defended by Pericles, was lined five talents and ban- ished (Plat, Apol. Socr. 26 /'.• Diog. Laert ii. ;; 12 sq.). In the same manner the worship of the sun. as distinguished from the Bun-gods, appears in the Y< das, although of le-s importance than these latter; the Greeks attributed the same worship to this luminary among the Persians; and Plato make- Socrates use the following word-: ■■ li seems to me that tin' earliest in- habitants of Greece held those only to be gods whom many of the barbarians now regard as such -sun, moon, star-, and heaven" (Cratyl. 897 C). In the Scriptures the worship of the heavenly bodies is spoken ol a- an "in (.o,l to which Israel would be tempted:
1 bei d 10 yourseh es . . . lest thou lift up
thine , \, . unto heaven, and when thou secst the -uu,
and the 1110,111, and the stars, e\cn all the hostof heaven, shnuldesl be driven to worship them, and serve them" (Deut iv, 15 19). \nd in tact they were driven into this kind of worship at as late an age of their history as'
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POLYTHEISM
the reign of Josiah, who put down " them that burned incense to the sun, and to the moon, and to the plan- ets, and to all the host of heaven.'' We hardly need to refer to the prevalence of such worship, especially of the planets, in Babylonia and Assyria, nor to the fact that sun-worship was the foundation probably of the honors paid to Baal and Moloch among the Ammonites, in Canaan and in Carthage, nor to the importance of this clement in the Egyptian religion. We only add that the religion of Peru — that is, the religion of the Incas, which superseded an older religion — was direct sun-worship, and that the same was spread over a large part of this continent, among the tribes even of the Red men in North America. The heathen part of the Dakotas still have their sun-dances, and as late as 1872 one of their practices was to look steadily many minutes at the blazing orb, as an act, it was un- derstood, of religious worship. This is only one of those objects of nature to which were paid divine hon- ors. The earth, as the general nursing mother, the sea, the sky, the life in the air, in trees, even in ani- mals, all seemed to be divine. The Earth particularly — as the Great Mother, the Syrian goddess Cybele, De- meter, Ceres — although exalted into a person separate from the dead earth, as the cause of life to vegetables, and ultimately to man, was worshipped, and in some countries, as in Asia Minor, with the most frantic rites. 3. But polytheism would have been comparatively dead, and possessed of fewer attractions to the religious sentiment of many, if it had stopped short in its devel- opment of the divine in nature. The next step was to convert these comparatively fixed objects, exhibiting superhuman agency to the eyes of men, into persons separated from the objects themselves. The sun, re- garded as a god, in this process became a sun-god ; that is, his personality was no longer identified with the sun, and confined to its orb, but he became free to go whithersoever he would, and to exercise supernatural powers away from the sun, his proper seat. This was a very great stage through which the religions of all the higher races passed. The spirit of the sun, pos- sessed of will and feelings like a man's, but of more than human power, is now free to move abroad, to mingle in human affairs, and thus to transcend his first agency by a very much wider and more varied new one. It is possible for him thus to become mytho- logical ; that is, the effects which he produces become events in history. The sun-god's rays to the imagina- tion become darts, and as the rays of the sun in summer cause malignant fevers, so he is conceived of as shoot- ing his arrows at men and beasts, the cause being some offence or dishonor done to his sacred rites or to his ser- vants. The beginning of the Iliad will illustrate what we mean, it being assumed, what is now generally ad- mitted, but what some eminent scholars have denied, that Apollo is indeed a sun-god. This the Greeks of the time of Sophocles and Euripides held, but they held it more as an inference than from any traditional opinion. But, furthermore, the sun-god might become the espe- cial object of worship of a city or a tribe — their tutelary god ; and thus he acquired a new character, and stood in new relations to a part of a people. From them his worship might spread over the whole of a tribe or of a race, and his old original nature would be almost lost out of sight ; he would have outgrown, so to speak, his youthful properties. In this way it could happen that a war-god could be developed out of the divinity of a nation of warriors, although his attributes at first might have had no relation to armed strife. Thus the Roman god Mars was the divinity of an agricultural people, it seems probable, a god of spring and of fructification, before he became a god of war. Apollo also, if a god of the sun and of light at first, had from this source naturally the attributes of a destroyer and of a healer (the latter attribute being shown in the names Ap< llo and Prean. the arerter and healer), of a pure one and a purifier; to which were added his connection with mu-