This is a sculpture of the most remote antiquity, but the dress, the beads, the sacred cord and other religious symbols declare it to be the work of Hindoos. In anthropomorphising the Deity, men always adopt their own typical countenance for that of their God. Hence their idols betray the national features. Now, observe the profiles of Vishnu and Siva in this Trimurti. The face of the former, the good and beneficent “Preserver,” the friend and mediator for man, is a purely Greek face; the Nose straight and well-defined. It has none of the air of the modern Hindoo countenance. Much less has that of the energetic and terrible Siva, “the Destroyer.” The Nose is of the most energetic form; it is a fine Roman Nose, aquiline and rugose. If phrenologists are permitted from similar facts to say that the Greeks—who were but children to these Hindoo artists—were phrenologists, surely we may venture to say that even at this very early period the Hindoos were Nasologists.
THE HINDOO TRIMURTI.
But in the wide nostril of Brahma we also perceive the Cogitative form of Nose, so necessary to indicate the wisdom of Brahma, “the Creator:” who, though now he rests, having consigned the inferior office of Preservation to Vishnu, was the first emanation from the supreme Brahmè, and by whom and from whom all creation proceeded. With the exception of the head in this Trimurti, Brahma has no idolatrous representations, for it is said in the Vedas, “Of Him whose glory is so great, there is no image. He is the incomprehensible Being which illumines all, delights all, and whence all proceed.”
Sir William Jones mentions, in one of his discourses published in the Asiatic Researches, the existence of a small nation in India which appears distinct from the Hindoo race. The people comprising it he describes as shrewd, clever tradesmen, enterprising merchants, acute money-lenders, and notorious in India for their aptitude for commerce. Their countenances, he adds, are what are called Jewish, and hence he concludes that they constitute a portion of Jews, who either at the dispersion of the Ten Tribes, or at some other very early period, settled in India. It is surprising that the acute President should have so hastily jumped to such a conclusion from the foregoing premises; for he adds a fact which seems most decidedly to negative it. This people, he tells us, have not the slightest trace of any Jewish traditions, belief, or customs among them. Now it is a familiar fact that the Jews, wherever dispersed, or however long separated from their brethren, have invariably retained a very large proportion of the inspired precepts revealed to regulate their religious, moral, and social conduct; and it must demand the most precise and indisputable evidence to justify the classing any people as Jews, who have lost all traces of the manners and customs of that singular nation.
For these reasons we do not hesitate to say that the two facts on which Sir W. Jones founded his hasty hypothesis, viz. the commercial character and the Jewish physiognomy of this Asiatic tribe, afford by their coincidence only a remarkable and curious confirmation of our Nasological theory, and as such, we here gladly insert it.
We have said that the Jewish Nose should more properly be called the Syrian Nose; but have reserved, until this place, some of the corroborative illustrations.
The Syrian Arabs, as descendants of Abraham, through the wild son of Hagar, inherit the physical, and many of the metaphysical, features of the Hebrew nation.
Destined, by the promise of God, to become a great nation, the Arabs founded one of the most extensive kingdoms of the earth, and for many centuries swayed an empire more extensive than that of Rome in her fullest prosperity. For twelve hundred years, a larger proportion of the inhabitants of the earth have devoutly obeyed the precepts of the Arabian prophet, than have knelt at the altar of any other individual creed; and, though Mahometanism is perhaps doomed to fall before Christianity, it cannot be regarded in any other light than as a minor dispensation, and an inferior blessing conferred by Providence on a very large proportion of His people.
Christians who yet recognize the finger of God in every sublunary affair, would shrink with horror if asked to recognize in Mahometanism a Providential dispensation; yet, whether we regard it as a religion which annihilated the grossest idolatries, abolished human sacrifices, exterminated the vilest obscenities, and substituted a nearly spiritual worship of One God, over the largest and fairest portion of the earth,—or as the religion of a nation, whose ancestor God blessed, and promised to “make a great nation,” and “to multiply exceedingly, that it should not be numbered for multitude;” and who, in token thereof, received the seal of circumcision—to this day retained, as among the Jews—it is difficult not to see in it the finger of God, or to deny that the pseudo-prophet of the sons of Ishmael was an unconscious instrument for good in His hands.