The Origins of Worship

85:7.1Na­ture wor­ship may seem to have arisen nat­u­rally and spon­ta­neously in the minds of prim­i­tive men and women, and so it did; but there was op­er­at­ing all this time in these same prim­i­tive minds the sixth ad­ju­tant spirit, which had been be­stowed upon these peo­ples as a di­rect­ing in­flu­ence of this phase of hu­man evo­lu­tion. And this spirit was con­stantly stim­u­lat­ing the wor­ship urge of the hu­man species, no mat­ter how prim­i­tive its first man­i­fes­ta­tions might be. The spirit of wor­ship gave def­i­nite ori­gin to the hu­man im­pulse to wor­ship, not­with­stand­ing that an­i­mal fear mo­ti­vated the ex­pres­sion of wor­ship­ful­ness, and that its early prac­tice be­came cen­tered upon ob­jects of na­ture.

85:7.2You must re­mem­ber that feel­ing, not think­ing, was the guid­ing and con­trol­ling in­flu­ence in all evo­lu­tion­ary de­vel­op­ment. To the prim­i­tive mind there is lit­tle dif­fer­ence be­tween fear­ing, shun­ning, hon­or­ing, and wor­ship­ing.

85:7.3When the wor­ship urge is ad­mon­ished and di­rected by wis­dom—med­i­ta­tive and ex­pe­ri­en­tial think­ing—it then be­gins to de­velop into the phe­nom­e­non of real re­li­gion. When the sev­enth ad­ju­tant spirit, the spirit of wis­dom, achieves ef­fec­tive min­is­tra­tion, then in wor­ship man be­gins to turn away from na­ture and nat­u­ral ob­jects to the God of na­ture and to the eter­nal Cre­ator of all things nat­u­ral.

85:7.4[Pre­sented by a Bril­liant Evening Star of Neb­a­don.]