A History of Architecture in all Countries, Volumes 1 and 2, 3rd ed.: From the Earliest Times to the Present DayFergusson, James
History
A History of Architecture in all Countries, Volumes 1 and 2, 3rd ed.: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day
Fergusson, James
Architecture -- History
If they do not all speak cognate languages, or if we cannot now trace
their linguistic affinities, we must not too readily assume that
therefore they are distinct the one from the other. It must be more
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.
RELIGION OF THE TURANIANS.
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
idolators, _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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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