NATURE-WORSHIP or Totemism is a cult in which natural objects, trees, lakes, stones, animals, etc. are worshipped. According to Bunsen, the earliest Bactrian faith was a pure nature-worship, as recorded in the Vedas. That was superseded by an ethical faith, when light and darkness, sunshine and storm, became represented by good and evil ; but in the change, Zoroaster denotes the spirits of evil by the term Deva, common to the old Aryan divinities. The Bactrian religion continued unchanged amongst the Aryan emi grants until they reached the Panjab. Amongst Aryan Hindus, non-Aryans, and the Parsecs, spirit-worship has almost displaced the nature worship of the Vedas. But Hindus recognise in Prithivi, an earth-goddess, the mother of all beings. Her worship among the Asiatic races has been associated with sanguinary and licentious rites. It was to her that to the present day the Kandhs of the Orissa mountains have been sacri ficing the Meriah victims. In Phoenicia and the adjacent parts of Syria, the worship of Ashtoreth was from the first accompanied- with licentious rites. As at Babylon, so in Phoenicia and Syria, at Byblus, at Ascalon,.at Aphaca, at Hierapolis, --the cult of the great nature-goddess tended to encourage dissoluteness in the relations between the sexes, and even to sanctify impurities of the most abominable description. Even in Africa, where an original severity of ' morals bad pre vailed, and Tauith had been worshipped as a virgin with martial attributes, and with severe, not licentious rites, corruption gradually crept in ; and by the time of Augustine the Carthaginian worship of the celestial goddess was characterized by the same impurity as that of Ashtoreth in Phoenicia and Syria. The Babylonian Anat or
Nana, the Assyrian Istar, the Phoenician Astarte, the Cypriote Venus, and the Ephesian Artemis, are all developments of the Asiatic mother goddess, whose worship spread from Babylon to Asia Minor and Greece. A bas-relief in a corridor at the ancient Carchemish, the capital of the Hittites, represents her worship. The figure is nude, full face, and winged, the feet close together, and the slender curves of the figure recall the terra-cotta votive figures of Anat found in the temples in Chalda. The hands support the breasts, as the nutrice of all created nature. The Ephesian Artemis represented the goddess many breasted, as the mother of nature. Naunma or Bibi Nani, the Babylonian Venus, has a statue shrine in the Hazara country on the top of a gigantic scarped rock, from the base of which flows the source of the Kurnuk. Her worship was introduced into Bactria from Syria, and is frequently indicated on Judo - Scythic coins. Rawlinson's Religions, p. 175.