by Dan Clore
From the Persian Tūrān — the mythical realm beyond the Oxus, named in Firdausi's Shāh Nāma — nineteenth-century ethnologists derived "Turanian" as a name for the Ural-Altaic language family: the peoples who were neither Aryan nor Semitic. In the occult tradition, the term acquired a darker resonance. Blavatsky placed the Turanians as a sub-race of her Atlantean system; folklorists proposed that European fairy lore was the racial memory of a small, dark, pre-Aryan people who had once inhabited every forest and hillside; Leland traced shamanism to a "Tartar-Mongol-mongrel-Turanian" origin somewhere in Central Asia. Arthur Machen built his horror fiction on this "pygmy theory" — that the obscure and horrible race of the hills was no superstition but a genuine survival, unchanged since the Stone Age; Lovecraft absorbed Machen and gave the theory cosmic dread. Dan Clore compiled these appearances in March 2004.
— Dan Clore, compiling sources, March 2004
Turanian, adj. & n. [< Pers Tūrān, name used by Firdausi in The Shah Namah for a realm beyond the Oxus, as opposed to Irān (Persia) < Tur, in Iranian mythology one of the three mythical brothers from which mankind is supposedly descended.] Of or pertaining to the (mostly Asian) languages of the Ural-Altaic family, as opposed to those of the Indo-European ("Aryan") and Semitic families; of or pertaining to the speakers of these Ural-Altaic languages, particularly when considered as a race. Formerly also used in an extended sense that included various non-Indo-European-speaking (or otherwise suspect) peoples such as the Lapps, Finns, Basques, Picts, Berbers, Dravidians, Gypsies, etc. According to the so-called "pygmy" theory, folk memories of Turanian peoples account for the European folklore concerning fairies, elves, dwarfs, etc. By some post-Blavatsky Theosophists, the name was given to the fourth Sub-race of the fourth Root Race.
[Not in OED.]
The kingdom had been through dangerous and difficult times, when powerful enemies like the Prince of the Turanians, leagued with wicked magicians, had gone up against the Persians in war. But now that splendid hero, Zal, mightiest of the warriors of the world, had broken the strength of the Turanians; the old Shah, Kaikobad, had gone into Paradise; and young Prince Kaikooz ascended to the Throne of Thrones as the twelfth Shah of the Persians, and all his people cheered his name.
— Lin Carter, "Rustum Against the City of Demons" (after Firdausi, The Shah Namah)
The very title of Tur, which they give to their supreme magistrate, indicates theft from a tongue akin to the Turanian.
— Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race
A curious Basque story shows that among this strange Turanian people, cut off by such a flood of Aryan nations from any other members of its family, the same superstition remains.
— Sabine Baring-Gould, The Book of Werewolves: Being an Account of a Terrible Superstition
The appropriate definition of the name "Turanian" is: any family that ethnologists know nothing about.
— H.P. Blavatsky, note to Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology
The occult doctrine admits of no such divisions as the Aryan and the Semite, accepting even the Turanian with ample reservations.
— H.P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy
Granting that the Turanian races were typified by the dwarfs (Dwergar), and that a dark, round-headed, and dwarfish race was driven northward by the fair-faced Scandinavians, or Æsir, the gods being like unto men, there still exists neither in history nor any other scientific work any anthropological proof whatever of the existence in time or space of a race of giants.
— H.P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy
This was the Shaman. He seems to have had a Tartar-Mongol-mongrel-Turanian origin, somewhere in Central Asia, and to have spread with his magic drum, and songs, and stinking smoke, exorcising his fiends all over the face of the earth.
— Charles Godfrey Leland, Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling
"It is a very ancient ceremony," said the priest; "probably Persian, like the baptismal form, although, for that matter, we can never dig deep enough for the roots of these things. They all turn up Turanian if we probe far enough."
— Harold Frederic, The Damnation of Theron Ware; or, Illumination
Philologists seem to be fast arriving at the view that when the whole earth was of "one language and of one speech" it was a primitive monosyllabic or Turanian tongue. The word Turanian is most indefinite, for it is taken to include the small, dark, long-headed Dravidian race of India, which penetrated Britain before the Aryan Celt and of which the Basques of Spain are a survival; the long-headed white race of Scandinavian hunters; and the white, broad-headed Mongoloid, whom we chiefly term proto-Aryan, as an early branch of the Aryan race; a race which in prehistoric times spread from Lapland to Babylon, and from India to Egypt and Europe.
— John Yarker, The Arcane Schools: a Review of Their Origin and Antiquity, with a History of Freemasonry and Its Relation to the Theosophic, Scientific, and Philosophic Mysteries
A further and rather terrible development of the Turanian times must still be referred to. With the practice of sorcery many of the inhabitants had, of course, become aware of the existence of powerful elementals — creatures who had been called into being, or at least animated by their own powerful wills, which being directed towards maleficent ends, naturally produced elementals of power and malignity. So degraded had then become man's feelings of reverence and worship, that they actually began to adore these semi-conscious creations of their own malignant thought. The ritual with which these beings were worshipped was bloodstained from the very start, and of course every sacrifice offered at their shrines gave vitality and persistence to these vampire-like creations — so much so, that even to the present day in various parts of the world, the elementals formed by the powerful will of these old Atlantean sorcerers still continue to exact their tribute from unoffending village communities.
— W. Scott-Elliot, Legends of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria
"And the hint came of the old name of fairies, 'the little people,' and the very probable belief that they represent a tradition of the prehistoric Turanian inhabitants of the country, who were cave dwellers: and then I realized with a shock that I was looking for a being under four feet in height, accustomed to live in darkness, possessing stone instruments, and familiar with the Mongolian cast of features!"
— Arthur Machen, "The Shining Pyramid"
But as I idly scanned the paragraph, a flash of thought passed through me with the violence of an electric shock: what if the obscure and horrible race of the hills still survived, still remained haunting the wild places and barren hills, and now and then repeating the evil of Gothic legend, unchanged and unchangeable as the Turanian Shelta, or the Basques of Spain?
— Arthur Machen, "Novel of the Black Seal" in The Three Impostors; or, The Transmutations
Though everybody called them gipsies, they were in reality Turanian metal-workers, degenerated into wandering tinkers; their ancestors had fashioned the bronze battle-axes, and they mended pots and kettles.
— Arthur Machen, "The Turanians" in Ornaments of Jade
M. Pineau, very properly, interprets these dwarfs to mean the aboriginal Turanian race which inhabited Europe before the coming of the Aryans, and passes on, without dwelling on the subject.
— Arthur Machen, "Folklore and Legends of the North"
That these hellish vestiges of old Turanian-Asiatic magic and fertility-cults were even now wholly dead he could not for a moment suppose, and he frequently wondered how much older and how much blacker than the very worst of the muttered tales some of them might really be.
— H.P. Lovecraft, "The Horror at Red Hook"
"They are known variously as Turanians, Picts, Mediterraneans, and Garlic Eaters. A race of small dark people, traces of their type may be found in primitive sections of Europe and Asia today, among the Basques of Spain, the Scotch of Galloway, and the Lapps."
— Robert E. Howard, "The Little People"
Colophon
Compiled by Dan Clore and posted to the Usenet newsgroups alt.magick, alt.magick.chaos, and alt.satanism on March 5, 2004. Clore was a scholar of occult literature and author of The Unspeakable and Others (Wildside Press, 2004). This essay is a lexicographic compilation tracing the term Turanian from its Persian etymological roots — Firdausi's mythical land of Tūrān, home of the enemies of Persia — through its Victorian life as an ethnological category (the Ural-Altaic language family, comprising Lapps, Finns, Basques, Gypsies, Dravidians, and others deemed neither Aryan nor Semitic), and into the occult and weird fiction traditions that transformed it into a name for the pre-Aryan substrate hidden beneath European civilization. Blavatsky assigned the Turanians a role in her Root Race cosmology and identified them with the Dwergar of Norse mythology. Folklorists such as the M. Pineau cited by Machen proposed the "pygmy theory" — that European fairy lore preserved the memory of a small, dark, Mongolian-featured race who had once inhabited the hills and caves of Britain. Arthur Machen, who absorbed this theory deeply, made it the engine of his horror fiction from "The Shining Pyramid" to The Three Impostors; Lovecraft absorbed Machen and gave the Turanian substrate the cosmic weight of "old Turanian-Asiatic magic and fertility-cults." Robert E. Howard, writing his Hyborian Age tales, used "Turanian" straightforwardly as an ethnic category alongside Picts and Mediterraneans. The arc — from Firdausi's mythological geography to Lovecraft's New York City — is the arc of a word that absorbed the anxieties of an era and returned them as dread.
Original Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.
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