**POLYPodium**, a genus of plants belonging to the cryptogamia class. See Botany Index.
**Polypremum**, a genus of plants belonging to the tetraordia class, and in the natural method ranking under the 2nd order, Caryophyllae. See Botany Index.
**Polypus**, a species of fresh-water insects, belonging to the genus of hydra, of the order of zoophytes, and class of vermes. See Helminthology.
The name of hydra was given them by Linnaeus, on account of the property they have of reproducing themselves when cut in pieces, every part soon becoming a perfect animal. Dr Hill called them *biota*, on account of the strong principle of life with which every part of them is endowed.
These animals were first discovered by Leeuwenhoek, who gave some account of them in the Philosophical Transactions for 1703; but their wonderful properties were not thoroughly known till the year 1749, when Mr Trembley began to investigate them. Previous to his discoveries, indeed, Leibnitz and Boerhaave, by reasonings *a priori*, had concluded that animals might be found which would propagate by flips like plants. Their conjectures have been verified.
**Marine Polypus**, is different in form from the freshwater polype already described; but is nourished, increases, and may be propagated, after the same manner: Mr Ellis having often found, in his inquiries, that small pieces cut off from the living parent, in order to view the several parts more accurately, soon gave indications that they contained not only the principles of life, but likewise the faculty of increasing and multiplying into a numerous issue. It has been lately discovered and sufficiently proved by Peyronel, Ellis, Jussieu, Reaumur, Donati, &c. that many of those substances which had formerly been considered by naturalists as marine vegetables or sea-plants, are in reality animal productions; and that they are formed by polypes of different shapes and sizes, for their habitation, defense, and propagation. To this class may be referred the corals, corallines, keratophyta, echinata, sponges, and alcyonium; nor is it improbable, that the more compact bodies, known by the common appellations of star-stones, brain-stones, petrified fungi, and the like, brought from various parts of the East and West Indies, are of the same origin. To this purpose Mr Ellis observes, that the ocean, in all the warmer latitudes, near the shore, and wherever it is possible to observe, abounds so much with animal life, that no inanimate body can long remain unoccupied by some species. In those regions, ships bottoms are soon covered with the habitations of thousands of animals: rocks, stones, and every thing lifeless, are covered with them instantly; and even the branches of living vegetables that hang into the water are immediately loaded with the spawn of different animals, shell-fish of various kinds: and shell-fish themselves, when they become impotent and old, are the basis of new colonies of animals, from whose attacks they can no longer defend themselves. See Corallina, Helminthology Index.
**Polypus of the Heart**. See Medicine, No 97, 98, 274, and 292.
**Polysarcia**, or Corpulency. See Medicine, No 335.
**Polyspermous** (from πολύς and σπέρμα, seed), in Botany, is applied to such plants as have more than four seeds succeeding each flower, without any certain order or number.
**Polyllable**, in Grammar, a word consisting of more than three syllables: for when a word consists of one, two, or three syllables, it is called a monosyllable, a disyllable, and trisyllable.
**Polysyndeton**. See Oratory, No 97.
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**Polytheism**
Definition. The doctrine of a plurality of gods or invisible powers superior to man.
"That there exist beings, one or many, powerful above the human race, is a proposition (says Lord Kames *) universally admitted as true in all ages and among all nations. I boldly call it universal, notwithstanding what is reported of some grofs savages; for reports that contradict what is acknowledged to be general among men, require more able vouchers than a few illiterate voyagers. Among many savage tribes, there are no words but for objects of external sense: is it surprising that such people are incapable of expressing their religious perceptions, or any perception of internal sense? The conviction that men have of superior powers, in every country where there are words to express it, is so well vouched, that in fair reasoning it ought to be taken for granted among the few tribes where language is deficient."
There are judicious observations, of which every man will admit the force who has not some favourite system to build upon the unstable foundation which his Lordship overturns. Taking it for granted, then, that our conviction of superior powers has long been universal, the important question is, From what cause it proceeds? The same ingenious author shows, with great strength of reasoning, that the operations of nature and the government of this world, which to us loudly proclaim the existence of a Deity, are not sufficient to account for the universal belief of superior beings among savage tribes. He is therefore of opinion, that this universality of conviction can spring only from the image of Deity stamped upon the mind of every human being, the ignorant equally with the learned. "Nothing less (he says) is sufficient: and the original possession which we have of Deity must proceed (he thinks) from an internal sense, which may be termed the sense of Deity."
We have elsewhere expressed our opinion of that philosophy which accounts for every phenomenon in human nature, by attributing it to a particular instinct (see Instinct); but to this instinct or sense of Deity, considered as complete evidence, many objections, more than usually powerful, force themselves upon us. All nations, except the Jews, were once polytheists and idolaters. If therefore his Lordship's hypothesis be admitted, Theism: mitted, either the doctrine of polytheism must be true theology, or this instinct or sense is of such a nature as to have at different periods of the world misled all mankind. All savage tribes are at present polytheists and idolaters; but among savages every instinct appears in greater purity and vigour than among people polished by arts and sciences; and instinct never mistakes its object. The instinct or primary impression of nature, which gives rise to self-love, affection between the sexes, love of progeny, &c., has in all nations, and in every period of time, a precise and determinate object which it inflexibly pursues. How then comes it to pass, that this particular instinct, which if real is surely of as much importance as any other, should have uniformly led those who had no other guide to pursue improper objects, to fall into the grossest errors and the most pernicious practices? To no purpose are we told, that the sense of Deity, like the moral sense, makes no capital figure among savages. There is reason to believe that the feeling or perception, which is called the moral sense, is not wholly instinctive; but whether it be or not, a single instance cannot be produced in which it multiplies its objects, or makes even a savage express gratitude to a thousand persons for benefits which his prince alone had power to confer.
For these, and other reasons which might easily be assigned, we cannot help thinking, that the first religious principles must have been derived from a source different as well from internal sense as from the deductions of reason; from a source which the majority of mankind had early forgotten: and which, when it was banished from their minds, left nothing behind it to prevent the very first principle of religion from being perverted by various accidents or causes, or, in some extraordinary concurrence of circumstances, from being perhaps entirely obliterated. This source of religion every confident theist must believe to be revelation. Reason, it is acknowledged, and we shall afterwards show (see Religion), could not have introduced savages to the knowledge of God; and we have just seen, that a sense of Deity is an hypothesis clogged with insuperable difficulties. Yet it is undeniable, that all mankind have believed in superior invisible powers; and if reason and instinct be set aside, there remains no other origin of this universal belief than primeval revelation, corrupted, indeed, as it passed by oral tradition from father to son, in the course of many generations. It is no flight support to this doctrine, that if there really be a Deity*, it is highly presumable that he would reveal himself to the first men—creatures whom he had formed with faculties to adore and to worship him. To other animals, the knowledge of a Deity is of no importance; to man, it is of the first importance. Were we totally ignorant of a Deity, this world would appear to us a mere chaos. Under the government of a wise and benevolent Deity, chance is excluded; and every event appears to be the result of established laws. Good men submit to whatever happens without repining, knowing that every event is ordered by Divine Providence; they submit with entire resignation; and such resignation is a sovereign balm—for every misfortune or evil in life.
Admitting, then, that the knowledge of Deity was originally derived from revelation, and that the first men professed pure theism, it shall be our business in the present article to trace the rise and progress of polytheism and idolatry; and to ascertain, if we can, the real opinions of the Pagan world concerning that multitude of gods with which they filled heaven, earth, and hell. In this inquiry, though we shall have occasion to appeal to the writings of Moses, we shall attribute to them no other authority than what is due to records of the earliest ages, more ancient and authentic than any others which are now extant.
Whether we believe, with the author of the book of Genesis, that all men have descended from the same progenitors; or adopt the hypotheses of modern theorists, that there have been successive creations of men, and that the European derives his origin from one pair, the Asiatic from another, the woolly-headed African from a third, and the copper-coloured American from a fourth—polytheism and idolatry will be seen to have arisen from the same causes, and to have advanced nearly in the same order from one degree of impiety to another. On either supposition, it must be taken for granted, that the original progenitors were instructed by their Creator in the truths of genuine theism; and there is no room to doubt, but that those truths, simple and sublime as they are, would be conveyed pure from father to son as long as the race lived in one family, and were not spread over a large extent of country. If any credit be due to the records of antiquity, the primeval inhabitants of this globe lived to so great an age, that they must have increased to a very large number long before the death of the common parent, who would of course be the bond of union to the whole society, and whose dictates, especially in what related to the origin of his being and the existence of his Creator, would be listened to with the utmost respect by every individual of his numerous progeny.
Many causes, however, would conspire to dissolve this family, after the death of its ancestor, into separate and independent tribes, of which some would be driven by violence, or would voluntarily wander, to a distance from the rest. From this dispersion great changes would take place in the opinions of some of the tribes respecting the object of their religious worship. A single family, or a small tribe banished into a desert wilderness (such as the whole earth must then have been), would find employment for all their time in providing the means of subsistence, and in defending themselves from beasts of prey. In such circumstances they would have little leisure for meditation, and, being constantly conversant with objects of sense, they would gradually lose which led the power of meditating upon the spiritual nature of that Being by whom their ancestors had taught them that all things were created. The first wanderers would no doubt retain in tolerable purity their original notions of Deity; and they would certainly endeavour to impress those notions upon their children; but in circumstances infinitely more favourable to speculation than theirs could have been, the human mind dwells not long upon notions purely intellectual. We are so accustomed to sensible objects, and to the ideas of space, extension, and figure, which they are perpetually impressing upon the imagination, that we find it extremely difficult to conceive any being without assigning to him a form and a place. Hence a learned writer* has supposed that the earliest generations of men (even those to whom he Religion... he contends that frequent revelations were vouchsafed) may have been no better than anthropomorphites in their conceptions of the Divine Being.
Be this as it may, it is not conceivable but that the members of those first colonies would quickly lose many of the arts and much of the science which perhaps prevailed in the parent state; and that, fatigued with the contemplation of intellectual objects, they would relieve their overstrained faculties, by attributing to the Deity a place of abode, if not a human form. To men totally illiterate, the place fittest for the habitation of the Deity would undoubtedly appear to be the sun, the most beautiful and glorious object of which they could form any idea; an object, too, from which they could not but be sensible that they received the benefits of light and heat, and which experience must soon have taught them to be in a great measure the source of vegetation. The great spirit therefore inhabiting the sun, which they would consider as the power of light and heat, was in all probability the first object of idolatrous adoration.
From looking upon the sun as the habitation of their god, they would soon proceed to consider it as his body. Of pure mind entirely separated from matter, men in their circumstances could not long retain the faintest notion; but conscious each of power in himself, and experiencing the effects of power in the sun, they would naturally conceive that luminary to be animated as their bodies were animated. They would feel his influence when above the horizon; they would see him moving from east to west; they would consider him when set as gone to take his repose: and those exertions and intermissions of power being analogous to what they experienced in themselves, they would look upon the sun as a real animal. Thus would the Divinity appear to their untutored minds to be a compound being like man, partly corporeal and partly spiritual; and as soon as they imbibed such notions, though perhaps not before, they may be pronounced to have been absolute idolaters.
When men had once got into this train, their gods would multiply upon them with wonderful rapidity. Darkness and cold they could not but perceive to be contrary to light and heat; and not having philosophy enough to distinguish between mere privations and positive effects, they would consider darkness and cold as entities equally real with light and heat; and attribute these different and contrary effects to different and contrary powers. Hence the spirit or power of darkness was in all probability the second god in the Pagan calendar; and as they considered the power of light as a benevolent principle, the source of all that is good, they must have looked upon the contrary power of darkness as a malevolent spirit, the source of all that is evil. This we know from authentic history to have been the belief of the Persian magi, a very ancient sect, who called their good god Yazdan, and also Ormuzd, and the evil god Ahriman. Considering light as the symbol, or perhaps as the body, of Ormuzd, they always worshipped him before the fire, the source of light, and especially before the sun, the source of the most perfect light: and for the same reason fires were kept continually burning on his altars. That they sometimes addressed prayers to the evil principle, we are informed by Plutarch in his life of Themistocles; but with what particular rites he was worshipped, or where he was supposed to reside, is Magianism not so evident. Certain it is, that the worshippers held him in detestation; and when they had occasion to write his name, they always inverted it (unumay), to denote the malignity of his nature.
The principles of the magi, though widely distant from pure theism, were much less absurd than those of other idolaters. It does not appear that they ever worshipped their gods by the medium of graven images, or had any other emblems of them than light and darkness. Indeed we are told by Diogenes Laertius and Clemens Alexandrinus, that they condemned all statues and images, allowing fire and water to be the only proper emblems or representatives of their gods. And we learn from Cicero*, that at their instigation Xerxes was said to have burnt all the temples of Greece, because the builders of those edifices impiously profaned to inclose within walls the gods, to whom all things ought to be open and free, and whose proper temple is the whole world. To these authorities we may add that of all the historians, who agree, that when magianism was the religion of the court, the Persian monarchs made war upon images, and upon every emblem of idolatry different from their own.
The Magi, however, were but one sect, and not the largest sect of ancient idolaters. The worship of the sun, as the source of light and heat, soon introduced into the calendar of divinities the other heavenly bodies, the moon, the planets, and the fixed stars. Men could not but experience great benefit from those luminaries in the absence of their chief god; and when they had proceeded so far as to admit two divine principles, a good and an evil, it was natural for minds clouded with such prejudices to consider the moon and the stars as benevolent intelligences, sent to oppose the power of darkness whilst their first and greatest divinity was absent or asleep. It was thus, as they imagined, that he maintained (for all held that he did maintain) a constant superiority over the evil principle. Though to astronomers the moon is known to be an opaque body of very small dimensions when compared with a planet or a fixed star, to the vulgar eye the appears much more magnificent than either. By those early idolaters she was considered as the divinity second in rank and in power; and whilst the sun was worshipped as the king, she was adored as the queen, of heaven.
The earth, considered as the common mother of all things; the ocean, whose waters are never at rest; the air, the region of storms and tempests, and indeed all the elements—were gradually added to the number of divinities; not that mankind in this early age had so far degenerated from the principles of their ancestors as to worship brute matter. If such worship was ever practised, which to us is hardly conceivable, it was at a later period, when it was confined to the very lowest of the vulgar, in nations otherwise highly civilized. The polytheists, of whom we now treat, conceived everything in motion to be animated, and animated by an intelligence powerful in proportion to the magnitude of the body moved.
This sect of idolaters, which remains in some parts of the east to this day, was known by the name of Sabians, which they pretended to have derived from Sabius, a son of Seth; and among the books in which their sacred doctrines are contained, they have one which they call call the book of Seth. We need hardly observe, that these are senseless and extravagant fables. The name Sabiim is undoubtedly derived from the Hebrew word Tjaba, which signifies "an host or army," and this class of polytheists was so called, because they worshipped "the host of heaven," the Tjaba hesemim, against which Moses so pathetically cautions the people of Israel.
This species of idolatry is thought to have first prevailed in Chaldea, and to have been that from which Abraham separated himself, when, at the command of the true God, he "departed from his country, and from his kindred, and from his father's house." But as it nowhere appears that the Chaldeans had fallen into the savage state before they became polytheists and idolaters, and as it is certain that they were not savages at the call of Abraham, their early Sabiim may be thought inconsistent with the account which we have given of the origin of that species of idolatry. If a great and civilized nation was led to worship the host of heaven, why should that worship be supposed to have arisen among savages? Theories, however plausible, cannot be admitted in opposition to facts.
True; but we beg leave to reply, that our account of the origin of polytheism is opposed by no fact; because we have not supposed that the worship of the host of heaven arose among savages only. That savages, between whom it is impossible to imagine any intercourse to have had place, have universally worshipped, as their first and supreme divinities, the sun, moon, and stars, is a fact evinced by every historian and by every traveller; and we have shown how their rude and uncivilized state naturally leads them to that species of idolatry. But there may have been circumstances peculiar to the Chaldeans, which led them likewise to the worship of the heavenly host, even in a state of high civilization.
We judge of the philosophy of the ancients by that of ourselves, and imagine that the same refined system of metaphysics was cultivated by them as by the followers of Descartes and Locke. But this is a great mistake; for if grogs were the notions of early antiquity, that it may be doubted whether there was a single man, uninspired, who had any notion of mind as being distinct and entirely separated from matter (see Metaphysics, Part III., chap. iv.). From several passages in the books of Moses, we learn, that when in the first ages of the world the Supreme Being condescended to manifest his presence to men, he generally exhibited some sensible emblem of his power and glory, and declared his will from the midst of a preternatural fire. It was thus that he appeared to the Jewish lawgiver himself, when he spoke to him from the midst of a bush; it was by a pillar of cloud and fire that he led the Israelites from Egypt to the Land of Promise; and it was in the midst of smoke, and fire, and thunders, that the law was delivered from Mount Sinai.—That such manifestations of the Divine Presence would be occasionally made to the descendants of Noah who settled in Chaldea soon after the deluge, must appear extremely probable to every one who admits the authority of the Hebrew Scriptures: and he who questions that authority, has no right to make the objection to which we now reply; because it is only from the book of Genesis that we know the Chaldeans to have been a civilized people when they fell into idolatry. All histories agree in representing the inhabitants of Chaldea as at a very early period corrupted by luxury and funk in vice. When this happened, we must suppose that the moral Governor of the universe would withdraw from them those occasional manifestations of himself, and leave them to their own inventions. In such circumstances, it was not unnatural for a people addicted to the study of astronomy, who had been taught to believe that the Deity frequently appeared to their ancestors in a flame of fire, to consider the sun as the place of his permanent residence, if not as his body. But when either opinion was firmly established, polytheism would be its inevitable consequence, and the progress of Sabiim would, in the most polished nation, be such as we have traced it among savage tribes.
From Chaldea the idolatrous worship of the host of heaven spread itself over all the east, passed into Egypt, and thence into Greece; for Plato affirms, that the first inhabitants of Greece seemed to him to have worshipped no other gods but the sun, moon, earth, stars, and heavens, as most barbarous nations (continues he) still do. That Sabiim, or the worship of the host of heaven, was the first species of idolatry, besides the probability of the thing, and the many allusions to it in sacred Scripture, we have the positive evidence of the most ancient pagan historians of whose writings any part has been transmitted to us. Herodotus speaking of Lib. i. the religion of the Persians, says, that "they worship cap. 131. the sun, moon, and earth, fire, water, and the winds;" and this adoration they have all along paid from the beginning." He testifies the same thing of the savage Africans, of whom he affirms, that they all worshipped Lib. iv. the sun and moon, and no other divinity. Diodorus Siculus, writing of the Egyptians, tells us, that Lib. i. "the first men looking up to the world above them, and terrified and struck with admiration at the nature of the universe, supposed the sun and moon to be the principal and eternal gods." And Sanchoniathon the Phoenician, a more ancient writer than either of these, informs us, in the fragment of his history preserved by Eusebius, that "the two first mortals were Æon and Protonos; and their children were Genus and Genea, who inhabited Phœnicia; and when they were scorched with the heat, they lifted up their hands to the sun, whom they believed to be the Lord of Heaven, and called him Baal-samem, the same whom the Greeks call Zvuv."
Hitherto those divinities were worshipped in person, or, as Dr Prideaux expresses it, in their facella, or sacred tabernacles; for the votaries of each directed their devotions towards the planet which they supposed to be animated by the particular intelligence whom they meant to adore. But those orbs, by their rising and setting, being as much below the horizon as above it, and their grossly ignorant worshippers not supposing it possible that any intelligence, however divine, could exert its influence but in union with some body, statues or pillars were soon thought of as proper emblems of the celestial gods. Sanchoniathon, in the fragment already quoted, informs us, that "Hyppouranios and his brother Osus, Phœnician patriarchs, erected two pillars, the one to fire and the other to air or wind, and worshipped those pillars, pouring out to them libations of the blood of the wild beasts hunted down in the chase." As these early monuments of idolatry were called Bethel, the word evidently derived from the Hebrew Bethel, the probability probability is, that they were altars of loose stones, such as that which was built by Jacob *, and from him received the same name. As his was consecrated to the true God, theirs were consecrated to the host of heaven; and the form of consecration seems to have been nothing more than the anointing of the stone or pillar with oil (A), in the name of the divinity whom it was intended to represent. When this ceremony was performed, the ignorant idolaters, who fancied that their gods could not hear them but when they were visible, supposed that the intelligences by which the sun and planets were animated, took possession, in some inexplicable manner, of the consecrated pillars, and were as well pleased with the prayers and praises offered up before those pillars, as with the devotions which were addressed towards the luminaries themselves.—Hence Sanchoniathon calls them animated or living stones, ἀνάγκης τελευταῖοι, from the portion of the Divine Spirit which was believed to reside in them; and as they were dedicated to the host of heaven, they were generally erected on the tops of mountains; or in countries which, like Egypt, were low and level, they were elevated to a great height by the labour of men.
It has been supposed, that this practice of raising the pillars on high places proceeded from a desire to make the objects of worship conspicuous and magnificent: but we are strongly inclined to believe, that the erectors of these had something farther in view, and that they thought of nothing less than to bring the sacred stone or pillar as near as possible to the god whom it represented. Whatever be in this, we know that the practice itself prevailed universally through the east; and that there was nothing which the Jewish legislator more strictly enjoined his people to destroy, than the altars, statues, and pillars, erected for idolatrous worship upon mountains and high places. "Ye shall utterly destroy (says he) all the places wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree. And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break down their pillars, and burn their groves with fire."*
The mention of groves by the Hebrew lawgiver, brings to our recollection another species of idolatry, which was perhaps the second in order, as men deviating from the principles of pure theism were more and more entangled in the labyrinths of error. The Chaldeans, Egyptians, and all the eastern nations who believed in a superintending providence, imagined that the government of this world, the care of particular nations, and even the superintendence of groves, rivers, and mountains, in each nation, was committed by the gods to a class of spirits superior to the soul of man, but inferior to those heavenly intelligences which animated the sun, the moon, and the planets. These spirits were by the Greeks called δαιμόνια, daemons, and by the Romans genii. Timaeus the Locrian, who flourished before Plato, speaking of the punishment of wicked men, says, "all these things hath Nemesis decreed to be executed in the second period, by the ministry of vindictive terrestrial daemons, who are overseers of human affairs;" to
* Genesis, ch. xxxv.
† De Anima Mundi, inter scrip. T. Gale editos.
(A) Hence the proverb of a superstitious man, πᾶσα λόγων λίπησιν προσκυνεῖ, he kisses or adores every anointed stone; which Arnobius calls lubricatam lapidem, et ex olivi ungine fordidatum.—Stillingfleet's Origines Sacrae.