IDOLATRY, the worship (Gr. [Greek: latreia]) of idols (Gr. [Greek: eidôlon]), i.e. images or other objects, believed to represent or be the abode of a superhuman personality. The term is often used generically to include such varied, forms as litholatry, dendrolatry, pyrolatry, zoolatry and even necrolatry. In an age when the study of religion was practically confined to Judaism and Christianity, idolatry was regarded as a degeneration from an uncorrupt primeval faith, but the comparative and historical investigation of religion has shown it to be rather a stage of an upward movement, and that by no means the earliest. It is not found, for instance, among Bushmen, Fuegians, Eskimos, while it reached a high development among the great civilizations of the ancient world in both hemispheres.[1] Its earliest stages are to be sought in naturism and animism. To give concreteness to the vague ideas thus worshipped the idol, at first rough and crude, comes to the help of the savage, and in course of time through inability to distinguish subjective and objective, comes to be identified with the idea it originally symbolized. The degraded form of animism known as fetichism is usually the direct antecedent of idolatry. A fetich is adored, not for itself, but for the spirit who dwells in it and works through it. Fetiches of stone or wood were at a very early age shaped and polished or coloured and ornamented. A new step was taken when the top of the log or stone was shaped like a human head; the rest of the body soon followed. The process can be followed with some distinctness in Greece. Sometimes, as in Babylonia and India, the representation combined human and animal forms, but the human figure is the predominant model; man makes God after his own image. Idols may be private and personal like the teraphim of the Hebrews or the little figures found in early Egyptian tombs, or--a late development, public and tribal or national. Some, like the ancestral images among the Maoris, are the intermittent abodes of the spirits of the dead. As the earlier stages in the development of the religious consciousness persist and are often manifest in idolatry, so in the higher stages, when men have attained loftier spiritual ideas, idolatry itself survives and is abundantly visible as a reactionary tendency. The history of the Jewish people whom the prophets sought, for long in vain, to wean from worshipping images is an illustration: so too the vulgarities of modern popular Hinduism contrasted with the lofty teaching of the Indian sacred books.