Lamaism may be defined as a mixture of late Indian Buddhism (which is itself a mixture of Buddhism and Hinduism) with various Tibetan practices and beliefs.  The principal of these are demonophobia and the worship of human beings as incarnate deities.  Demonophobia is a compendious expression for an obsession which victimizes Chinese and Hindus to some extent as well as Tibetans, namely, the conviction that they are at all times surrounded by fierce and terrible beings against whom they must protect themselves by all the methods that religion and magic can supply.  This is merely an acute form of the world-wide belief that all nature is animated by good and bad spirits, of which the latter being more aggressive require more attention, but it assumes startlingly conspicuous forms in Tibet because the Church has enlisted all the forces of art, theology and philosophy to aid in this war against demons.  The externals of Tibetan worship suffer much from the idea that benevolent deities assume a terrible guise in order to strike fear into the hosts of evil.[1012] The helpers and saviours of mankind such as Avalokita and Tara are often depicted in the shape of raging fiends, as hideous and revolting as a fanciful brush and distorted brain can paint them.  The idea inspiring these monstrous images is not the worship of cruelty and terror, but the hope that evil spirits may be kept away when they see how awful are the powers which the Church can summon.  Nevertheless the result is that a Lama temple often looks like a pandemonium and meeting house for devil-worship, an Olympus tenanted by Gorgons, Hydras and Furies.  It is only fair to say that Tibetan art sometimes represents with success gods and saints in attitudes of repose and authority, and has produced some striking portraits,[1013] but its most marked feature (which it shares with literature) is a morbid love of the monstrous and terrible, a perpetual endeavour to portray fiends surrounded with every circumstance of horror, and still more appalling deities, all eyes, heads and limbs, wreathed with fire, drinking blood from skulls and trampling prostrate creatures to death beneath their feet.  Probably the wild and fantastic landscapes of Tibet, the awful suggestions of the spectral mists, the real terrors of precipice, desert and storm have wrought for ages upon the minds of those who live among them.

Like demonophobia, the worship of incarnate deities is common in eastern Asia but here it acquires an extent and intensity unknown elsewhere.  The Tibetans show a strange power of organization in dealing with the supernatural.  In India incarnations have usually been recognized post-mortem and as incalculable manifestations of the spirit.[1014] But at least since the seventeenth century, the Lamas have accepted them as part of the Church’s daily round and administrative work.  The practices of Shamanism probably prepared the way, for in his mystic frenzies the Shaman is temporarily inhabited by a god and the extreme ease with which