In India food is offered to the idol, it goes through its ablutions, is fanned, and so on, exactly like a human king.

The ideas of sanctuary and sacrilege appear to depend primarily on the belief in the actual presence of the god in his shrine.

And in India no sanctity at all attaches to a temple from which the idol has been removed.

Thus we see the life of the god distributed over a multitude of personalities.

Again, the same god, as Vishnu or the sun, is held to have had a number of incarnations, as the boar, the tortoise, a man-lion, a dwarf, Rama and Krishna, and these are venerated simultaneously as distinct deities.