Cult-Images and Religious Ethnology: The European Exploration of Medieval Asia and the Discovery of New Iconic Religions

In their exploration of the Mongol Empire during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Western merchants and missionaries experienced for the first time the contact with peoples and cultural traditions which had been almost completely unknown in the times past. Unexpectedly, some features of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist use of religious images proved to look quite similar to Western practices and contributed to suggest a feeling of affinity between European and Far Eastern devotional habits. Such a feeling relied on at least three important issues: first of all, the widespread use of three-dimensional statues (instead of icons, as in the Christian East) caught the Westerners’ imagination; second, they were struck by the complex and highly developed iconographic code employed by the religions of the Far East; third, they understood that the “idolaters” of Asia shared the Christian conception of the sacred image as a reproduction of a much older archetype, being an authentic, original, or even “acheir...