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Deification   /dˌiəfəkˈeɪʃən/   Listen
Deification

noun
1.
The condition of being treated like a god.
2.
An embodiment of the qualities of a god.
3.
The elevation of a person (as to the status of a god).  Synonyms: apotheosis, exaltation.






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"Deification" Quotes from Famous Books



... of beauties as well as of provinces. The thought of resistance exasperated him. In everything he demanded success, triumph, dominion. The celebration of his birthday, August 15, 1807, which was accompanied with unusual pomp and splendor, was of the nature of a deification. He made Josephine share his triumph, and held her by the hand when he appeared on a balcony of the Tuileries, in the enclosure, amid the applause of the multitude assembled in ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand

... been readers of Tolstoi, you will see that I passed into a vein of feeling similar to his, with its abhorrence of all that conventionally passes for distinguished, and its exclusive deification of the bravery, patience, kindliness, and dumbness of the ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James

... were made," he cried, "we were made for each other. It is too beautiful. Think of the valiant independence of Pump Street. That is the real thing. It is the deification of the ludicrous." ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... this campaign the emperor was seized with some contagious malady, of which he died in the camp, A.D. 180, in the fifty-ninth year of his age. His son Commodus was with him. The body, or the ashes probably, of the emperor were carried to Rome, and he received the honor of deification. Those who could afford it had his statue or bust; and when Capitolinus wrote, many people still had statues of Antoninus among the Dei Penates or household deities. He was in a manner made a saint. Commodus erected to the memory ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius

... comparative predominance of the vulgar. They are stated by Mr. Elphinstone as a gradual oblivion of monotheism, the neglect of the worship of some gods and the introduction of others, the worship of deified mortals. The doctrine of human deification is carried to such an extent that Indra and other mythological gods are said to tremble lest they should be supplanted by men. This introduction of polytheism and use of images has probably been connected with the fact that there have been no temples to the Invisible God, and the ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper

... sovereign; he tolerated private superstition, of which he might be the object; [23] but he contented himself with being revered by the senate and the people in his human character, and wisely left to his successor the care of his public deification. A regular custom was introduced, that on the decease of every emperor who had neither lived nor died like a tyrant, the senate by a solemn decree should place him in the number of the gods: and the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... which the living welcomed, so diverse are the ways of our human sentiment, and in which the more wealthy, at least in the country, might indulge themselves. All this Marius followed with a devout interest, sincerely touched and awed by his mother's sorrow. After the deification of the emperors, we are told, it was considered impious so much as to use any coarse expression in the presence of their images. To Marius the whole of life seemed full of sacred presences, demanding ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater

... indulgence - and, as time went on, he grew indulgent - Fleeming had views of duty that were even stern. He was too shrewd a student of his fellow- men to remain long content with rigid formulae of conduct. Iron- bound, impersonal ethics, the procrustean bed of rules, he soon saw at their true value as the deification of averages. 'As to Miss (I declare I forget her name) being bad,' I find him writing, 'people only mean that she has broken the Decalogue - which is not at all the same thing. People who have kept in the high-road of Life really have less opportunity for ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson

... existing condition of metaphysics and theology. Schleiermacher could not look upon the dearth around him without the deepest emotion. He asked himself if there was no remedy for the wide-spread evil. The seat of the disease appeared to him to be the false deification of reason in particular; and the general mistake of making religion dependent upon external bases instead of upon the heart and consciousness of man. His conclusion was that both the friends and enemies of Rationalism ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst

... religions that in process of time have totally changed their character. It lies at the root of the creeds and practices of most peoples in east and west. It was in Greece before its religion passed into the stage of the deification of natural forces. The Assyrians and Chaldeans clung to it in Western Asia. The Egyptians in the valley of the Nile, the Etruscans in Italy. At the other extremity of the world, the Chinese and Anamites perform its rites to this day from ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould

... history reach over a period of twelve thousand years"—replied Zuriel, . . "But 'tis the present fashion to count from the Deification of Nagaya or the Snake,—and, according to this, we are now in the nine hundred and eighty-ninth year of so-called Grace and Knowledge,—rather say Dishonor and Crime! ... for a crueler, more bloodthirsty creed than the worship of Nagaya never debased a people! Who shall number up the innocent victims ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... of a literary man. France is considering the celebration of the late Zola, England is considering that of the recently deceased Shakspere. There is some national significance, it may be, in the time that has elapsed. Some will find impatience and indelicacy in this early attack on Zola or deification of him; but the nation which has sat still for three hundred years after Shakspere's funeral may be considered, perhaps, to have carried delicacy too far. But much deeper things are involved than the mere matter of time. The point ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton

... the students who first gave me the endearing appellative 'mother' not to name me thus. But, without my consent, that word spread like wildfire. I still must think the name is not applicable to me. I stand in relation to this century as a Christian discoverer, founder, and leader. I regard self-deification as blasphemous; I may be more loved, but I am less lauded, pampered, provided for, and cheered than others before me—and wherefore? Because Christian Science is not yet ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... same tendency in a more extreme form in the deification of human beings. Though some examples of this occur earlier, especially in the case of the heroes or founders of cities, these are not placed on a level with the gods; but the worship of Alexander, and in imitation of ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner

... the French Revolution'' he revived the worst of the Revolution legend, and especially the deification of destructiveness; by his "History of the Consulate and of the Empire,'' and his translation of the body of Napoleon to France, he effectively revived the Napoleonic legend. The Queen of the French, when escaping from the Tuileries in 1848, was entirely right in reproaching him with ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White

... early Renaissance. It was the problem of the later Renaissance to complete this emancipation in the sphere of philosophical thought. The bold metaphysics of Bruno, for which he atoned by a fiery death, offered the solution which was most unorthodox and complete. His deification of nature and of man as part of nature involved the liberation of humanity from external authority. But other speculative minds of the age, though less audacious, were equally inspired by the idea of freely interrogating nature, and were all engaged in accomplishing ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... have managed to get an extraordinary atmosphere," he continued, bent on doing himself an exact justice. But I should say, if you pressed me, that it represents to me the deification of beauty to the exclusion of all else. You have made ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... upon the Deification (105/1. "If we confound 'Variation' or 'Natural Selection' with such creational laws, we deify secondary causes or immeasurably exaggerate their influence" (Lyell, "The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, with Remarks on Theories on the Origin of Species by Variation," page ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... for harmony between the soul and the circumstance, the progressive, idealizing instinct, predominate later, and the step backward from the higher to the lower relations is impossible. Thus even love, which is the deification of persons, must become more impersonal every day. Of this at first it gives no hint. Little think the youth and maiden who are glancing at each other across crowded rooms with eyes so full of mutual ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... shall never be said that my pen passed close to a great man or a great thing without a word of homage and sympathy to set against the sneers of groveling criticasters, the blindness of self-singing poetasters, and the national itch for detraction of all great things and men that live, and deification ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade

... most illustrious Egyptians, and contained ample records of miraculous cures which that god had performed on sleepers.[98] Isis, it is said, effected similar cures in her lifetime, whence it became her office, in her after state of deification, to reveal in dreams the most efficacious remedies to the sick. Indeed the healing powers of this goddess were such, that, as we are told by Diodorus,[99] the remedies she prescribed never failed of their effect, and that convalescents were ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian

... Olympic Jove appeared the bust of the contemptible Caligula; and this incongruous adaptation represented the change of the popular faith from its former heavenly idealisations to the most grovelling fetish worship of the time. This deification of the emperors avenged its terrible blasphemy by the sublime wickedness of those who were so raised above humanity. Here, in this last pagan temple of Rome, converted into one of the earliest Christian churches, we see the darkness and despair ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan

... was to be condoned for not offering her worship, and so putting public question on her deification. It appeared also that Ylga's interference was looked upon as untimely, and, though I could not understand the exact reasons for either of these things, I accepted them as they were, seeing that they forwarded the scheme that Zaemon had bidden ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne

... replied young Reynolds. We can hardly blame Hudson for sending him away—no master wants a pupil around who sees all over, above and beyond him, and who can do better work than he. It's confusing, and tends to rob the master of the deification that is his due. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard

... anarchists, however, this deification of the individual induces a morbid and diseased egotism which drives them to the most amazing excesses; among others, the yearning to commit some memorable act of revolt in order to be remembered. In fact, the ego in its ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter

... Rome, and who, profiting by the oppression of the true Romans, succeeded in attaining great influence over the wretches who governed. The most disgusting ignominies of the empire, such as the apotheosis of the emperors and their deification during life, came from the East, and particularly from Egypt, which was at that period one of the most corrupt countries on the face of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various

... it was acquired from the incense and the aromatic woods which were credited with the power of animating the dead. But at a very early epoch many other considerations helped to confirm and extend the conception of deification. When Osiris was buried, a sacred sycamore grew up as "the visible symbol of the imperishable life of Osiris".[62] But the sap of trees was brought into relationship with life-giving water and thus constituted ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... out that the love which presented itself was exactly suited to the state of her soul. It was a sort of admiration at a distance, a mute contemplation, the deification of a stranger. It was the apparition of youth to youth, the dream of nights become a reality yet remaining a dream, the longed-for phantom realized and made flesh at last, but having as yet, neither name, nor fault, nor spot, nor exigence, nor defect; ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... seek in the rudest periods for the origin of religion) we do not find any such systematic procedure amongst rude thinkers—we do not find any condition of mankind which displays that complete ascendancy of the principle here described. Our author would lead us to suppose, that the deification of objects was uniformly a species of explanation of natural phenomena. The accounts we have of fetishism, as observed in barbarous countries, prove to us that this animation of stocks and stones has frequently no connexion ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various

... is right and love is no more than the deification of persons, the criminalist does not need to bother about this very rare paroxysm of the human soul. We might translate, at most, a girl's description of her lover who is possibly accused of some crime, from deified into human, but that is ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... the power of Prussianism, run mad and murderous, held the world by the throat, if the primacy of the earth belonged to a government steeped in the doctrines of a barbarous past and supported by a ruling caste which preaches the deification of sheer might, which despises liberty, hates democracy and would destroy both if ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn

... of God is so intimate that his experience of the world is reduced to insignificance. As an overpowering human love welds two beings into one, and identifies their thoughts, wills, springs of action and even feelings, so the amor dei identifies man with God and makes possible a deification of humanity. Deeply religious natures in all ages have heard this mystic call. To lose their ego in the divine spirit is the height of their religious ambition. The conception is lofty, but it is not the Christian ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce

... vague sacredness to trees, rivers, rocks, and mountains, and of vague notions of power for good or evil to the sea, the forest, the fire, and the sun and moon. I cannot make out that they possess a trace of the deification of ancestors, though their rude nature worship may well have been the primitive form of Japanese Shinto. The solitary exception to their adoration of animate and inanimate nature appears to be the reverence paid ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird

... communal life was the prime problem and necessity. It furnished the religious sanctions for the social order in its customs of worshiping not only the gods, but also the Emperor and ancestors. It gave the highest possible justification of the national social order in its deification of the supreme ruler. Shinto was so completely communal in its nature that the individual aspect of religion was utterly ignored. It developed no specific moral code, no eschatological and soteriological systems, no comprehensive view of nature or of the gods. ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick

... earliest beginnings of civilization man's emotions seem to have swung to the opposite extreme, for emphasis fell on the mystic and uncanny powers possessed by woman. Thus it was that in ancient nations there was a deification of woman which found expression in the belief in feminine deities and the establishment of priestess cults. Not until the dawn of the Christian era was the emphasis once more focussed on woman as a ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard

... his historic school, a masterly paper, which reasons convincingly against those historians "who strain humanity, who make the lesson that history teaches too direct and stiff, who put themselves in the place of Providence," which, as is said in another place (vol. v. p. 150), "is often but a deification of ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert

... happened, however, that my deification was due neither to my recognition as a diplomatist nor as a military strategist," said the explorer. "No, they wanted something beyond the mere fighting man to worship, and my knowledge of that fact combined with their paeans of victory—to the obbligato ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore

... fancy came into my head that Moreau, after animalising these men, had infected their dwarfed brains with a kind of deification of himself. However, I was too keenly aware of white teeth and strong claws about me to stop my chanting ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells

... the deification of a deceased emperor, usually regarded by Senate and people as a hollow mockery, became a veritable fact upon the death of Marcus Aurelius. He was not regarded in any sense as mortal. All men said he had but returned to his heavenly place among the immortal gods. As his body passed, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... the bargain with humanity, a bargain to be kept on their side if they expected tribute of lambs and piglings, of hallowed cakes and vervain wreaths. Very little of what we call devotion seasons them. In two Odes (I, ii, xii), from a mere litany of Olympian names he passes to a much more earnest deification of Augustus. Another (III, xix) is a grace to Bacchus after a wine-bout. Or Faunus is bidden to leave pursuing the nymphs (we think of Elijah's sneer at Baal) and to attend to his duties on the Sabine farm, of blessing ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell

... truth that these earliest religions are more profoundly pantheistic than polytheistic. Man recognizes an all-pervading interest that is capable of being directed to himself. The selection of a deity is not due to any special qualification for deification possessed by the individual object itself, but to the tacit presumption that, as Thales said, "all things are full of gods." The disposition of residual reality manifests to the believer no consistency or unity, but it is nevertheless the most ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry

... something they named power. But Hume has shown we may search 'in vain for an idea of power or necessary connection in all the sources from which we would suppose it to be derived. [11:2] Owen, Carlile, and other Atheists, falsely so called, supposed power the only entity worthy of deification. They dignified it with such appellations as 'internal or external cause of all existence,' and ascribed to it intelligence, with such other honourable attributes as are usually ascribed to 'deified, error.' But Hume astonished religious philosophers by declaring that, 'while we argue ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell

... downwards? He is intensely English nevertheless, as expatriated Englishmen generally are. I always tell Robert that his patriotism grows and deepens in exact proportion as he goes away from England. As for me, it is not so with me. I am very cosmopolitan, and am considerably tired of the self-deification of the English nation at the expense of all others. We have some noble advantages over the rest of the world, but it is not all advantage. The shameful details of bribery, for instance, prove what I have ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... happy hunting grounds; Alfardaws[obs3], Assama[obs3]; Falak al aflak "the highest heaven" (Mohammedan)[Arabic][Arab]. future state, eternal home, eternal reward. resurrection, translation; resuscitation &c. 660. apotheosis, deification. Adj. heavenly, celestial, supernal, unearthly, from on high, paradisiacal, beatific, elysian. Phr. "looks through nature up to the nature's god" [Pope]; "the great world;s altarstairs, that slope through darkness up to God" [Tennyson]; "the treasury of everlasting ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... you'll succeed in gaining disciples,' said Graham, with a shrug. 'There is no belief strange enough for some men to doubt. After Mormonism and Joseph Smith's deification, I am prepared to believe that humanity will go to any length in its search after the unseen. No doubt you'll form a sect in time, Mr Baltic. If so, call ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume

... the feeling of Scientists in this city toward the reported deification of Mrs. Eddy, a Post reporter called upon a few of the leading members of the faith yesterday and had a number of very interesting conversations upon ...
— Pulpit and Press (6th Edition) • Mary Baker Eddy

... first, the Encyclopedie of D'Alembert, Voltaire, and Diderot, sought to malign and extirpate Christianity, while it did frequent homage to Natural Theology; the second, the "Nouvelle Encyclopedie" of Pierre Leroux and his coadjutors, proclaims the deification of Humanity, and the dethronement ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan



Words linked to "Deification" :   worship, apotheosis, incarnation, status, condition, deify, embodiment, avatar



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