The heroes are spirits of the dead, not demi-gods; their position is not intermediate between gods and men, but by the side of these they exist as a separate class.

Again, side by side with gods of superior rank, certain heroes were worshipped as protecting spirits of the country or state; such were the Aeacidae amongst the Aeginetans, Ajax son of Oileus amongst the Epizephyrian Locrians and Hector at Thebes.

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.

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.

Of the latter the number has tended to diminish in the light of modern scholarship. The fashion during the 19th century set strongly in the other direction, and the " degraded gods " theory was applied not only to such conspicuous heroes as Siegfried, Dietrich and Beowulf, but to a host of minor characters, such as the good marquis Rudeger of the Nibelungenlied and our own Robin Hood (both identified with Woden Hruodperaht).

The reaction from one extreme has, indeed, tended to lead to another, until not only the heroes, but the very gods themselves, are being traced to very human, not to say commonplace, origins.

The Teutonic heroes are, in the main, historical personages, never gods; though, like the Greek heroes, they are sometimes endowed with semi-divine attributes or interpreted as symbolical representations of natural forces.

Every night Hilde revives the fallen, and " so will it continue till the twilight of the gods."

Alarmed at his lengthy absence the people clamoured for "gods" to lead them, and at the instigation of Aaron, they brought their jewelry and made the calf out of it.

When, later, they migrated, they despoiled the sacred place and carried off the gods and priest to their newly won home at Laish.

Subsequent sociologists may have conceivably to men's minds were in the theological state, political events, for example, were explained by the will of the gods, and political authority based on divine right.

A majority of the artists are content to copy old pictures of Buddhas sixteen disciples, the seven gods of happiness, and other similar assemblages of mythical or historical personages, not only because such work offers large opportunity for the use of striking colors and the production of meretricious effects, dear to the eye of the average Western householder and tourist, but also because a complicated design, as compared with a simple one, has the advantage of hiding the technical imperfections of the ware.

If any person who has been educated in or has professed the Christian religion shall, by writing, printing, teaching, or advised speaking, assert or maintain that there are more Gods than one, or shall deny any of the persons of the Holy Trinity to be God, or shall deny the Christian religion to be true or the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be of divine authority, he shall for the first offence be declared incapable of holding any ecclesiastical, civil, or military office or employment, and for the second incapable of bringing any action, or of being guardian, executor, legatee, or grantee, and shall suffer three years' imprisonment without bail.

Its three roots go down into the three great realms - (I) of death, where, in the well Hvergelmer, the dragon Nidhug (Niandggr) and his brood are ever gnawing it; (2) of the giants, where, in the fountain of Mimer, is the source of wisdom; (3) of the gods, Asgard, where, at the sacred fountain of Urd, is the divine tribunal, and the dwelling of the Fates.

Such a theory must be mythical in form, and, after gods have arisen, is likely to be a theogony (0E6s, god) as well as a cosmogony (Babylonia, Egypt, Phoenicia, Polynesia).

The latter received mythical representation in that most interesting god (but originally rather culture-hero) Maui, who, in NewZealand practically supplants Tangaloa, and becomes the god of the air and of the heaven, the creator and the causer of the flood.2 Speculation opened the usual deep problem; whence came the gods?

A strange episode in the legend of the destruction of man by the gods tells how Ra (or Re), the first king of the world, finding in his old age that mankind ceased to respect him, first tried the remedy of massacre, and then ascended the heavenly cow, and organized a new world - that of heaven.9 8.

Some said that the gods had blinded him because he had revealed to men what they ought not to know.

Traces of this union of immigrants with older inhabitants have been detected in the combination of Zeus Herkeios with Apollo Patrons as the ancient gods of the phratry.

The former comprised two beneficent gods of the necropolis; the latter also were beneficent, but warlike, divinities.

The domestic dog would be brought into the sacred circle through the increased veneration for animals, and the more pronounced view in later times of Anubis as servant, messenger and custodian of the gods.

On a stepped pedestal facing the open stood the statues of the gods and the admirals, perhaps in rows above one another.

Here we have a series of celebrations representing the occupations of the successive seasons, addressed sometimes to numina who developed later on into the great gods of the state, such as Jupiter, Mars or Ceres, sometimes to vaguer divinities who remained always indefinite and rustic in character, such as Pales and Consus.

Organization showed itself in the fixing of the annual calendar and the development of the character and functions of the priesthood, and as we should expect, in a new conception of the legal relation of the gods to the state.

The consequence was the introduction of certain new deities, the di novensides, from external sources, and the birth of new conceptions of the gods and their worship. We may distinguish three main influences, to a certain extent historically successive.

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.

Its first note is struck by Ennius in his translation of the Sceptl- Sicilian rationalist Euhemerus, who explained the genesis m, of the gods as apotheosized mortals.

She marched through the open door into the Roman state, and settled down there to Christianize the state by imparting to it the word of the Gospel, but at the same time leaving it everything except its gods.

Some of them, who denied that they had ever been Christians, had consented to pray to the gods, to adore the image of the emperor, and to blaspheme Christ; these he had dismissed.

All of these worshipped images of the gods and of the emperor, and blasphemed Christ.

If, however, any one denied that he was a Christian, and ratified his denial by worshipping the gods of Rome, he was to receive pardon.

Here were represented Isis and Serapis, Helios, the Mother of the Gods, the Fates, Demeter and Persephone; but no trace of these temples remains.

The other attitude, however, is that into which simple-minded Latin peasants actually lapse, as it is also that which characterizes other religions ancient or modern which use pictures or sculptures of gods, demons, men, brutes, or of particular parts and organs of the same.

This is not necessarily the case with the worshipper of aniconic or unshaped gods.

Equally contradictory of any such law of development is the circumstance that the Greeks of the 5th and 4th centuries B.C., although Pheidias and other artists were embodying their gods and goddesses in the most perfect of images, nevertheless continued to cherish the rude aniconic stocks and stones of their ancestors.

Possessing no images of Yahweh the Jews were also not exposed to the same risk as were idolaters of having their gods stolen by their foes and used against them.

But the tendency of his art is to give rise to new tales of the gods.

In the Roman religion, on a feast of thanksgiving for a great victory, couches were spread in the temples for the gods, whose images were taken down from their pedestals and laid on the couches, and tables set before them loaded with delicate viands.

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.

The Ionian geographers looked on the circular disk of the habitable world as surrounded by a mighty stream named Oceanus, the name of the primeval god, father of gods and men, and thus the bond of union between heaven and earth.

It means "gate of the god," not"gate of the gods," corresponding to the Assyrian Bab-ili.

The gods, however, destroyed it with fire and confounded the language of the builders.

Until recent years the Baganda and most of the other Bantu peoples of the protectorate worshipped ancestral and nature spirits who had become elevated to the rank of gods and goddesses.

Doubtless with the object of expanding the flourishing foreign trade of Samos, he entered into alliance with Amasis, king of Egypt, who, according to Herodotus, renounced his ally because he feared that the gods, in envy of Polycrates' excessive good fortune, would bring ruin upon him and his allies.

Even in Mexican and Mayan sculptures the gods are arrayed in gorgeous breech-clouts.

Beliefs and practices with reference to the heavenly world were inspired by zoic activities; its location, scenery and environment were the homes of beast gods.

The Areois travelled about, devoting their whole time to feasting, dancing (the chief dance of the women being the grossly indecent Timorodeementionedby Captain Cook), and debauchery, varied by elaborate realistic stage presentments of the lives and loves of gods and legendary heroes.

In late times the priests of Denderah claimed Khufu as a benefactor; he was reputed to have built temples to the gods near the Great Pyramids and Sphinx (where also a pyramid of his daughter Hentsen is spoken of), and there are incidental notices of him in the medical and religious literature.

The form Seaxneat is identical with Saxnot, one of three gods mentioned in a short continental document probably of Old Saxon origin.

Achilles is a typical Greek hero; handsome, brave, celebrated for his fleetness of foot, prone to excess of wrath and grief, at the same time he is compassionate, hospitable, full of affection for his mother and respect for the gods.

He next helped the gods in the great battle against the giants.

The guardian angels of the nations in Daniel probably represent the gods of the heathen, and we have there the first step of the process by which these gods became evil angels, an idea expanded by Milton in Paradise Lost.

In Homer he is the origin of all things, even the father of the gods, and the equal in rank of all of them save Zeus.

A properly understood worship of gods and demons is quite compatible with a purified monotheism, and they might as well give up the mad idea of winning the authorities over to their faith, or of hoping to attain anything like universal agreement on divine things.

In the `Ola inscriptions we read the names of Minaean kings and gods.

Most of the many names of gods are mere names that appear and vanish again in particular districts and temples.

Of the great national gods of the Sabaeans and Minaeans we know a little more.

Wadd and Nikrah, the gods of love and hate, are possibly only other forms of the two `Athtars.

Three gods of the inscriptions are named in the Koran - Wadd, Yaghuth and Nasr. In the god name Ta'lab there may be an indication of tree-worship. The many minor deities may be passed over; but we must mention the sanctuary of Riyam, with its images of the sun and moon, and, according to tradition, an oracle.

Sacrifices and incense were offered to the gods.

The gods received tithes of the produce of trade and of the field, in kind or in ingots and golden statues, and these tributes, with freewill offerings, erected and maintained the temples.

Their commerce brought the Sabaeans under Christian and Jewish influence; and, though the old gods were too closely connected with their life and trade to be readily abandoned, the great change in the trading policy, already spoken of, seems to have affected religion as well as the state.

The inland gods lost importance with the failure of the overland trade, and Judaism and Christianity seem for a time to have contended for the mastery in South Arabia.

Socrates was charged with " not believing in the gods the city believes in."

In this work he for the first time systematized an old Oriental (perhaps Phoenician) method of interpreting the popular myths, asserting that the gods who formed the chief objects of popular worship had been originally heroes and conquerors, who had thus earned a claim to the veneration of their subjects.

There is no doubt that it contains an element of truth; as among the Romans the gradual deification of ancestors and the apotheosis of emperors were prominent features of religious development, so among primitive peoples it is possible to trace the evolution of family and tribal gods from great chiefs and warriors.

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.

To the phrase" ye shall be as gods "a later writer may have added" knowing good and evil,"but" to be as gods "originally meant" to live the life of gods - wise, powerful, happy."The serpent was in the main right, but there is one point which he did not mention, viz.

Only thus could even the gods escape death.'

He had a chance, however, of obtaining the gift, or at least of eating the food and drinking the water which makes the gods ageless and immortal.

According to Jastrow, this attempted ascension was an offence against the gods, and his fall was his punishment.

But certainly the myth does help us to imagine a story in which, for some sin against the gods, some favoured hero was hurled down from the divine abode, and such a story may some day be discovered.

Some better monumental illustration may some day be found, for it is clear that the Babylonian sacred literature had much to tell of offences against the gods in the primeval age.

In the Odyssey, however, he appears mainly as the messenger of the gods, and the conductor of the dead to Hades.

Though athletic, he was one of the least militant of the gods; a title rpoµaxos, the Defender, is found only in connexion with a victory of young men ("ephebes") in a battle at Tanagra.

His strongest arguments are that the wind would easily develop into the messenger of the gods (Len oU pos), and that it was often thought to promote fertility in crops and cattle.

Sometimes he was represented in his pastoral character, as when he bears a sheep on his shoulders; at other times he appears as the messenger or herald of the gods with the KfpvKEiov, or herald's staff, which is his most frequent attribute.

He accordingly commissioned Hephaestus to fashion a woman out of earth, upon whom the gods bestowed their choicest gifts.

Before leaving, he led his troops to the coast opposite Britain, and ordered them to pick up shells on the seashore, to be dedicated to the gods at Rome as the spoils of ocean.

The Chaldaeans chose three stars in each sign to be the " councillor gods" of the planets."

The superfluous asterism, named Abhijit, included the bright star a Lyrae, under whose influence the gods had vanquished the Asuras.

The name Kovpe&TCS is derived either from Koupos, that is, the day of the young, or less probably from Keipw, because on this occasion young people cut their hair and offered it to the gods.

All the gods, even Zeus, hate him, but his bitterest enemy is Athena, who fells him to the ground with a huge stone.

In this last aspect he was one of the chief gods of the Thracians, amongst whom his home was placed even in the time of Homer.

In Homer Ares is the lover of Aphrodite, the wife of Hephaestus, who catches them together in a net and holds them up to the ridicule of the gods.

His worship was not so widely spread over Greece as that of other gods, although he was honoured here and there with festivals and sacrifices.

It was here, according to the legend, that he was tried and acquitted by a council of the gods for the murder of Halirrhothius, who had violated Alcippe, the daughter of Ares by Agraulos.

The worship of Ares being less general throughout Greece than that of the gods of peace, the number of statues of him is small; those of Ares-Mars, among the Romans, are more frequent.

Augustine's City of God, published in 426, was an apologetic, not an historical work, but it had great influence in our field, for in it he undertook to answer the common heathen accusation that the growing misfortunes of the empire were due to the prevalence of Christianity and the forsaking of the gods of Rome.

Thus we find that the Egyptian monarch was empowered to exercise priestly functions before all the gods.

We constantly see him in the wall-paintings portrayed as a priest in the conventional attitudes before the images of the gods.

On the other hand, gentes and phratriae, which had no natural head, had special priests chosen from their members; for every circle of ancient society, from the family up to the state, was a religious as well as a civil unity, and had its own gods and sacred rites.

The position was often lucrative and always honourable, and the priests were under the special protection of the gods they served.

As man approached the gods in sacrifice and prayers, so too the gods declared themselves to men by divers signs and tokens, which it was possible to read by the art of Divination (q.v.).

Priestly acts - that is, acts done by one and accepted by the gods on behalf of many - are common to all antique religions, and cannot be lacking where the primary subject of religion is not the individual but the natural community.

The upright and considerate manner in which he treated the provincials won him their affection, but at the same time brought upon him the hatred of Nero, who felt specially aggrieved because Soranus had refused to punish a city which had defended the statues of its gods against the Imperial commissioners.

Occasionally he is didactic, as in Worek Judaszow (The Bag of Judas) and Victoria deorum, where, under the allegory of the gods of Olympus, he represents the struggles of parties in Poland, not without severely satirizing the nobility and ecclesiastics.

This is a colossal seated image cut in a niche of the rock, of "Hittite" origin, and perhaps that called by Pausanias the "very ancient statue of the Mother of the Gods," carved by Broteas, son of Tantalus, and sung by Homer.

The reason for this punishment is not mentioned in Homer, and is obscure; according to some, he had revealed the designs of the gods to mortals, according to others, he was in the habit of attacking and murdering travellers.

Diogenes Laertius says, "If the gods use dialectic, they can use none other than that of Chrysippus"; A yap v Xpuvciriros, oinc av i v Ewa, ("Without Chrysippus, there had been no Porch").

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.

The gods Apollo and Poseidon served him for hire, Apollo tending his herds, while Poseidon built the walls of Troy.

The process of assimilation did not proceed so far in Babylonia and Assyria, but Shamash and Adad became in combination the gods of oracles and of divination in general.

Whether the will of the gods is determined through the inspection of the liver of the sacrificial animal, through observing the action of oil bubbles in a basin of water or through the observation of the movements of the heavenly bodies, it is Shamash and Adad who, in the ritual connected with divination, are invariably invoked.

Similarly in the annals and votive inscriptions of the kings, when oracles are referred to, Shamash and Adad are always named as the gods addressed, and their ordinary designation in such instances is bele biri, " lords of divination."

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?

The nous is a sort of second god, the X6yoc which are wrapped up in it are gods, the stars are gods, and so on.

He is not to be classed amongst the " deceived deceivers," and the restoration of the worship of the old gods was by no means his chief object.

But, outspoken as he was in his criticism of the popular religions, he had no wish to give them up. He stood up for a pure worship of the many gods, and maintained the cause of every old national religion and the ceremonial duties of its adherents.

Of more historical interest are the two books Contra Symmachum, of 658 and 1131 hexameter verses respectively, the first attacking the pagan gods, the second directed against the petition of Symmachus to the emperor for the restoration of the altar and statue of Victory which Gratian had cast down.

Fenrir grew so large that the gods were afraid of him and had him chained up. But he broke the first two chains.

His image was carried in the pompa circensis amongst those of the immortal gods, and his statue set up in the temple of Quirinus with the inscription "To the Unconquerable God."

This Sophia then appears as the mother of the " seven " gods (see above).

This is a Gnostic interpretation of the various myths of the great mother-goddess's many loves and love-adventures with other gods and heroes.

The Roman Catholic religion was enforced at the time of the conquest, but a large percentage of the natives may still be considered semi-pagan, the gods of their ancestors being worshipped in secret, and the forms and tenets of the dominant faith, which they but faintly comprehend, being largely adulterated with superstitions and practices of pagan origin.

When the first Moteuczoma was crowned king of the Aztecs, the Mexican sway extended far beyond the valley plateau of its origin, and the gods of conquered nations around had their shrines set up in Tenochtitlan in manifest inferiority to the temple of Huitzilopochtli, the war-god of the Aztec conquerors.

It was not merely for conquest and tribute that the fierce Mexicans ravaged the neighbourlands, but they had a stronger motive than either in the desire to obtain multitudes of prisoners whose hearts were to be torn out by the sacrificing priests to propitiate a pantheon of gods who well personified their bloodthirsty worshippers.

These divinities, however, seem to have had little or no place in the popular faith, which was occupied by polytheistic gods of the ordinary barbaric type.

Tezcatlipoca was held to be the highest of these, and at the festival of all the gods his footsteps were expected to appear in the flour strewn to receive this sign of their coming.

As is related in the legends, Quetzalcoatl came into the land to teach men to till the soil, to work metals and to rule a well-ordered state; the two gods played their famous match at the ball-game, and Tezcatlipoca persuaded the weary Quetzalcoatl to drink the magic pulque that sent him roaming to the distant ocean, where he embarked in his boat and disappeared from among men.'

These deities are not easily ' One of the most important sources for the ancient Mexican traditions and myths is the so-called " Codex Chimalpopoca," a manuscript in the Mexican language discovered by the Abbe analysed, but on the other hand Tonatiuh and Metztli, the sun and moon, stand out distinctly as nature gods, and the traveller still sees in the huge adobe pyramids of Teotihuacan, with their sides oriented to the four quarters, an evidence of the importance of their worship. The war-god Huitzilopochtli was the real head of the Aztec pantheon; his idol remains in Mexico, a huge block of basalt on which is sculptured on the one side his hideous personage, adorned with the humming-bird feathers on the left hand which signify his name, while the not less frightful war-goddess Teoyaomiqui, or " divine wardeath," occupies the other side.

Centeotl, the goddess of the allnourishing maize, was patroness of the earth and mother of the gods, while Mictlanteuctli, lord of dead-land, ruled over the departed in the dim under-world.

A large fraction of the Mexican population were set apart as priests or attendants to the services of the gods.

In the month of the " diminishing of waters " the rain gods or Tlalocs were propitiated by a procession of priests with music of flutes and trumpets carrying on plumed litters infants with painted faces, in gay clothing with coloured paper wings, to be sacrificed on the mountains or in a whirlpool in the lake.

Gods are represented with their appropriate attributes - the fire-god hurling his spear, the moon-goddess with a shell, &c.; the scenes of human life are pictures of warriors fighting with club and spear, men paddling in canoes, women spinning and weaving, &c. An important step towards phonetic writing appears in the picture-names of places and persons.

After the birth of a child, the tonalpouhqui or;sun-calculator drew its horoscope from the signs it was born under, and fixed the time for its solemn lustration or baptism, performed by the nurse with appropriate prayers to the gods, when a toy shield and bow were provided if it was a boy, or a toy spindle and distaff if it was a girl, and the child received its name.

He is frequently mentioned in Lucian as the lampooner of the gods.

Atargatis is said to have had sacred fish at Askelon, and from Xenophon we read that the fish of the Chalus were regarded as gods.

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.

Just as a process of syncretism has given rise to cults of animal gods, tree spirits tend to become detached from the trees, which are thenceforward only their abodes; and here again animism has begun to pass into polytheism.

The term may, however, be conveniently used to describe the early stage of religion in which man endeavours to set up relations between himself and the unseen powers, conceived as spirits, but differing in many particulars from the gods of polytheism.

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.

Tylor, makes the foundation of all religion animistic, but recognizes the non-human character of polytheistic gods.

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.