Page:History of Architecture in All Countries Vol 1.djvu/90

58 philosophical to believe, what probably is the case, that the one instrument of analysis we have hitherto used is not sufficient for the purpose, and we ought consequently to welcome every other process which will throw further light on the subject.

It is perhaps not too much to assert that no Turanian race ever rose to the idea of a God external to the world. All their gods were men who had lived with them on the face of the earth. In the old world they were kings,—men who had acquired fame from the extent of their power, or greatness from their wisdom. The Buddhist reform taught the Turanian races that virtue, not power, was true greatness, and that the humblest as well as the highest might attain beatitude through the practice of piety.

All the Turanians have a distinct idea of rewards and punishments after death, and generally also of a preparatory purgatory by transmigration through the bodies of animals, clean or unclean according to the actions of the defunct spirit, but always ending in another world. With some races transmigration becomes nearly all in all; in others it is nearly evanescent, and Heaven and Hell take its place; but the two are essentially doctrines of this race.

From the fact of their gods having been only ordinary mortals, and all men being able to aspire to the godhead, their form of worship was essentially anthropic and ancestral; their temples were palaces, where the gods sat on thrones and received petitions and dispensed justice as in life, and where men paid that homage to the image of the dead which they would have paid to the living king. They were in fact the idolaters, par excellence. Their tombs were even more sacred than their temples, and their reverence was more frequently directed to the remains of their ancestors than to the images of their gods. Hence arose that reverence for relics which formed so marked a feature in their ritual in all ages, and which still prevails among many races almost in the direct ratio in which Turanian blood can be traced in their veins.

Unable to rise above humanity in their conceptions of the deity, they worshipped all material things. Trees with them in all times were objects of veneration, and of especial worship in particular localities. The mysterious serpent was with them a god, and the bull in most Turanian countries a being to be worshipped. The sun, the moon, the stars, all filled niches in their Pantheon; in fact, whatever they saw they believed in, whatever they could not comprehend they worshipped. They cared not to inquire beyond the evidence of their senses, and were incapable of abstracting their conceptions. To the Turanians also is due that peculiar reverence for localities made