Idolatry is the worship paid to an image which is held to be the abode of a superhuman personality. It is widely spread among primitive religions, as the ideas underlying it form an essential part of the savage philosophy of the universe everywhere. Yet it is not itself a primitive worship, being absent among Bushmen, Hottentots, Fuegians, Veddahs, and Eskimo, while present in the great civilisations, as the Egyptian, Chaldean, Indian, Greek, and Roman, and nowhere in more splendid development than in the Mexican and Peruvian. The idol, as something visible and concrete, helps the savage to give a definite form to his vague ideas of higher beings, just as the doll embodies to the child the notion of distinct personality. We may dismiss the idea that idolatry represents a decadence of the religious sentiment, degenerating from a conception of the Divine as absolute spirit to its symbolical representation under human or animal forms. In reality it marks a stage of progress in religious growth, when man rising above the vague adoration of personified objects, conceives of gods under the form judged most worthy of their habitation. In theological phraseology the term idolatry is often used loosely as covering all forms of worship of seen as opposed to unseen existences, thus including litholatry, dendrolatry, zoolatry, pyrolatry, sabeism, and even such forms of worship as necrolatry. The earlier stages of idolatry are naturism, or the worship of mere objects personified, and animism, or the belief in spirits as distinct from things and accustomed to exercise influence upon the affairs of men. It is incorrect to say that idols invariably begin with being symbolical representations, and are next taken for the image, and lastly for the body itself of the divinity, through forgetfulness of their primitive signification. And all images which represent a superior being and are worshipped are not idols, but only those which are believed to be conscious and animate. Yet the distinction is not precise, and indeed within the range of the same religion the images of the Divinity remain for some animate individualities—actual embodiments of spirits—for others mere symbols, like the Madonna and Child which help to warm the piety of the faithful in Catholic countries, or the photograph which brings a distant mother the more distinctly to the memory of an Australian colonist. In course of time the idol tends to become confounded with the idea of which it was the symbol, hence superstition and delusion ensue: but the missionary's iconoclastic zeal is often as unintelligent as the grown man's indignation at the child fondling its doll. It must not be forgotten that the savage mind is ever prone to confound a subjective relation with an objective one. To make the image of an object for him is to reproduce it, and by means of the portrait he passes easily to the notion of reaching its original.
There is a continuous transition from fetishism to idolatry, and the one is commonly the antecedent of the other. Fetishism is strictly the belief that the possession of an object can procure the services of the spirit lodged within its interior, and hence any material object is capable of being made a fetich, provided only it is capable of being appropriated. Naturally the fetich of stone or wood is the one most easily transformed into an idol, and early it is carved, shaped, and polished, like the Greek xoana, or ornamented with coloured feathers or the like. A new step is taken when on the summit of the stone or column there is shaped a human head, like the hermes of the Greeks; and once the head is formed the rest of the figure follows naturally. Idols are most often more or less artistic imitations of the human form, often made colossal or monstrous to represent added power or dignity; and it is a somewhat striking development of commercial Christianity that there is an active manufacture of these in our own city of Birmingham and elsewhere, to be sent out to India, it may be, in the same ship with the missionaries. To the savage mind the animal is the equal of man, and it is quite natural that it also should become the dwelling-place of a divinity, either in its ordinary form or in mixed human and animal forms, like the monstrous creations of the ancient Chaldeans. But in general the human form predominates in the conception of gods, because the natural anthropomorphism of man attributes to his deities human thoughts and feelings, and thus ends with lending them also a human physiognomy. Even such developments of idolatry as the apotheosis of the phallic emblem and its representation in wood or stone is but a specialised form of the anthropomorphic spirit.
Idols which receive the worship of a nation or a tribe are a simple development of fetiches in human form which belong to individuals. Thus side by side with idols which are the object of public worship we find others that are merely individual or domestic fetiches, like the small figures buried by the ancient Egyptians in their graves, and the teraphim which Rachel stole from Laban, and hid in the camel's furniture on which she sat. The worship of the dead may also lead us to idolatry by the same transitions as the worship of spirits.
They form a large and powerful class of spirits; and it is natural that some receptacle should be found for them. Again, the elemental idea that after death the spirit continues to reside in the body, or in some portion of it, as a bone or the skull, explains the philosophy of placing a statue of the dead man beside his grave. The Maori atua or ancestral deity deigns to enter his carved wooden image through the incantation of a priest, in order temporarily to deliver oracles. Tiele has shown us that the nirgalli, those representations of monsters so common outside the Chaldean palaces, had for their aim to offer alternative dwelling-places to malignant spirits, especially those of diseases.
A striking feature of idolatry is its tendency to revive even under the shadow of purer spiritual ideas. The proneness of the ancient Jews to lapse into the idolatry of the neighbouring races, despite the lofty conception of monotheism which was early grasped by the Semitic consciousness and is still maintained within the wide range of Islam, is paralleled by the modern Brahman return to a practice abhorrent to the ancient Vedic religion, as well as the universal Buddhist adoration of statues and relics of a founder pre-eminent among men for the pure spirituality of his teaching. And even within the range of Christianity itself such fantastic absurdities as winking and weeping statues, and the periodical liquefaction of a saint's blood sixteen centuries old are conceptions in perfect keeping with the devices of an idolatrous priesthood in Polynesia or Central Africa.
See the articles ANIMISM, ANIMALS (WORSHIP OF), FETICHISM, IMAGE-WORSHIP, and RELIGION; the works of Spencer, Waitz, Schultze, Réville, and Girard de Rialle, passim; and particularly E. B. Tylor's Early History of Mankind (chap. vi.), and Primitive Culture (chap. xiv.); and Goblet d'Alviella's admirable study, 'Les Origines de l'Idolâtrie,' in the Revue de l'Histoire des Religions (vol. xii. 1885).