is personified by the seven principal planets, and by the good, knowing,
excellent earthly bodies. This, however, is without any disturbance of His unity.
It is, say the Zabians, as if the seven planets were His seven limbs, and as if our
seven limbs were His seven spheres in which He manifests Himself,—so that He
speaks with our tongues, sees with our eyes, hears with our ears, touches with
our hands, comes and goes with our feet, and acts through our members.
It teaches further, that GOD is too great and too sublime to occupy Himself
directly with the affairs of this world; that its government He has therefore
entrusted to other gods, and that it is only to the highest things of destiny He
Himself devotes His attention,—an attribution of cold superiority and
intellectual indifference in striking contrast to the idea of GOD the Father
developed by Christianity, that all-loving, as well as all-powerful GOD, Who
watches over the fall of a sparrow, and listens with tender ear to the prayer of
even the meanest of His creatures. Moreover, Zabism inculcates the chilling
doctrine that man is too feeble to offer his homage directly to the Supreme, and
must therefore address the inferior deities to whom the regimen of the world has
been handed. In this way we see that the veneration shown to the planets and the
worship of idols are only a symbolism resulting from the humiliating doctrines
just defined.
Zabism is a polytheistic system,—it absolutely revels in gods and goddesses.
There are the spirits that direct and guide the planets, the spirits that originate or
represent every action in this world,—not a natural effect, great or little, which
does not emanate from a deity. Whatever appears in the air, whatever is formed
near the sky or springs from the earth, must be traced to certain gods that govern
these manifestations, so that every flake of snow, every drop of rain has its
presiding spirit.
These spirits also “mould and shape everything bodily from one form into the
other, and gradually bring all created things to the state of their highest possible
perfection, and communicate their powers to all substances, beings, and things.
By the movement and guidance of these spiritual beings, the different elements
and natural compositions are influenced in such a way that the tenderest plant
may pierce the hardest cliff. He who guides this world is called the first spirit.
These gods know our most secret thoughts, and all our future is open to them.
The female deities seem to have been conceived as the feeling or passive
principle. These gods or intelligences emanate directly from GOD without His
will, as rays do from the sun. They are, further, of abstract forms, free of all
matter, and neither made of any substance or material. They consist chiefly of a