composite and grotesque,
sometimes (especially images of Buddha) highly impressive.

+1092+. The Hebrews appear to have had no anthropomorphic images of
their national deity. Down to a late period there was a cult of
household gods,[2011] and of these, probably, there were images in
private houses and in shrines, whether anthropomorphic or not is
uncertain. In Solomon's temple (and in Ezekiel's proposed plan) figures
of cherubs (originally divine beings) stood on the walls of the main
room and guarded the ark in the adytum; they were winged creatures, the
forms derived immediately from Phoenicia, ultimately from Babylonia;
they appear only in the great public cult, probably did not enter into
the religious life of the people at large, and there is no evidence that
they ever received divine worship.[2012] The Hebrews had no plastic art
of their own, seem to have had small disposition in their earlier
history to make images, and later such forms were excluded by the
antagonism of the prophets to foreign cults and by refined ideas of the
deity.[2013] The absence of images in the Zoroastrian cult may be
accounted for in a similar way--from early lack of artistic impulse and
later elevated conceptions. In China there are images in household
worship, but none in the great imperial religious ceremonies.[2014]
Though the Koran does not expressly forbid the cult of images, yet, as
the old Arabian cults denounced by the prophet were all idolatrous,
images were identified with false religion (polytheism) and have been
avoided by the Moslems, whose strict monotheism left no place for them.

+1093+. Images were credited in half-civilized times with a certain
personality, were flogged or destroyed when they failed to do what was
expected of them, or were bound in order to prevent their going
away.[2015] In such cases the conception of the power of these objects
was probably a confused one; though they were known to be inanimate
pieces of wood or stone or other material, it was believed that they
were inhabited by spirits or deities, and it was held that in some
undefined way the power of the divine agent was transferred to its
physical incasement--the two were practically identified. This sort of
conception soon passed away and was succeeded by a symbolical
interpretation. Whatever the ultimate origin of the Egyptian,
Babylonian, and Hindu divine and semi-divine forms (which are sometimes
monstrous),[2016] it is probable that for t