In the practice of religion, a cult image is a man-made object that is venerated for the deity, spirit or daemon that it embodies or represents. Cultus, the outward religious formulas of "cult", often centers upon the treatment of cult images, which may be dressed, fed or paraded, etc. Look up deity in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... The term Daemon has several meanings: Daemon (mythology) - see also Demon Daemon (computer software), a background process Dæmon (His Dark Materials) in the Philip Pullman trilogy of novels His Dark Materials Daemon (Warhammer) Daemon (Warcraft) Daemon Sadi (SaDiablo) is a character in the Black Jewels Trilogy by Anne Bishop. ... In traditional usage, the cult of a religion, quite apart from its sacred writings (scriptures), its theology or myths, or the personal faith of its believers, is the totality of external religious practice and observance, the neglect of which is the definition of impiety. ...

Cult images in Ancient Egypt

Apis Bull

Cult images in classical Greece and Rome

Statue of Zeus at Olympia A fanciful reconstruction of Phidias Statue of Zeus, in an engraving made by Philippe Galle in 1572, from a drawing by Maarten van Heemskerck The Statue of Zeus at Olympia carved by the famed Classical sculptor Phidias (5th century BC) circa 435 BC, in present day Greece, is traditionally one...

Opposition from Abrahamic religions

Members of "Abrahamic religions" identify cult images as "idols" and their veneration as "idolatry", the worship of hollow forms (Christian Catholics and Eastern Orthodox making an exception for the veneration of saints, which is not considered adoration). The word idol entered Middle English in the 13th century from Old French idole adapted in Church Latin from the Greek eidolon ("appearance" extended in later usage to "mental image, apparition, phantom"). Greek eidos means "form" [1] as used by Plato. map showing the prevalence of Abrahamic (purple) and Dharmic (yellow) religions in each country. ... Idolatry is a major sin in the Abrahamic religions regarding image. ... Veneration is a religious symbolic act giving honor to someone by honoring an image of that person, particularly applied to saints. ... Adoration (Latin ad, to, and as, mouth; i. ... Middle English is the name given by historical linguistics to the diverse forms of the English language spoken between the Norman invasion of 1066 and the mid-to-late 15th century, when the Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English, began to become widespread, a process aided by the... The term Ecclesiastical Latin (sometimes called Church Latin) refers to the Latin language as used in documents of the Roman Catholic Church and in its Latin liturgies. ... Plato (ancient Greek: Πλάτων, Plátōn, wide, broad-shouldered) (c. ...

Cult images in Christianity

Christian images that are venerated are called icons. Christians who venerate icons make an emphatic distinction between Veneration and Worship, though the proliferation of wonder-working images since at least the 4th century shows that the distinction is blurred in ordinary practice: see Image of Edessa, Veronica etc. Christ the Redeemer (1410s, by Andrei Rublev) An icon (from Greek , eikon, image) is an image, picture, or representation; it is a sign or likeness that stands for an object by signifying or representing it, or by analogy, as in semiotics; in computers an icon is a symbol on the... Veneration is a religious symbolic act giving honor to someone by honoring an image of that person, particularly applied to saints. ... Worship usually refers to specific acts of religious praise, honour, or devotion, typically directed to a supernatural being such as a god or goddess. ... According to the legend, King Abgarus received the Image of Edessa from the apostle Thaddeus. ... Saint Veronica with her famous veil is part of Christianitys many legends. ...

The introduction of venerable images in Christianity was highly controversial for centuries, especially in Eastern Orthodoxy: see the Byzantine Iconoclastic Controversies of the 8th and 9th centuries. In the West, resistance to idolatry delayed the introduction of sculpted images for centuries until the rise of Romanesque art and the use of the crucifix. The intensified pathos that informs the poem Stabat Mater takes corporeal form in the realism and sympathy-inducing sense of pain in the typical Western European corpus (the representation of Jesus' crucified body) from the mid-13th century onwards. "The theme of Christ's suffering on the cross was so important in Gothic art that the mid-thirteenth-century statute of the corporations of Paris provided for a guild dedicated to the carving of such images, including ones in ivory" [2]. ... Illustration of the Beeldenstorm during the Dutch reformation Iconoclasm is the destruction of religious icons and other symbols or monuments, usually for religious or political motives. ... Romanesque St. ... A crucifix amidst the cornfields near Mureck in rural Styria, Austria A handheld crucifix A crucifix in front of the Holy Spirit Church in Košice, Slovakia A crucifix is a cross with a representation of Jesuss body, or corpus. ... Look up Pathos in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Mater dolorosa became an iconic type, as in this sixteenth-century Spanish version by Luis de Morales (c. ...

The 16th-century Reformation engendered spates of cult-image smashing, notably in England and Scotland, the Low Countries and France. The corpus was removed from the crucifix in many Protestant churches. Often the damage was concentrated on three-dimensional cult images, but more extreme iconoclasts ("image-breakers") even smashed the representations of holy figures in stained glass windows. Further destruction of cult images, anathema to Puritans, occurred during the English Civil War. The Protestant Reformation was a movement which began in the 16th century as a series of attempts to reform the Roman Catholic Church, but ended in division and the establishment of new institutions, most importantly Lutheranism, Reformed churches, and Anabaptists. ... This article belongs in one or more categories. ... Strictly speaking, stained glass is glass that has been painted with silver stain and then fired. ... The Puritans were members of a group of radical Protestants which developed in England after the Reformation. ... The English Civil War was a series of armed conflicts and political machinations which took place between Parliamentarians (known as Roundheads) and Royalists (known as Cavaliers) from 1642 until 1651. ...

See also

• Madonna and Child
• Fetishism
• Asherah
• Murti
• Prana pratishta
• Antinous Mondragone