Nature Worship
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Nature Worship. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
the religion of those who see gods in the objects and the phenomena of nature, as in the sun, moon, and stars, in the fire, the wind, trees, mountains, fountains, streams, etc. Herbert Spencer considers nature worship an outgrowth of ancestor worship . To his mind, "emergence of a people from a forest, confounded in tradition with emergence from the trees forming it, has led to the worship of trees as ancestors." Mountains are venerated for a similar reason. In his judgment, the stars are worshiped because they are believed to be the spirits of the departed. Certain North American Indians have, indeed, a myth that the Milky Way is the route of spirits on the way to the happy hunting grounds, and that the stars are camp fires. Mr. Spencer would have us think, also, that persons named for natural phenomena, as a child named the Dawn, from birth at an early hour, became afterward confused in the minds of descendants with that for which they were named, and that the break of day was worshiped on account of acts performed generations ago by a real person named Dawn. Andrew Lang rejects Spencer's theories on the ground that "they require, as a necessary condition, a singular amount of memory on one hand and forgetfulness on the other." In the present state of investigation, the student is obliged to content himself with a few incontestable facts. 1. Nature worship, like ancestor worship, animal worship, the use of stone, and the use of bronze, is world-wide in its occurrence. Missionaries, travelers, traders, and investigators have found it everywhere among primitive peoples. 2. A remarkable similarity in the choice of objects of worship, and a corresponding similarity in the legends held by the Eskimo, Hopi, Patagonian, Senegambian, Congo dweller, Bushman, Hottentot, Australian, Maori, Turkoman, Chinaman, and Cossack indicate that nature worship is a general product of the primitive mind, not communicated by radiation from a common center, but cropping out whenever and wherever the savage mind was ready for it. 3. Nature worship is the basis of mythology. The statement holds good for not only the rude mythology of the red man, the African, the Tasmanian, and the Jap, but for Norse mythology and the incomparable mythology of the Greek.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a generic term to denote a stage of religious thought in which the powers of nature are personified and worshipped. It found its highest and most beautiful expression in the mythology of ancient Greece. an ancient city of
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 entry frames the debate as Herbert Spencer versus Andrew Lang, and treats nature worship as "a general product of the primitive mind" that appears "whenever and wherever the savage mind was ready for it." That whole framework — religions arranged on a ladder from fetishism and ancestor worship up to Greek mythology and monotheism — was abandoned by anthropologists over the following decades, as long-term fieldwork in the manner of Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard replaced the sifting of travellers' and missionaries' reports, and Durkheim redirected attention to religion's social function rather than its supposed origin. Nobody today writes of a single "primitive mind", and the living traditions Aiton lists are studied as religions in their own right rather than as survivals of an earlier stage. Meanwhile the phrase has acquired a meaning neither book could have anticipated: since the mid-20th century, Wicca and other modern pagan movements have adopted nature veneration as a deliberate contemporary religious choice.
Written for this edition, 2026.