The Origins of Worship

85:5.1The wor­ship of rocks, hills, trees, and an­i­mals nat­u­rally de­vel­oped up through fear­ful ven­er­a­tion of the el­e­ments to the de­ifi­ca­tion of the sun, moon, and stars. In In­dia and else­where the stars were re­garded as the glo­ri­fied souls of great men who had de­parted from the life in the flesh. The Chaldean star cultists con­sid­ered them­selves to be the chil­dren of the sky fa­ther and the earth mother.

85:5.2Moon wor­ship pre­ceded sun wor­ship. Ven­er­a­tion of the moon was at its height dur­ing the hunt­ing era, while sun wor­ship be­came the chief re­li­gious cer­e­mony of the sub­se­quent ag­ri­cul­tural ages. So­lar wor­ship first took ex­ten­sive root in In­dia, and there it per­sisted the longest. In Per­sia sun ven­er­a­tion gave rise to the later Mith­raic cult. Among many peo­ples the sun was re­garded as the an­ces­tor of their kings. The Chaldeans put the sun in the cen­ter of “the seven cir­cles of the uni­verse.” Later civ­i­liza­tions hon­ored the sun by giv­ing its name to the first day of the week.

85:5.3The sun god was sup­posed to be the mys­tic fa­ther of the vir­gin-born sons of des­tiny who ever and anon were thought to be be­stowed as sav­iors upon fa­vored races. These super­nat­u­ral in­fants were al­ways put adrift upon some sa­cred river to be res­cued in an ex­traor­di­nary man­ner, af­ter which they would grow up to be­come mirac­u­lous per­son­al­i­ties and the de­liv­er­ers of their peo­ples.