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Updated: September 26, 2025
It approaches to a sort of natural nature-worship, an adoration in which nothing is personified. For the emotion aroused in the Far Oriental is just as truly an emotion as it was to the Greek; but whereas the Greek personified its object, the Japanese admires that object for what it is.
Their worship was probably Nature-worship; and while such a basis may count for something in the elemental quality that has always soaked the island arts, the collision between it and the tolerant Empire suggests the presence of something which generally grows out of Nature-worship I mean the unnatural. But upon nearly all the matters of modern controversy Cæsar is silent.
Where the nature-power is a harsh one, a scorching sun, a tempestuous sea, the self-command and self-sacrifice called out by the worship of them may be, if not carried to extremes, a bracing discipline; but with some exceptions the nature-gods are good, and have to do with light and with kindness. The Minor Nature-worship.
He knew that his own Persians possessed the military spirit in its fullest vigor; he felt that he himself had all the qualities of a successful loader; he may have had faith in his cause, which, he would view as the cause of Ormazd against Ahriman, of pure Religion against a corrupt and debasing nature-worship. His revolt was sudden, unexpected, and well-timed.
The sixth century saw that career, Templeton; the nineteenth may see it re- enacted, with only these differences, that the Nature-worship which seems coming will be all the more crushing and slavish, because we know so much better how vast and glorious Nature is; and that the superstitions will be more clumsy and foolish in proportion as our Saxon brain is less acute and discursive, and our education less severely scientific, than those of the old Greeks."
But if the Supreme God whom we adore was recognized by this ancient people, he was soon lost sight of in the multiplied manifestations of his power, so that Rawlinson thinks that when the Aryan race separated in their various migrations, which resulted in what we call the Indo-European group of races, there was no conception of a single supreme power, from whom man and nature have alike their origin, but Nature-worship, ending in an extensive polytheism, as among the Assyrians and Egyptians.
"Shinto, which means literally 'the way of the Gods, is the name given to the mythology and vague ancestor-and nature-worship which preceded the introduction of Buddhism into Japan Shinto, so often spoken of as a religion, is hardly entitled to that name. It has no set of dogmas, no sacred book, no moral code.
The number of ages during which the most primitive religion, namely, that of pure Nature-worship, prevailed among the inhabitants of the earth may not be conjectured, and the exact length of time during which earth and sun adoration unalloyed by serpent and phallic faiths remained is not known.
The few traces that remained of the ancient nature-worship, unrelated to one another, lost their power of producing mythology. The Capitoline Jupiter never stood to the Romans in a true personal relation. Whatever poetic sentiment was felt centred rather in the city herself than in the deities who guarded her.
In the unsystematic nature-worship of the old Aryans the gods are presented to us only as vague powers, with their nature and attributes dimly defined, and their relations to each other fluctuating and often contradictory. There is no theogony, no regular subordination of one deity to another.
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