HISTORICAL EXAMINATION OF DIFFERENT CONCEPTS ABOUT DIVINITY
A brief from Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s account in his translation of the Holy Quran for studying ancient comparative mythologies, is given below :

(1) Man’s ideas of God tend to be anthropomorphic. He transfers qualities, which he admires, to the godhead.
(2) Fear of mysterious things induces him to the formation of pantheon in order to placate them that they may not injure.
(3) This also leads to the worship of animals, noxious to man, such as serpent worship, etc. In ancient Egyptian mythology Crocodile (so common in the Nile), Dog, Bull, etc were worshipped.. (See Appendix V, The Holy Quran Translation, Abdullah Yusuf Ali) .
(4) Observation of wonderful heavenly bodies and their motions created feelings of their sublimity, beauty and mystery, which turned man to their worship. The allegory of Abraham (peace be upon him) (6:74-82 and notes, Abdullah Yusuf Ali) points to the cult of the worship of heavenly bodies and the fallacy in the first great astronomers in the ancient world, the Babylonians and Chaldaeans:

"It is those who believe, and confuse not their beliefs with wrong –that are truly in security,
For they are on right guidance" (6:82).

"The Sabaean worship of heavenly bodies in Arabia had probably its source in Chaldaea (see last paragraph of n.76 to 2:62, A.Y.A.).
(5) Paganism includes worship of abstractions, treatment of concrete things as symbols of abstract qualities which they represent. For example, the planet Saturn with its slow motion was treated as phlegmatic and evil. The planet Mars with its fiery red light was treated as betokening war, havoc, evil, and so on. Jupiter, with its magnificent golden light, was treated as lucky and benignant.. Venus became symbol and the goddess of carnal love. The Pagan Arabs erected Time (Dahr) into a deity, existing from eternity to eternity, and dispensing good and ill fortune to man.
(6) Then these qualities were attributed to living beings , with feelings, and passions, who quarreled, hated, loved, were jealous, and suffered or enjoyed life like ordinary human beings. These included demi-gods and real human heroes that were worshipped as gods. The Greek poets and artists were past masters in carrying out this process, as they discussed profound human problems with great power. They made religion dramatic. While they gained in humanism, they lost the purer spiritual conceptions which lift the divine world far above the material life. Hierarchical Christianity has suffered from this inheritance of the Greek tradition.
(7) Where there was a commingling of peoples and cultures, several of these ideas, processes, forces of nature, animals, trees, qualities, astronomical bodies, and various other factors got mixed up, and formed a shapeless medley of superstitions.

The objects which stood out vividly with mysterious laws of relative motion, impressed imagination of the ancients, e.g., Sirius the Dog star, the brightest fixed star in the heavens, and Algol the variable star, whose variation can be perceived by the naked eye, became connected with many legends, myths, and superstitions. [(It is probably Sirius that is referred to as the fixed star in the Parable of Abraham (Peace be upon him) (6:76)]. The moving “stars”, or planets, stood out to them personified, each with influence of its own. As they knew and understood them, they were seven in number, viz.: (1) and (2) the moon and the sun, two objects which most closely and indubitably influence tides, temperature, and life on our planet: (3) and (4) the two inner planets, Mercury and Venues, which are morning and evening stars, and (5), (6) and (7) Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The number seven became itself a mystic number, as explained in n. 5526 to 65:12, [ Seven Firmaments ( Cf 2-29 , 17-44, 23-86, and 51-12 ) Ed.]

It will be noticed that the sun and the moon and the five planets got identified each with a living deity, god or goddess, e.g., eagle became identified with the sun. The sun myth mixes itself up with the myth of the Nile. In Babylon the name Shamash (Arabic, Shams) proclaims the glory of the sun-god corresponding to the old Sumerian Utu of Babbar, while the hymns to Surya (the sun) in the Rig-Veda and the cult of Mithras in Persia proclaim the dominance of sun-worship.

Moon-worship was equally popular in various forms. The Egyptain Khonsu, traversing the sky in a boat, referred to the moon, and the moon legends also got mixed up with those about the god of magic. In the Vedic religion of India the moon-god was Soma, the lord of the planets, and the name was also applied to the juice which was the drink of gods. Moon was a male divinity in ancient India and Semitic religion, and the Arabic word for the moon (qamar) is of the masculine gender. On the other hand, the Arabic word for the sun (shams) is of the feminine gender. The Pagan Arabs evidently looked upon the sun as a goddess and the moon as a god.

Venus, in different places, was considered both male and female. In the Bible (Isaiah, xiv. 12), the words, “How art thou fallen, O Lucifer, son of the morning!” are understood to refer to the Morning Star in the first instance, and by analogy to the King of Babylon. The Fathers of the Christian Church, on the other hand, transferred the name Lucifer to Satan, the power of evil. Mercury is a less conspicuous planet, and was looked upon as a child in the family of the moon and the sun. Jupiter, most conspicuous object in the heavens, was reputed to be beneficent and to bestow good fortune, and was considered the father of the planets. Mars and Saturn were considered malevolent planets, to be feared for the mischief that they might do. The days of the week are named after the seven planets of geocentric astronomy, and if we take them in alternate sequence they indicate the order in which their heavens were arranged with reference to proximity to the earth.

These cross-currents and mixtures of nature-worship, astral-worship, heroworship, worship of abstract qualities, etc., resulted in a medley of debasing superstitions which are summed up in the five names, Wadd, Suwa, Yaghuth, Ya’uq, and Nasr, as noted..above. The time of Noah is taken to be the peak of superstition and false worship, and the most ancient cults may thus be symbolically brought under these heads.

The five names of deities mentioned here, to represent very ancient religious cults, are well-chosen. They are not the names of the deities best known in Makkah, but rather those which survived as fragments of very ancient cults among the outlying tribes of Arabia, which were influenced by the cults of Mesopotamia (Noah’s country). The Pagan deities best known in the Ka’bah and round about Makkah were Laat, Uzza, and Manat. (Manaat was also known round Yathrib, which afterwards became Madinah.) See 53:19-20. They were all female goddesses. Laat almost certainly represents another wave of sun-worship. “Laat” may be the original of the Greek “Leto”, the mother of Apollo the sun-god (Encyclopedia of Islam, I, p. 380). If so, the name was brought in prehistoric times from South Arabia by the great Incense Route (n. 3816 to 34:18) to the Mediterranean. ‘Uzza probably represents the planet Venus. The origin of Manaat is not quite clear, but it would not be surprising if it also turned out to be astral. (Excerpts/Extract from Appendix-X, Pages 1538-1541, The Holy Quran Translation, Abdullah Yusuf Ali).