The prophet's dictionary guide to the supernatural

The catchall term Babylonian, commonly used for early heathen worship, came to apply to the assortment of rituals, offerings, sacrifices, and oblations the people invented and prescribed to appease the gods. Through their idols, the spiritual forces occupying and manipulating them and their land were petitioned for intervention and prosperity. The pantheon of gods were believed to exercise authority to maneuver the weather, crops, warfare, life, and death. According to what the deity prescribed, their worship and rituals consisted of divination, augury, astrology, magic and sorcery, fortune-telling, and diverse, yet crude, animal and human sacrifices. Fertility was their highest rite as they united copulation with vegetation in an effort to provoke the earth to grow abundantly. In addition to fertility, ancient world religions also prized death, which they believed was an exit from earth’s pain and suffering as well as elevation to godhood. Most of their ceremonies required revelry and intoxication. The objects of their worship were summarily everything and anything. They divided their deities into three groups—celestial gods (gods of the sky), terrestrial gods (gods of the earth), and death gods (those of the netherworld); these were afterlife gods. Whenever fertility (life) was not the object or occasion of worship, death was, and the ancient worshippers executed a host of funerary rituals to assure their prosperity and prominence in the afterlife. This conception forged with the Egyptian religion and entrenched the mystic belief in reincarnation to explain away the mystery of death. It became a pervasive way to ease the grief suffered from the loss of a loved one. They would return to earth again in another form or by inhabiting another creature. The goal was to prove that death was not the end but the beginning. To feed their deities of death, gods of the underworld, human sacrifices were often made. This was to give them a life, ideally pure and sinless, in exchange for continued favor, victory, prosperity, or simply to stay alive themselves. Celestial worship venerated gods who were superior in the lofty spheres of life. They were the ones who helped them win wars, provoke the elements for rain, connect with the high spiritual forces of creation, and access supernatural information for prophecy and divination. The death cult is explained by the funerary worship rituals of old. Excessive sexuality looks back to the fertility rites of the heathens. What remains to be explained is persistent ancestral worship that also resurfaced repeatedly in succeeding generations and prophecy. In explaining ancestral worship (our version of generation spirits) the belief was that the gods came down to earth and copulated with humans and produced