Adoration
admiration or devotion in a certain person, place, God or thing
Adoration is respect, reverence, strong admiration, and love for a certain person, place, or thing. The term comes from the Latin adōrātiō, meaning "to give homage or worship to someone or something".
Ancient Rome
In classical Rome, adoration was primarily an act of homage or worship. Among the Romans, it was performed by raising the hand to the mouth, kissing it and then waving it in the direction of the adored object. This act was called Adoratio and was performed during rites. The devotee had their head covered and, after the act, turned themselves round from left to right. Sometimes they kissed the feet or knees of the images of the gods themselves; Saturn and Hercules were adored with the head bare.
By a natural transition, the homage, at first paid to divine beings alone, came to be paid to monarchs. Thus the Greek and Roman emperors were adored by bowing or kneeling, laying hold of the imperial robe, and presently withdrawing the hand and pressing it to the lips, or by putting the royal robe itself to the lips.
Ancient Middle East
In Eastern countries, adoration has been performed in an attitude still more lowly.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Adoration” is admiration or devotion in a certain person, place, God or thing. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Adoration, admiration and devotion, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q851918. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Adoration” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.