worship

worship, broadly defined, the response, often associated with religious behaviour and a general feature of almost all religions, to the appearance of that which is accepted as holy—that is, to a sacred power or being. Characteristic modes of response to the holy include cultic acts of all kinds: ritual drama, prayers of many sorts, dancing, ecstatic speech, veneration of various persons and objects, sermons, silent meditation, and sacred music and song. Also included in worship are acts of private response: spoken or unspoken prayers, silence, the assumption of particular postures, ritual acts and gestures, and individual acts of veneration of persons or objects.

Nature and significance

The performance of acts of worship rests upon the assumption that there is a realm of being that transcends the ordinary (i.e., secular or profane) “world” of the worshipper. Acts of worship serve to unite, temporarily at least, the ordinary and the transcendent realms through one or more of a variety of possible means. According to the imagery of this assumption, the heavenly world is above and apart from the earthly, and the reality and powers of the heavenly realm are made to be effectively present on earth through acts of worship. The worshipper may thus find himself transported from the earthly to the heavenly world or may perceive the heavenly to descend to the earthly through the movement of worship.

The act of uniting the sacred and profane realms, in effect, transforms the situation of the worshipper into one that means health, fresh understanding, renewal of life, or salvation. The situation that prompts worship thus calls for change or for the acknowledgment of change. Frequently, life is recognized to be in need of renewal, and worship is viewed as offering the path to such renewal. Some acts of worship arise from the need of the worshipper to exult in praise of the holy and to express his joy or gratitude that his situation, in fact, has changed for the better.

In both instances, the change is widely believed to take place through the worshipper’s return, by means of the acts of worship, to primordial time (as in early or tribal religions), to the realm in which unity and blessedness obtain. Public acts of ritual often include the recitation of myths of creation or of origin; such recitation transports the worshipper from ordinary time and circumstance back to the beginnings of things. The result is the reconstitution of the world itself and of the worshipper within the world.

Worship, especially in ancient societies, was no matter of indifference to the society at large, for the very continuation of life demanded it. In hunting and food-gathering societies, the continuance of sources of food depended upon the performance of ritual acts through which the means of sustaining life were preserved or secured. In agricultural societies, the fructification of the soil took place in relation to acts of worship focussed upon fertility (e.g., in Syrian and Palestinian religions). In the religion of the state (e.g., ancient Rome), the preservation of the society in times of danger depended upon appropriate acts of worship through which the power of the holy was focussed upon the community’s particular need.

In ancient societies (and in some contemporary communities) worship was viewed as affecting all aspects of the life of the community, since it was recognized to provide the means for preserving and renewing life itself. Most of the arts developed in relation to worship and to statecraft and law, and the practical (technical) arts generally gained legitimacy and continuing force through their place in the ritual and liturgical acts of the community. In many ancient societies, the chief institutions (e.g., monarchies) and customs of the society were understood to be derivative from their prototypes or archetypes in the realm of the gods. Kingship was patterned upon divine kingship; worship itself had its heavenly archetype; and the representations of the gods and goddesses were modelled upon the divine beings themselves or upon replicas of them in the heavenly place of worship.