THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
priests of both types. Three forms of animism may be distinguished: physiolatric, anthropolatric, and patriarcholatric. Physiolatric animism is the worship of certain nature spirits residing in wells or rivers (nymphs, nixies), in hills or rocks (cobalds), in trees (hamadryads), or in animals, and the like, the two chief subdivisions being the two last, phytolatry and zoolatry, the latter comprising ophiolatry. Anthropolatric animism is the worship of the dead, whether regarded as being in some inanimate medium or in some living animal from simple inhabitation to metempsychosis; this type is the darkest of spiritism issuing in necromancy and fanatical Shamanism. Patriarcholatry, or ancestor worship, is the worship of the ancestors of special families or entire stocks, this frequently passing over among wild tribes into totemism, in which the ancestors are held to have been certain beasts or birds, which thus become fixed emblems of the families or stocks in question. All attempts to make any or all of these types of animism the source of the development of religion have failed. Ancestor worship in particular, defended by H. Spencer in his Principles of Sociology (London, 1876-82), J. Lippert (ut sup.), and others, is rendered nugatory because the pious regard of ancestors presupposes too long a development and too ripe a civilization to be regarded as the primitive source of religion; as, for instance, the Chinese cult and the Pitris and Rishis of India and the Greeks. See Comparative Religion, VI., 1, a, §§ 1-6; Heathenism, §§ 2-4, 6.
The Sabaistic theory, or the assumption that the cult of the heavenly bodies is the source of religion, seems to go back, strictly speaking, to such Church Fathers as Clement of Alexandria, and Firmicius Maternus, who held that, while monotheism was
the original religion, the stages of de- 3. Sabaism. cline had begun with the worship of
the heavenly bodies. They were closely followed by Moses Maimonides (q.v.), and, among more recent students, by those who investigate mainly religions possessing an astronomical basis, as the Egyptian, Babylonian, and Phenician. A chief exponent of this theory was the French astronomer C. F. Dupuis, who, in his Origine de tous les cultes ou religion (12 vols., Paris, 1795), sought to prove that worship first of the sun and then of the other heavenly bodies was the point of departure for all religious evolution. Similar attempts were made by J. A. Kanne in Neue Darstellung der Mythologie der Griechen (Leipsic, 1805), J. G. Rohde in Versuch fiber das Alter des Tierkreises und den Alter der Sternbilder (Breslau, 1809), E. von Bunsen in his Einheit der Religion (Berlin, 1870) and Die Plejaden und der Tierkreis (1879), and C. Ploix in La Nature des dieux (Paris, 1888), in which he blended Sabaism and fetishism. If, however, a stellar cult developed into adoration of the zodiac, the planets, and other celestial objects, it presupposes a degree of culture which is incompatible with the primitive period of mankind. The truly primitive forms of worship of the heavenly bodies seem rather to be monotheistic, the divine element being regarded not so much as the sun, moon, or " host of heaven," as the heaven itself as the symbol or manifestation
of the highest beneficent power, in comparison with which the individual stars constituted mere subdeities. A number of adherents of primitive monotheism have accordingly regarded Sabaism as the mediate stage through which man passed in his decline from monotheism to the baser forms of polytheism. Criticism of Sabaism leads necessarily to the positing of a primitive monotheism though not in its absolute form.
III. Development: A relative monotheism, consisting of a theistic basis with pantheistic elements, was assumed as the basis of all religious development by Schelling in Philosophie der 1. A Cor- Metologie und Offenbarung (Stuttgart, ruption of 1856-59), and he was followed by Monothe- many others. This relative monotheism, ism of the earliest historic period was termed kathenotheism or henotheism by Max Muller; and though restricted by him only to certain characteristics of the Vedic religion, yet it may well be applied, mutatis mutandis, to the earliest periods of the religion of various other peoples of similar antiquity. This henotheism is defined by Muller as a naive faith in individual powers of nature which alternately appear as supreme. The religion of the Chinese seems to be an unfolding of the cult of heaven, and early Iranian religious records show similar traces of a relatively pure primitive monotheism, since between the supreme creator of the universe, Ormazd, and his subordinate deities, the six Amshaspands, a considerable interval is held to exist. The oldest religious concepts of the other Indo-Germanic peoples were richer in polytheistic elements, though even in them the skygod was dominant. Among the religions of southwestern Asia, the ancient Arabs and the Phenicians had a basis of primitive monotheism, consisting in the worship of a supreme god of the light or of the sun (Ilah or Shamsh in North Arabia, Bel among the Sabeans of South Arabia, and Baal Hamman among the Phenicians), though even in the earliest records this basis had received many accretions of stellar polytheism. The same statements hold good of the religion of ancient Babylonia. The most ancient supreme sky-god Anu must early have received by his side a Bel and an Ea, their number later being increased by various younger nature deities, such as the moon-god Sin and the sun-god Shamash, as well as the five planetary deities Marduk, Ishtar, Adar, Nergal, and Nebo. Many of the most competent Egyptologists agree in placing at the head of the development of the Nilotic religion a creative celestial " king " or " father " of the gods, who was called Amon-Ra by the Thebans and Ptah at Memphis; and Le Page Renouf, in his Lectures mi the Origin and Growth of Religion, p. 119 (London, 1880), declares: "The sublimer portions [of the Egyptian religion] are not the comparatively late results of a process of development or elimination from the grosser. The sublimer portions are demonstrably ancient; and the last stage of the Egyptian religion, that known to the Greek and Latin writers, was by far the grossest and most corrupt."
It must not be supposed, however, that this process of degeneration from monotheism everywhere