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THE HEBREW RELIGION Such, in brief, were the beginnings of a religion as unique as it was elevated in its character, a religion which stood from the outset in mortal antagonism to the Egyptian worship of sun-gods, and to the star-worship, the service of Baal, and of sensual or savage divinities joined with him, to that service which was diffused through the Semitic nations of western Asia.
But the necessary result of such a view is no other than the admission of the astrological influence of the heavenly bodies; first, as respects inanimate nature, and then as respects the fortune and fate of men. It is not until the vast distance of the starry bodies is suspected that man begins to feel the necessity of a mediator between him and them, and star-worship passes to its second phase.
The Chinese add the sequel that Hêng O became changed into a toad, whose outline is traceable on the moon's surface. Star-worship
Certain parts of Babylonian religion are much ruder and more superstitious than the exalted star-worship which is its central feature, and these have been ascribed to peoples who dwelt in Babylonia before the supposed Semitic conquest, viz. the Accadians in the north and the Sumerians to the south, peoples not related to the Semites in blood or in language, but generally called Turanian, and thought to be perhaps akin to the Chinese.
About the middle of the Shang period there occurred interesting changes, probably under the influence of nomad peoples from the north-west. In religion there appears some evidence of star-worship. The deities seem to have been conceived as a kind of celestial court of Shang Ti, as his "officials". In the field of material culture, horse-breeding becomes more and more evident.
His love knew no spirit of conquest yet; it was star-worship; it was angel adoration; seraphically pure; something so celestially refined that had it been a tangible object you could have held it up and seen the stars right through it. The thought of acquisition would have seemed like coveting the gold of a temple. And yet already the faintest hint of loss was intolerable.
In the distance and irresistible motions of the stars he finds arguments for the supernatural, and gives to each of those shining bodies an abiding and controlling genius. The mental phase through which he is passing permits him to believe in the exercise of planetary influences on himself. But as reason led him forth from fetichism, so in due time it again leads him forth from star-worship.
Others have opposed to this the fact that the pits sometimes occur on vertical walls or under the cover-slabs, and have preferred to see in them some totemistic signification or some expression of star-worship. It is possible that we have to deal with a complex and not a simple phenomenon, and that the pits were not all made to serve a single purpose.
What seems sufficiently obvious is all that I care to maintain, namely, that these shepherd-astronomers were of Chaldæan birth and training, and therefore astrologers, though, unlike their Chaldæan kinsmen, they rejected Sabaism or star-worship, and taught the belief in one only Deity.
The air of fate-like precision with which their appointed movements are accomplished, their solemn silence, their incomprehensible distances, might satisfy an observer that they are far removed from the influences of all human power, though, perhaps, they may be invoked by human prayer. Thus star-worship found for itself a plausible justification.
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