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.

Cult images in Ancient Egypt

Apis Bull

Cult images in classical Greece and Rome

Statue of Zeus at Olympia

The Parthenon contains a cult image of Athena, the Greek goddess of civilization and the noble side of war. This cult image was done by Phidias, the sculptor and head supervisor of building the Parthenon. This cult image was used for religious sacrifices at this Athenian temple.

In Greek and Roman mythology, a "palladium" was an image of great antiquity on which the safety of a city was said to depend, especially the wooden one that Odysseus and Diomedes stole from the citadel of Troy and which was later taken to Rome by Aeneas. (The Roman story was related in Virgil's Aeneid and other works.)

Opposition from Abrahamic religions

Members of "Abrahamic religions" identify cult images as "idols" and their veneration as "idolatry", the worship of hollow forms (Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians make an exception for the veneration of saints, which is not considered adoration or latria). 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" as used by Plato.

Idols in Mecca

In early "Mecca" the Meccan merchants controlled the sacred "Kaaba". Many people flocked here to put their idols in the Kaaba, thus making the Meccan merchants quite wealthy. By the time "Muhammad" was born he had already lost his mother and by age 6 his father. Then he lived with his grandfather and then his uncle. Muhammad's uncle was a merchant, therefor Muhammad became one as well. On a "business" trip he met a wealthy woman named Khadijah. They had an awkward relationship, for Khadijah was much older than Muhammad and she proposed. Their marriage was more for business than love. With all of this wealth, Muhammad still wasn't happy on a daily basis he went up into a cave on Mt. Hira, to get away from it all. All of his experiences throughout life had changed him so much. One day the angel Gabriel came to Muhammad and told him that he was the messenger of god. Soon an illiterate Muhammad began to write the "Quran" He began to preach that there was only one god, "Allah" and to stop worshipping the idols. This made the merchants angry and they plotted to kill Muhammad. Muhammad and his followers flocked to "Medinah" for protection. Many battles were fought, but in the end Medinah won. After the victory, Muhammad did three things. 1. Destroyed the idols in the Kabah 2. Built a "mosque" around the Kaabah 3. Forgave his enemies. Now all of the idols were destroyed and Islam was created.

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.

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"

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 leaving a bare cross. 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.

Jainism

The focus for image worship among many Jains is the icon of the Tirthankara in either a domestic shrine or temple shrine room. It appears that Tirthankaras cannot respond to such worship, but veneration of the image can function as a meditative aid. Although most worship takes the form of prayers, hymns and recitations, the idol is sometimes ritually bathed, and often has offerings of made to it; there are eight kinds of offering representing the eight karmas of Jainism.

This form of reverence is not a central tenet of the faith, and there seems to be debate about the value of this form of worship.

See also

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