IDOLATRY, the worship of idols, i.e., images or other ob jects believed to represent or be the abode of a superhuman personality. The term is often used generically to include such varied forms as litholatry, dendrolatry, pyrolatry, zoolatry and even necrolatry. In an age when the study of religion was prac tically confined to Judaism and Christianity, idolatry was regarded as a degeneration from an uncorrupt primeval faith, but the com parative and historical investigation of religion has shown it to be rather a stage of an upward movement, and that by no means the earliest.
As the earlier stages in the development of the religious con sciousness persist and are often manifest in idolatry, so in the higher stages, when men have attained loftier spiritual ideas, idolatry itself survives and is abundantly visible as a reactionary tendency. The history of the Jewish people whom the prophets sought, for long in vain, to wean from worshipping images is an illustration; so, too, the vulgarities of modern popular Hinduism contrasted with the lofty teaching of the Indian sacred books.
In the New Testament the word €i&wXoXarpela (idololatria), afterwards shortened occasionally to E%bcwXarp€ia (idolatria), occurs in all four times, viz., in I Cor. x. 14 ; Gal. v. 20 ; I Peter iv. 3 ; Col. iii. 5. In the last of these passages it is used to describe the sin of covetousness or "mammon-worship." In the other places it indicates with the utmost generality all the rites and practices of those special forms of paganism with which Christianity first came into collision. It can only be understood by reference to the LXX., where E'18cwXov (like the word "idol" in A.V.) occasionally translates indifferently no fewer than 16 words by which in the Old Testament the objects of what the later Jews called "strange worship" are denoted (see Encyclopaedia Biblica). In the widest acceptation of the word, idolatry in any form is absolutely forbidden in the second commandment, which runs: "Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image; [and] to no visible shape in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the water under the earth, shalt thou bow down or render service." (See DECALOGUE. ) It is obvious that two religious votaries in an attitude of reverence before an image may be moved by very different ideas of what the image is and signifies, although their outward atti tude is the same. The one may regard it as merely an image, picture, or representation of a higher being, and in itself void of value or power. Its value is that of mere resemblance or some kind of acquired association. But the other may regard it as the tenement or vehicle of the god and fraught with Divine influence. In modern Christendom the former is the attitude which the Roman Church officially inculcates towards sacred pictures and statues; they are intended to convey to the eyes of the faithful, especially to the illiterate among them, facts about Jesus, the Virgin, and the Saints. The other attitude is that into which simple-minded peasants may easily lapse, as it is that which characterizes other religions, ancient or modern, which use images of any kind; and it is this attitude which may be conveniently called "idolatry" or image-worship.
The invectives against idolatry of the early Jewish and Chris tian apologists, of Philo, Minucius, Felix, Tertullian, Arnobius, Lactantius, and others, throw light on the question how an ancient pagan regarded his idols. One capital argument of the Christians was the absurdity of a man making an idol and then adoring or being afraid of the work of his own hands. Lactantius preserves the answer of the pagans so criticized (De origine erroris, ii. 2) : we do not, they said, fear the images themselves, but those after whose likeness they were fashioned and by whose names they were consecrated. And Augustine (De civ. dei, viii. 23) relates how, according to Hermes, the spirits entered "by invita tion" so that the images became "bodies of the gods." Image worship is essentially a form or rather an outcome of animism, now known to represent a type of religion arising subsequently to its really primitive forms. An image fashioned like a god and having this advantage over a mere stock or stone, that it declares itself and reveals at a glance to what god it is sacred, is believed to attract and influence the god to choose it as his home and tenement. Religious ceremonial is much more hopeful and effica cious for a worshipper who thus has means of approaching the god he worships in visible and tangible form, and even of coercing it. Having the god thus at hand and bound up with the material object, the simple-minded worshipper can punish it if his prayers are left unanswered (cf. Tylor, Primitive Culture, ii. 170) . Suetonius relates (Aug. 16) that Augustus, having lost some ships in a storm, punished Neptune by refusing to allow his image to be carried in procession at the games. See RELIGION (History of), and ANIMISM 1 with references there to be found.