And therefore, when they paid their devotions to any one of them, they directed their worship towards the planet in which they supposed he dwelt. But these orbs, by their rising and setting, being as much under the horizon as above, they were at a loss how to address to them in their absence. To remedy this, they had recourse to the invention of images, in which, after their consecration, they thought these intelligences, or inferior deities, to be as much present by their influence as in the planets themselves, and that all addresses to them were made as effectually before the one as before the other. And this was the beginning of image worship among them. To these images were given the names of the planets they represented.... After this, a notion obtaining that good men departed had a power with God also to mediate and intercede for them, they deified many of those whom they thought to be such; and hence the number of their gods increased, in the idolatrous times of the world. This religion first began among the _Chaldeans_, which their knowledge of astronomy helped them to. And from this it was that Abraham separated himself when he came out of _Chaldea_. From the _Chaldeans_ it spread itself over all the East, where the professors of it had the name of Sabians. From thence it passed into Egypt, and from thence to the Grecians, who propagated it to all the western nations of the world; and therefore those who mislike the notion advanced by Maimonides, that many of the Jewish laws were made in opposition to the idolatrous rites of the Sabians, are much mistaken when they object against it that the Sabians were an inconsiderable sect, and therefore not likely to be so far regarded in that matter.... Anciently, they were all the nations of the world that worshipped God by images. And that Maimonides understood the name in this latitude is plain from hence, that he tells us the Sabians whom he spoke of were a sect whose heresy had overspread almost all mankind.... That which hath given them the greatest credit among the people of the East is, that the best of their astronomers have been of this sect, as Thebat Ebn Korrah, Albatani, and others; for the stars being the gods they worshipped, they made them the chief subject of their studies. These Sabians, in the consecrating of their images, used many incantations to draw down into them, from the stars, those intelligences for whom they erected them, whose power and influence they held did afterwards dwell in them."