CHAPTER  3.
 

Worship of Divinities and fabulous beings.
 

I.   Imageless worship of the divinities of Kypros and other countries.

1.   riiiageless Rites, especially to Mountain and Storm divinities.
Imageless Altar-iites.

The period in which the gods were worshipped under the form of aniconic symbols such as
unhewn stones, tree-trunks and posts, was preceded by a time when worship was carried on without
images of any kind. When the worship of images had had its way for some time, a great reaction
against it arose. Jews, Christians and Mohammedans waged war on images, and tried to restore an
imageless worship.

As Yahve appears on Sinai from the midst of a thick cloud, with thunder and lightning, fire
and smoke,*) so Zeus sits on Ida in the thundercloud and hurls his thunderbolts.**) As when Moses
set a bound round Sinai by command of Yahve, and any one who approache must die,***) so, at
the summit of the Arkadian Olympos, any one who entered the sacred precinct of Zeus Lykaios must
die within the year, t) As Hebrew belief identified Sinai with Yahve, so did Pelasgic belief identify
the Arkadian Olympos with Zeus. Even in Tacitus' times Mount Carmel was accounted a god
worshipped without a temple or image, tt) Similarly we must conclude (see p. 16, no. 28) that
the Anat-Athena-Idalia on the Akropolis of Idalion was worshipped, like the Athena
Telchinia who came from Kypros to Teumessos in Boeotia, either entirely without
images, or with unhewn stone or wood symbols.    Curtius says of Zeus Lykaios. §)   "He lived

'^) Exodus XIX, 16—20.
**) Ihad VIII, 47 ff. and XIV, 292 ft'.
***) Exodus XIX, 12 and 13.
t) Pausanias VIII, 38, 6.
,    tt) Hist. II, 78.
ttt) Pausanias IX, 19, 1.
§) E. Curtius, "Peloponnes" I, 308, R. Beer, " Heilige Hohen," p. 11.