The rude stock or stone was sometimes itself the actual recipient of material offerings; or it might be painted with some bright and pleasing colour, or wrapped in costly draperies.

In most of these customs an assumption is implied that the object of worship is pleased by the same things as please its worshippers; and here we find the germ of the anthropomorphic idea.

It was probably the desire to make the offerings and prayers of the worshippers perceptible to the power within that first led to the addition of human features to the shapeless block.
Just as the early Greeks painted eyes upon the prows of their ships, to enable them to find their way through the water, so they carved a head, with eyes and ears, out of the sacred stone or stock, or perhaps added a head to the original shapeless mass.

We find many primitive idols in this form--a cone or column with a head and perhaps arms and feet added to it; and the tradition survives in the herm, or in the mask of Dionysus attached to a post, round which we still see the Maenads dancing on fifth-century vases.

The notion that such carved eyes or ears actually served to transmit impressions to the god is well illustrated by Professor Petrie's discovery at Memphis of a number of votive ears of the god, intended to facilitate or to symbolise his reception of the prayers of his votaries.