Idolatry
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Idolatry. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
the worship of idols. An idol is usually a carved figure resembling the figure of a person. The ruder the people, the ruder its idols. There are two sorts of idol worship; the worship of the idol by reason of godlike qualities which it is believed to possess, and the worship of idols as a means of approaching the deity or deities they are supposed to represent. A statue of a noted man, on the other hand, is an entirely different thing. While the erection of the statue is, no doubt, an outgrowth of idolatry, the statue is erected merely as a mark of respect and to keep in mind one whose qualities commend him. Idolatry appears to have prevailed among all savage nations. Idols were set up in groves and in temples more or less elaborate. Although the Hebrews have given to the world a religion which is especially severe upon idolatry, the families of the Hebrew patriarchs themselves were not entirely free from idolatry or image worship. We learn that Rachel, Jacob's wife, had stolen "the images that were her father's," and that she put them in the camel's furniture and sat thereon that Laban might not find them. The idolatry of the surrounding people gave the prophets of Israel much trouble. The worship of idols has ever been accompanied by bowing down in front of them, making presents, and offering sacrifices. Whenever communities were sufficiently organized to maintain a priesthood, the offerings to idols were necessarily large enough to maintain the priests. Idolatry is by no means at an end. Bejeweled idols of large proportions are still to be seen in the temples of India, and have thousands, we may say millions, of devotees. The most celebrated idol in the world is without doubt an image of Buddha in the temple of Lhasa, Tibet. In The World's Work for March, 1905, Landon, who accompanied Colonel Younghusband on a recent diplomatic mission, writes: The first sight is uncannily impressive. Before him are rows and rows of great butter-lamps of solid gold. Lighted by the tender radiance of these twenty or thirty beads of light,. the great glowing mass of the Buddha softly looms out, ghost-like and shadowless. The crown is perhaps the most interesting of the many jewels. It is a deep coronet of gold, set round and round with turquoise, and heightened by five conventional leaves, each inclosing a golden image of Buddha and incrusted with precious stones. In the center, below the middle leaf, is a flawless turquoise six inches long and three inches wide, the largest in the world. See Ancestor Worship ; Buddha
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
the vorship of idols, images, or representations made by hands to represent divinity, or of any inanimate object; the worship of false gods; paganism. According to Lubbock idolatry or anthropomorphism is the fifth of six progressive stages in the history of religion. Ethnic. The ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans, the modern Chinese, Burmese, Hindus, etc., all in that fifth stage of religious development. Jewish. In all countries where idolatry exists, the tendency is for the uneducated to worship the idol as if it were a deity. Denunciations by the prophet people When Isaiah are directed against this. When Aaron made the golden calf he built an altar and proclaimed a feast to Jehovah, but the people said: "These be thy gods, O Israel." Idolatry is forbidden in the Decalogue (Exodus xx: 3-6). Christian. In the 8th and 9th cen- 1 turies a party in the Eastern Church (see ICONOCLAST) denounced image worship as idolatry, and the Emperor Leo interdicted the images, but they were restored by the Empress Irene. (See IMAGE WORSHIP.)
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Both entries rest on a framework anthropology has since abandoned: Collier's placed "idolatry or anthropomorphism" as the fifth of Sir John Lubbock's six progressive stages of religion, and Aiton's held that "the ruder the people, the ruder its idols." No working scholar now ranks religions on such a ladder; since the mid-20th century "idolatry" has been treated less as a describable stage of belief than as a polemical label applied by one tradition to another, and Hindu and Buddhist image practice is discussed in its own terms — murti, darshan, consecration — rather than as worship of wood and stone. On the biblical side, Aiton's shrewd note that the patriarchs' own families kept images has been vastly expanded by excavation: inscriptions found at Kuntillet Ajrud in the 1970s pairing Yahweh with "his Asherah" are now standard evidence that Israelite religion grew out of the polytheism its prophets denounced. Aiton's great jewelled Buddha at Lhasa, described from a 1905 magazine report, is the Jowo Rinpoche of the Jokhang temple, which came through the Cultural Revolution and is now visited by tourists as well as pilgrims.
Written for this edition, 2026.