I 093mentioned in the last chapter two origins of Idols to which, as I believed, an insufficient amount of attention had been directed by Mr. Herbert Spencer. These were the Sacred Stone and the Wooden Stake which mark the grave. To these two I will now add a third common object of worship, which does not indeed enter into the genesis of idols, but which is of very high importance in early religion—the sacred tree, with its collective form, the sacred grove. All the objects thus enumerated demand further attention at our hands, both from their general significance in the history of religion, and also from their special interest in connexion with the evolution of the God of Israel, who became in due time the God of Christianity and of Islam, as well as the God of modern idealised and sublimated theism.

I will begin with the consideration of the Sacred Stone, not only because it is by far the most important of the three, but also because, as we shall shortly see, it stands in the direct line of parentage of the God of Israel.

All the world over, and at all periods of history, we find among the most common objects of human worship certain blocks of stone, either rudely shaped and dressed by the hand, or else more often standing alone on the soil in all their native and natural roughness. The downs of England are everywhere studded with cromlechs, dolmens, and other antique megalithic structures (of which the gigantic trilithons of Stonehenge and Avebury are the best-known examples), 094long described by antiquaries as “druidical remains,” and certainly regarded by the ancient inhabitants of Britain with an immense amount of respect and reverence. In France we have the endless avenues of Carnac and Locmariaker; in Sardinia, the curious conical shafts known to the local peasants as sepolture dei giganti—the tombs of the giants. In Syria, Major Conder has described similar monuments in Heth and Moab, at Gilboa and at Heshbon. In India, five stones are set up at the corner of a field, painted red, and worshipped by the natives as the Five Pandavas. Theophrastus tells us as one of the characteristics of the superstitious man that he anoints with oil the sacred stones at the street corners; and from an ancient tradition embedded in the Hebrew scriptures we learn how the patriarch Jacob set up a stone at Bethel “for a pillar,” and “poured oil upon the top of it,” as a like act of worship. Even in our own day there is a certain English hundred where the old open-air court of the manor is inaugurated by the ceremony of breaking a bottle of wine over a standing stone which tops a tumulus; and the sovereigns of the United Kingdom are still crowned in a chair which encloses under its seat the ancestral sacred stone of their heathen Scottish and Irish predecessors.

Now, what is the share of such sacred stones in the rise and growth of the religious habit?

It is hardly necessary, I suppose, to give formal proof of the familiar fact that an upright slab is one of the commonest modes of marking the place where a person is buried. From the ancient pillar that prehistoric savages set up over the tumulus of their dead chief, to the headstone that marks the dwarfed and stunted barrow in our own English cemeteries, the practice of mankind has been one and continuous. Sometimes the stone is a rough boulder from the fields; a representative of the big block which savages place on the grave to keep the corpse from rising: sometimes it is an oblong slab of slate or marble; sometimes, and especially among the more advanced races, it is 095a shapely cross or sculptured monument. But whenever on earth interment is practised, there stones of some sort, solitary or in heaps, almost invariably mark the place of burial.

Again, as presents and sacrifices are offered at graves to the spirits of the dead, it is at the stone which records the last resting-place of the deceased that they will oftenest be presented. As a matter of fact we know that, all the world over, offerings of wine, oil, rice, ghee, corn, and meat are continually made at the graves of chiefs or relations. Victims, both human and otherwise, are sacrificed at the tomb, and their blood is constantly smeared on the headstone or boulder that marks the spot. Indeed, after a time, the grave and the stone get to be confounded together, and the place itself comes to have a certain sacredness, derived from the ghost which haunts and inhabits it.

Four well-marked varieties of early tombstone are recognised in the eastern continent at least, and their distribution and nature is thus described by Major Conder: “Rude stone monuments, bearing a strong family resemblance in their mode of construction and dimensions, have been found distributed over all parts of Europe and Western Asia, and occur also in India. In some cases they are attributable to early Aryan tribes; in others they seem to be of Semitic origin. They include menhirs, or standing stones, which were erected as memorials, and worshipped as deities, with libations of blood, milk, honey, or water poured upon the stones: dolmens, or stone tables, free standing—that is, not covered by any mound or superstructure, which may be considered without doubt to have been used as altars on which victims (often human) were immolated: cairns, also memorial, and sometimes surrounding menhirs; these were made by the contributions of numerous visitors or pilgrims, each adding a stone as witness of his presence: finally cromlechs, or stone circles, used as sacred enclosures or early hyp忙thral temples, often 096with a central menhir or dolmen as statue or altar.”

There can be very little doubt that every one of these monuments is essentially sepulchral in character. The menhir or standing stone is the ordinary gravestone still in use among us: the dolmen is a chambered tomb, once covered by a tumulus, but now bare and open: the cairn is a heap of stones piled above the dead body: the stone circle is apparently a later temple built around a tomb, whose position is marked by the menhir or altar-stone in its centre. And each has been the parent of a numerous offspring. The menhir gives rise to the obelisk, the stone cross, and the statue or idol; the dolmen, to the sarcophagus, the altar-tomb, and the high altar; the cairn, to the tope and also to the pyramid; the cromlech, or stone circle, to the temple or church in one at least of its many developments.

Each of these classes of monuments, Major Conder observes, has its distinctive name in the Semitic languages, and is frequently mentioned in the early Hebrew literature. The menhir is the “pillar” of our Authorised Version of the Old Testament; the dolmen is the “altar”; the cairn is the “heap”; and the stone circle appears under the names Gilgal and Hazor. The significance of these facts will appear a little later on when I reach a more advanced stage in the evolution of stone-worship.

In the simplest and most primitive stage of religion, such as that pure ancestor-cult still surviving unmixed among the people of New Guinea or the African tribes whose practice Mr. Duff Macdonald has so admirably described for us, it is the corpse or ghost itself, not the stone to mark its dwelling, which comes in for all the veneration and all the gifts of the reverent survivors. But we must remember that every existing religion, however primitive in type, is now very ancient; and it is quite natural that in many cases the stone should thus come itself to be regarded as the ghost or god, the object to which veneration is 097paid by the tribesmen. In fact, just in proportion as the ghost evolves into the god, so does the tombstone begin to evolve into the fetish or idol.

At first, however, it is merely as the rude unshapen stone that the idol in this shape receives the worship of its votaries. This is the stage that has been christened by that very misleading name fetishism, and erroneously supposed to lie at the very basis of all religion. Here are a few interesting samples of this stage of stone-worship, taken from the very careful Samoan collection of Mr. Turner, of the London Missionary Society:

“Fonge and Toafa were the names of the two oblong smooth stones which stood on a raised platform of loose stones inland of one of the villages. They were supposed to be the parents of Saato, a god who controlled the rain. When the chiefs and people were ready to go off for weeks to certain places in the bush for the sport of pigeon-catching, offerings of cooked taro and fish were laid on the stones, accompanied by prayers for fine weather and no rain. Any one who refused an offering to the stones was frowned upon; and in the event of rain was blamed and punished for bringing down the wrath of the fine-weather god, and spoiling the sports of the season.”

Here, even if one doubts that Saato was a deceased Weather-doctor, and that Fonge and Toafa were his father and mother (which I do not care to insist upon), it is at least clear that we have to deal essentially with two standing stones of precisely the same sort as those which habitually mark sepulture.

Of the gods of Hudson’s Island, Mr. Turner gives this very interesting and suggestive account:

“Foelangi and Maumau were the principal gods. They had each a temple; and under the altars, on which were laid out in rows the skulls of departed chiefs and people, were suspended offerings of pearl-shell and other valuables. Foelangi had an unchiselled block of stone to represent him—something like a six feet high gravestone.... 098Offerings of food were taken to the temples, that the gods might first partake before anyone else ate anything.... Husked cocoanuts were laid down, one before each skull.”

And of St. Augustine Island he writes: “At the Temple of Maumau there stood a nine feet high coral sandstone slab from the beach.... Meat offerings were laid on the altars, accompanied by songs and dances in honour of the god.”

Similarly, about one of the Gilbert Group, Mr. Turner says:

“They had other gods and goddesses, and, as was common in this group, had sandstone slabs or pillars set up here and there among the houses. Before these shrines offerings of food were laid during the day, which the priests took away stealthily by night and made the credulous believe that gods and not mortals had done it. If the stone slab represented a goddess it was not placed erect, but laid down on the ground. Being a lady they thought it would be cruel to make her stand so long.”

In these cases, and in many others, it seems to me clear that the original gravestone or menhir itself is the object of worship, viewed as the residence of the ghost or god in whose honour it was erected. For in Samoa we know that the grave “was marked by a little heap of stones, a foot or two high,” and at De Peyster’s Island “a stone was raised at the head of the grave, and a human head carved on it”—a first step, as we have already seen, towards the evolution of one form of idol.

Similar instances abound everywhere. Among the Khonds of India, every village has its local god, represented by an upright stone under the big tree on the green, to use frankly an English equivalent. (The full importance of this common combination of sacred stone and sacred tree will only come out at a later stage of our enquiry.) In Peru, worship was paid to standing stones which, says Dr. Tylor, “represented the penates of households 099and the patron-deities of villages”—in other words, the ghosts of ancestors and of tribal chiefs. “Near Acora,” says the Marquis de Nadaillac, “the bodies were placed under megalithic stones, reminding us of the dolmens and cromlechs of Europe. One vast plain is covered with erect stones, some forming circles, some squares, and often covered in with large slabs which entirely closed round the sepulchral chamber.” In Fiji the gods and goddesses “had their abodes or shrines in black stones like smooth round milestones, and there received their offerings of food.” An immense number of similar instances have been collected by Dr. Tylor and other anthropologists.

But when once the idea of the sacredness of stones had thus got firmly fixed in the savage mind, it was natural enough that other stones, resembling those which were already recognised as gods, should come to be regarded as themselves divine, or as containing an indwelling ghost or deity. Of this stage, Mr. Turner’s Samoa again affords us some curious instances.

“Smooth stones apparently picked up out of the bed of the river were regarded as representatives of certain gods, and wherever the stone was, there the god was supposed to be. One resembling a fish would be prayed to as the fisherman’s god. Another, resembling a yam, would be the yam god. A third, round like a breadfruit, the breadfruit god—and so on.”

Now, the word “apparently” used by this very cautious observer in this passage shows clearly that he had never of his own knowledge seen a stone thus selected at random worshipped or deified, and it is therefore possible that in all such cases the stone may really have been one of sepulchral origin. Still, I agree with Mr. Spencer that when once the idea of a ghost or god is well developed, the notion of such a spirit as animating any remarkable or odd-looking object is a natural transition. *

     * The whole subject is admirably worked out in The
     Principles of Sociology, 搂 159.

Hence I incline 100to believe Mr. Turner is right, and that these stones may really have been picked out and worshipped, merely for their oddity, but always, as he correctly infers, from the belief in their connexion with some god or spirit.

Here is another case, also from Polynesia, where no immediate connexion with any particular grave seems definitely implied:

“Two unchiselled ‘smooth stones of the stream’ were kept in a temple at one of the villages, and guarded with great care. No stranger or over-curious person was allowed to go near the place, under penalty of a beating from the custodians of these gods. They represented good and not malicious death-causing gods. The one made the yams, breadfruit, and cocoanuts, and the other sent fish to the nets.

“Another stone was carefully housed in another village as the representative of a rain-making god. When there was overmuch rain, the stone was laid by the fire and kept heated till fine weather set in.”

Further instances (if fairly reported) occur elsewhere. “Among the lower races of America,” says Dr. Tylor, summarising Schoolcraft, “the Dakotahs would pick up a round boulder, paint it, and then, addressing it as grandfather, make offerings to it, and pray it to deliver them from danger.” But here the very fact that the stone is worshipped and treated as an ancestor shows how derivative is the deification—how dependent upon the prior association of such stones with the tomb of a forefather and its indwelling spirit. Just in the same way we know there are countries where a grave is more generally marked, not by a stone, but by a wooden stake; and in these countries, as for instance among the Samoyedes of Siberia, sticks, not stones, are the most common objects of reverence. (Thus, again, stick-worship is found “among the Damaras of South Africa, whose ancestors are represented at the sacrificial feasts by stakes cut from trees or bushes consecrated to them, to which stakes the meat is first 101offered.”) But here, too, we see the clear affiliation upon ancestor-worship; and indeed, wherever we find the common worship of “stocks and stones,” all the analogies lead us to believe the stocks and stones either actually mark the graves of ancestors or else are accepted as their representatives and embodiments.

The vast majority, however, of sacred stones with whose history we are well acquainted are indubitably connected with interments, ancient or modern. All the European sacred stones are cromlechs, dolmens, trilithons, or menhirs, of which Mr. Angus Smith, a most cautious authority, observes categorically, “We know for a certainty that memorials of burials are the chief object of the first one, and of nearly all, the only object apparently.” So many other examples will come out incidentally in the course of the sequel that I will not labour the point any further at present. Among the most remarkable instances, however, I cannot refrain from mentioning the great Sardinian sacred stones, which so often occur in the neighbourhood of the nuraghi, or ancient forts. These consist of tall conical monoliths, rough and unhewn in the oldest examples, rudely hewn in the later ones, and occasionally presenting some distant resemblance to a human face—the first rough draft of the future idol. “Behind the monolith lies the burial-place, ten to fourteen yards long by one or two in width.” These burial-places have been examined by the Abbate Spano.

“He was satisfied that several bodies had been buried together in the same tomb, and that these were therefore family burial-places. When the death of one of the members of the tribe occurred, one of the great transverse stones which covered the long alley built behind the monolith was removed, and then replaced until the time came for another body to claim its place in the tomb. The monolith, called by the Sardinian peasants pietra dell’ altare, or altar-stone, because they believe it to have been used for human sacrifice, always faces the south or east.”

Such 102a surviving tradition as to the human sacrifices, in an island so little sophisticated as Sardinia, has almost certainly come down to us unbroken from a very early age.

I have already stated that the idol is probably in many cases derived from the gravestone or other sacred stone. I believe that in an immense number of cases it is simply the original pillar, more or less rudely carved into the semblance of a human figure.

How this comes about we can readily understand if we recollect that by a gradual transference of sentiment the stone itself is at last identified with the associated spirit. Here, once more, is a transitional instance from our Polynesian storehouse.

The great god of Bowditch Island “was supposed to be embodied in a stone, which was carefully wrapped up with fine mats, and never seen by any one but the king” (note this characteristic touch of kingly priesthood), “and that only once a year, when the decayed mats were stripped off and thrown away. In sickness, offerings of fine mats were taken and rolled round the sacred stone, and thus it got busked up to a prodigious size; but as the idol was exposed to the weather out of doors, night and day, the mats soon rotted. No one dared to appropriate what had been offered to the god, and hence the old mats, as they were taken off, were heaped in a place by themselves and allowed to rot.”

Now the reasonableness of all this is immediately apparent if we remember that the stones which stand on graves are habitually worshipped, and anointed with oil, milk, and blood. It is but a slight further step to regard the stone, not only as eating and drinking, but also as needing warmth and clothing. As an admirable example of the same train of thought, working out the same result elsewhere, compare this curious account of a stone idol at Inniskea (a rocky islet off the Mayo coast), given by the Earl of Roden, as late as 1851, in his Progress of the Reformation in Ireland: “In 103the south island, in the house of a man named Monigan, a stone idol, called in the Irish ‘Neevougi,’ has been from time immemorial religiously preserved and worshipped. This god resembles in appearance a thick roll of home-spun flannel, which arises from the custom of dedicating a dress of that material to it whenever its aid is sought; this is sewn on by an old woman, its priestess, whose peculiar care it is. Of the early history of this idol no authentic information can be procured, but its power is believed to be immense; they pray to it in time of sickness; it is invoked when a storm is desired to dash some hapless ship upon their coast; and, again, the exercise of its power is solicited in calming the angry waves, to admit of fishing or visiting the mainland.”

Nor is this a solitary instance in modern Europe. “In certain mountain districts of Norway,” says Dr. Tylor, “up to the end of the last century, the peasants used to preserve round stones, washed them every Thursday evening,.... smeared them with butter before the fire, laid them in the seat of honour on fresh straw, and at certain times of the year steeped them in ale, that they might bring luck and comfort to the house.”

The first transitional step towards the idol proper is given in some rude attempt to make the standing stone at the grave roughly resemble a human figure. In the later Sardinian examples, two conical lumps, representing the breasts, seem to mark that the figure is intended to be female—either because a woman is buried there, or to place the spot under the protection of a goddess. From this rude beginning we get every transitional form, like the Herm忙 and the archaic Apollos, till we arrive at the perfect freedom and beauty of Hellenic sculpture. Says Grote, in speaking of Greek worship, “their primitive memorial erected to a god did not even pretend to be an image, but was often nothing more than a pillar, a board, a shapeless stone, or a post [notice the resemblance to ordinary grave-marks] receiving care and decoration from the 104neighbourhood as well as worship.” Dr. Tylor, to whose great collection of instances I owe many acknowledgments, says in comment on this passage, “Such were the log that stood for Artemis in Euboea; the stake that represented Pallas Athene ‘sine effigie rudis palus, et informe lignum;’ the unwrought stone at Hyethos, which ‘after the ancient manner’ represented Heracles; the thirty such stones which the Phar忙ans in like fashion worshipped for the gods; and that one which received such honour in Boeotian festivals as representing the Thespian Eros.” Such also was the conical pillar of Asiatic type which stood instead of an image of the Paphian Aphrodite, and the conical stone worshipped in Attica under the name of Apollo. A sacred boulder lay in front of the temple of the Trozenians, while another in Argos bore the significant name of Zeus Kappotas. “Among all the Greeks,” says Pausanias, “rude stones were worshipped before the images of the gods.” Among the Semites, in like manner, Melcarth was reverenced at Tyre under the form of two stone pillars.

Intermediate forms, in which the stone takes successively a face, a head, arms, legs, a shapely and well-moulded body, are familiar to all of us in existing remains. The well-known figures of Priapus form a good transitional example. “At T芒bala, in Arabia,” says Professor Robertson Smith, “a sort of crown was sculptured on the stone of al-Lat to mark her head.” Indeed, to the last, the pillar or monolithic type is constantly suggested in the erect attitude and the proportions of the statue among all except the highest Hellenic examples. I may add, that even in Islam itself, which so sternly forbids images of any sort, some traces of such anthropomorphic gravestones may still be found. I noticed in the mosque of Mehemet Ali at Cairo that the headstones of the Vice-regal family were each adorned with a fez and tassel.

It is worth noting that the obelisk, also, doubtless owes its origin to the monolith or standing stone. Whatever fresh 105sacredness it may later have obtained from the associations of sun-worship, as a solar ray, cannot mask for any wide anthropological enquirer the fact that it is by descent a mere shapeless head-stone, with a new symbolic meaning given to it (as so often happens) in a new religion. The two obelisks’ which stand so often before Egyptian temples are clearly the analogues of the two pillars of Melcarth at Tyre, and the sacred pair at Paphos, Hera-polis, and Solomon’s temple. In the same way, the Indian tope and the pyramid are descendants of the cairn, as the great stone-built tombs of the Numidian kings in Algeria seem to be more advanced equivalents of the tumulus or round barrow. And let me clear the ground here for what is to follow by adding most emphatically that the genesis of stone-worship here sketched out precludes the possibility of phallic worship being in any sense a primitive form of it. The standing stone may have been, and doubtless often was, in later stages; identified with a phallus; but if the theory here advocated is true, the lingam, instead of lying at the root of the monolith, must necessarily be a later and derivative form of it. At the same time, the stone being regarded as the ancestor of the family, it is not unnatural that early men should sometimes carve it into a phallic shape. Having said this, I will say no more on the subject, which has really extremely little to do with the essentials of stone worship, save that on many gravestones of early date a phallus marked the male sex of the occupant, while breasts, or a symbolical triangle, or a mandorla, marked the grave of a woman.

Sometimes, both forms of god, the most primitive and the most finished, the rude stone and the perfect statue, exist side by side in the same community.

“In the legendary origin of Jagannath,” says Sir William Hunter, “we find the aboriginal people worshipping a blue stone in the depths of the forest. But the deity at length wearies of primitive jungle offerings, and longs for the cooked food of the more civilised Aryans, upon 106whose arrival on the scene the rude blue stone gives place to a carved image. At the present hour, in every hamlet of Orissa, this twofold worship coexists. The common people have their shapeless stone or block, which they adore with simple rites in the open air; while side by side with it stands a temple to one of the Aryan gods, with its carved idol and elaborate rites.”

Where many sacred stones exist all round, marking the graves of the dead, or inhabited by their spirits, it is not surprising, once more, that a general feeling of reverence towards all stones should begin to arise—that the stone per se, especially if large, odd, or conspicuous, should be credited to some extent with indwelling divinity. Nor is it astonishing that the idea of men being descended from stones should be rife among people who must often, when young, have been shown headstones, monoliths, boulders, or cromlechs, and been told that the offerings made upon them were gifts to their ancestors. They would accept the idea as readily as our own children accept the Hebrew myth of the creation of Adam, our prime ancestor, from “the dust of the ground”—a far less promising material than a block of marble or sandstone. In this way, it seems to me, we can most readily understand the numerous stories of men becoming stones, and stones becoming men, which are rife among the myths of savage or barbarous peoples.

Fernandez de Piedrahita says that the Laches “worshipped every stone as a god, as they said they had all been men.” Arriaga tells us the Peruvians paid honour to “very large stones, saying that they were once men.” In the American Report of the Bureau of Ethnology for 1880, several stories are told of metamorphosis of men into stones from the Iroquois legends. According to Dorman, the Oneidas and Dakotahs claim descent from stones, to which they ascribe animation. An interesting intermediate form, which shows the growth of this idea, is given in Arriaga’s statement that the Marcayoc, or idol worshipped in 107Peru as the patron of the village, “is sometimes a stone and sometimes a mummy”: in other words, it depended upon circumstances whether they reverenced the body itself or the gravestone that covered it. Among the Coast Negroes, when a person dies, a stone is taken to a certain house—the village valhalla—to represent his ghost; and among the Bulloms, women “make occasional sacrifices and offerings of rice to the stones which are preserved in memory of the dead.” At Tanna, in the New Hebrides, Mr. Gray, a missionary, found “a piece of sacred ground, on which were deposited the stones in which they supposed the spirits of their departed relatives to reside”; and Commander Henderson, commenting upon a similar case from Vati Island, says these “were the only form of gods the natives possessed, and into them they supposed the souls of their departed friends and relatives to enter.” Some of them “had a small piece chipped out on one side, by means of which the indwelling ghost or spirit was supposed to have ingress or egress.” Of a third sort, rudely fashioned by hand, Captain Henderson says acutely, “these, it seemed to me, were the beginnings of a graven image—a common stone, sacred as the dwelling-place of an ancestral ghost.” *

     * I owe this and several other references to Mr. Spencer’s
     Appendix, as I do some of my previously cited cases to Mr.
     Lang or Dr. Tylor.

Classical and Hebrew literature are full of examples of such stones, believed to have been once human. Niobe and Lot’s wife are instances that will at once occur to every reader. In Boeotia, Pausanias tells us, people believed Alkmene, the mother of Herakles, was changed into a stone. Perseus and the Gorgon’s head is another example, paralleled by the Breton idea that their great stone circles were people, who, in the modern Christianised version of the story, were turned into stone for dancing on a Sunday. (About this Christianisation I shall have a word to say further on; meanwhile, observe the similar name of the Giant’s Dance given to the great Stonehenge 108of Ireland.) In the same way there is a Standing Rock on the upper Missouri which parallels the story of Niobe—it was once a woman, who became petrified with grief when her husband took a second wife. Some Samoan gods (or ancestral ghosts) “were changed into stones,” says Mr. Turner, “and now stand up in a rocky part of the lagoon on the north side of Upolu.”

On the other hand, if men become stones, stones also become men, or at least give birth to men. We get a good instance of this in the legend of Deucalion. Again, by the roadside, near the city of the Panopoeans, lay the stones out of which Prometheus made men. Manke, the first man in Mitchell Island, came out of a stone. The inhabitants of the New Hebrides say that “the human race sprang from stones and the earth.” On Francis Island, says Mr. Turner, “close by the temple there was a seven-feet-long beach sandstone slab erected, before which offerings were laid as the people united for prayer”; and the natives here told him that one of their gods had made stones become men. “In Melanesia,” says Mr. Lang, “matters are so mixed that it is not easy to decide whether a worshipful stone is the dwelling of a dead man’s soul, or is of spiritual merit in itself, or whether the stone is the spirit’s outward part or organ.” And, indeed, a sort of general confusion between the stone, the ghost, the ancestor, and the god, at last pervades the mind of the stone-worshipper everywhere. “The curious anthropomorphic idea of stones being husbands and wives, and even having children,” as Dr. Tylor calls it—an idea familiar to the Fijians as to the Peruvians and Lapps—is surely explicable at once by the existence of headstones either to men or women, and the confusion between the mark and the ghost it commemorates.

An interesting side-point in this gradual mixing up of the ghost and the stone, the god and the image, is shown in a gradual change of detail as to the mode of making offerings at the tomb or shrine. On the great trilithon in Tonga, 109Miss Gordon-Cumming tells us, a bowl of kava was placed on a horizontal stone. Here it must have been supposed that the ghost itself issued forth (perhaps by night) to drink it, as the serpent which represented the spirit of Anchises glided from the tomb to lick up the offerings presented by 脝neas. Gradually, however, as the stone and the ghost get more closely connected in idea the offering is made to the monument itself; though in the earlier stages the convenience of using the flat altar-stone (wherever such exists) as a place of sacrifice for victims probably masks the transition even to the worshippers themselves. Dr. Wise saw in the Himalayas a group of stones “erected to the memory of the petty Rajahs of Kolam,” where “some fifty or sixty unfortunate women sacrificed themselves.” The blood, in particular, is offered up to the ghost; and “the cup-hollows which have been found in menhirs and dolmens,” says Captain Conder, “are the indications of the libations, often of human blood, once poured on these stones by heathen worshippers.” “Cups are often found,” says a good Scotch observer, “on stones connected with the monuments of the dead, such as on the covering stones of kistvaens, particularly those of the short or rarest form; on the flat stones of cromlechs; and on stones of chambered graves.” On the top of the cairn at Glen Urquhart, on Loch Ness, is an oblong mass of slate-stone, obviously sepulchral, and marked with very numerous cups. When the stones are upright the notion of offering the blood to the upper part, which represents the face or mouth, becomes very natural, and forms a distinct step in the process of anthropomorphisation of the headstone into the idol.

We get two stages of this evolution side by side in the two deities of the Samoyed travelling ark-sledge, “one with a stone head, the other a mere black stone, both dressed in green robes with red lappets, and both smeared with sacrificial blood.” In the Indian groups of standing stones, representing the Five Pandavas, “it is a usual practice,” 110says Dr. Tylor, “to daub each stone with red paint, forming, as it were, a great blood-spot where the face would be if it were a shaped idol.” Mr. Spencer, I think, hits the key-note of this practice in an instructive passage. “A Dakotah,” he says, “before praying to a stone for succour paints it with some red pigment, such as red ochre. Now, when we read that along with offerings of milk, honey, fruit, flour, etc., the Bodo and Dhimals offer ‘red lead or cochineal,’ we may suspect that these three colouring matters, having red as their common character, are substitutes for blood. The supposed resident ghost was at first propitiated by anointing the stone with human blood; and then, in default of this, red pigment was used, ghosts and gods being supposed by primitive men to be easily deceived by shams.” It is possible, too, that with the process of idealisation and spiritualisation it might be supposed a substitute would please the gods equally well, or that redness generally was the equivalent of blood, in the same way as the Chinese burn paper money and utensils to set free their ghosts for the use of ancestral spirits.

In any case, it is interesting to note that the faces of many Hindu gods are habitually painted red. And that this is the survival of the same ancient custom we see in the case of Shashti, protectress of children, whose proper representative is “a rough stone as big as a man’s head, smeared with red paint, and set at the foot of the sacred vata-tree.” Like customs survived in Greece down to the classical period. “The faces of the ancient gilded Dionysi at Corinth,” says Mr. Lang, quoting Pausanias, “were smudged all over with cinnabar, like fetish-stones in India or Africa.” In early South Italy, too, the Priapus-Hermes, who protected the fields, had his face similarly “daubed with minium.” Is it possible to dissever these facts from the cannibal banquets of the Aztec gods, where the images had lumps of palpitating human flesh thrust into their lips, 111and where their faces were smeared with the warm blood of the helpless victims?

Only in one instance, however, have I been able to trace the custom of painting with red directly back to cannibalism, and that is among the man-eaters of the New Hebrides, where, when a man died, and his body was laid out in a piece of thick native cloth, “the face was kept exposed and painted red.” I believe with this practice must ultimately be correlated the red-painted faces of the Corinthian Dionysi.

Another point of considerable interest and importance in the evolution of stone worship is connected with the migration of sacred stones. When the Israelites left Egypt, according to the narrative in Exodus, they carried the bones of Joseph with them. When Rachel left her father’s tent she stole the family teraphim to accompany her on her wanderings. When 脝neas flew from burning Troy, he bore away to his ships his country’s gods, his Lares and Penates. All of these tales, no doubt, are equally unhistorical, but they represent what, to the people who framed the legends, seemed perfectly natural and probable conduct. Just in the same way, when stone-worshippers migrate from one country to another, they are likely to carry with them their sacred stones, or at least the most portable or holiest of the number.

Here is a very good illustrative case, once more from that most valuable storehouse, Turner’s Samoa. The Fijian gods and goddesses we saw, according to Tylor, “had their abodes or shrines in black stones like smooth round millstones, and there received their offerings of food.” But on a certain Samoan island, says Mr. Turner, “In a district said to have been early populated by settlers from Fiji, a number of fancy Fijian stones were kept in a temple, and worshipped in time of war. The priest, in consulting them, built them up in the form of a wall, and then watched to see how they fell. If they fell to the westward, it was a sign that the enemy there was to be 112driven; but if they fell to eastward, that was a warning of defeat, and delay in making an attack was ordered accordingly.”

I cannot find room here for many detailed instances of similar migrations; but there are two examples in Britain so exceedingly interesting that even in so hasty a notice I cannot pass them by without a brief mention. The inner or smaller stones at Stonehenge are known to be of remote origin, belonging to rocks not found nearer Salisbury Plain than Cumberland in one direction or Belgium in the other. They are surrounded by a group of much larger stones, arranged as trilithons, but carved out of the common sarsen blocks distributed over the neighbouring country. I have tried to show elsewhere that these smaller igneous rocks, untouched by the tool, * were the ancient sacred stones of an immigrant tribe that came into Britain from the Continent, probably over a broad land-belt which then existed where the Straits of Dover now flow; and that the strangers on their arrival in Britain erected these their ancestral gods on the Plain of Amesbury, and further contributed to their importance and appearance by surrounding them with a circle of the biggest and most imposing grey-wethers that the new country in which they had settled could easily afford.

     * So Moses in the legend commanded the children of Israel to
     build “an altar of whole stones, over which no man hath lift
     up any iron”; and so of the boulders composing the altar on
     Mount Ebal it was said, “Thou shah not lift up any iron tool
     upon them.” The conservatism of religion kept up the archaic
     fashion for sacred purposes.

The other case is that of the Scone stone. This sacred block, according to the accredited legend, was originally the ancestral god of the Irish Scots, on whose royal tumulus at Tara it once stood. It was carried by them to Argyllshire on their first invasion, and placed in a cranny of the wall (say modern versions) at Dunstaffnage Castle. When the Scotch kings removed to Scone, Kenneth II. took the stone to his new lowland residence. Thence Edward I. 113carried it off to England, where it has ever since remained in Westminster Abbey, as part of the chair in which the sovereigns of Britain sit at their coronation. The immense significance of these facts or tales will be seen more clearly when we come to consider the analogies of the Hebrew ark. Meanwhile, it may help to explain the coronation usage, and the legend that wherever the Stone of Destiny is found “the Scots in place must reign,” if I add a couple of analogous cases from the history of the same mixed Celtic race. According to Dr. O’Donovan, the inauguration stone of the O’Donnells stood on a tumulus in the midst of a large plain; and on this sacred stone, called the Flagstone of the Kings, the elected chief stood to receive the white wand or sceptre of kingship. A cylindrical obelisk, used for the same purpose, stands to this day, according to Dr. Petrie, in the Rath-na-Riogh. So, too, M’Donald was crowned King of the Isles, standing on a sacred stone, with an impression on top to receive his feet. He based himself, as it were, upon the gods his ancestors. The Tara stone even cried aloud, Professor Rhys tells us, when the true king placed his feet above it. The coronation stone exists in other countries; for example, in Hebrew history, or half-history, we learn that when Abimelech was mads king it was “by the plain of the pillar that was in Shechem”; and when Jehoash was anointed by Jehoiada, “the king stood by a pillar, as the manner was.” In front of the church of Sant’ Ambrogio at Milan stands the stone pillar at which the Lombard kings and German emperors took the coronation oath, under the ancient lime-trees which overshadow the piazza.

Now, it is quite true that Mr. Skene, the best authority on Celtic Scotland, rejects this story of the Stone of Destiny in most parts as legendary: he believes the Scone stone to have been merely the sacred coronation-block of the Pictish Kings at Scone, and never to have come from Ireland at all. Professor Ramsay thinks it is a piece of red 114sandstone broken off the rock of that district of Scotland. Even Professor Rhys (who gives a most interesting account of the Tara Stone) seems to have doubts as to the migration. But, true or not, the story will amply serve my purpose here; for I use it only to illustrate the equally dubious wanderings of a Hebrew sacred stone, at which we will arrive in due time; and one legend is surely always the best possible parallel of another.

In the course of ages, as religions develop, and especially as a few great gods grow to overshadow the minor ancestral Lares and spirits, it often comes about that sacred stones of the older faith have a new religious significance given them in the later system. Thus we have seen the Argives worshipped their old sacred stone under the name of Zeus Kappotas; the Thespians identified theirs with the later Hellenic Eros; and the Megarians considered a third as the representative of Phoebus. The original local sacred stone of Delos has been found on the spot where it originally stood, beneath the feet of the statue of the Delian Apollo. And this, I am glad to see, is Mr. Andrew Lang’s view also; for he remarks of the Greek unwrought stones, “They were blocks which bore the names of gods, Hera, or Apollo, names perhaps given, as De Brosses says, to the old fetishistic objects of worship, after the anthropomorphic gods entered [I should say, were developed in] Hellas.” So, too, in India, the local sacred stones have been identified with the deities of the Hindu pantheon; Mr. Hislop remarks that in every part of the Deccan (where Hinduism is of comparatively late introduction) four or five stones may often be seen in the ryot’s field, placed in a row and daubed with red paint, which the peasants call the Five Pandavas; but, says Dr. Tylor, “he reasonably takes these Hindu names to have superseded more ancient appellations.” Islam, in like manner, has adopted the Kaaba, the great black stone of the Holy Place at Mecca; and the Egyptian religion gave 115a new meaning to the pillar or monolith, by shaping it as an obelisk to represent a ray of the rising sun-god.

Sometimes the sanctity of the antique stones was secured in the later faith by connecting them with some legend or episode of the orthodox religion. Thus the ancient sacred stone kept at Delphi—no doubt the original oracle of that great shrine, as the rude Delian block was the precursor of the Delian Apollo—was explained with reference to the later Hellenic belief by the myth that it was the stone which Kronos swallowed in mistake for Zeus: an explanation doubtless due to the fact that this boulder was kept, like Monigan’s Irish idol and the Samoan god, wrapped up in flannel; and in the myth, Rhea deceived Kronos by offering him, instead of Zeus, a stone wrapped in swaddling-bands. There is here indeed food for much reflection. The sacred stone of the Trozenians, in like manner, lay in front of the temple; but it was Hellenised, so to speak, by the story that on it the Trozenian elders sat when they purified Orestes from the murder of his mother.

In modern Europe, as everybody knows, a similar Christianisation of holy wells, holy stones, and holy places has been managed by connecting them with legends of saints, or by the still simpler device of marking a cross upon them. The cross has a threefold value: in the first place, it drives away from their accustomed haunts the ancient gods or spirits, always envisaged in early Christian and medi忙val thought as devils or demons; in the second place, it asserts the supremacy of the new faith; and in the third place, by conferring a fresh sanctity upon the old holy place or object, it induces the people to worship the cross by the mere habit of resorting to the shrine at which their ancestors so long worshipped. Gregory’s well-known advice to St. Augustine on this matter is but a single example of what went on over all Christendom. In many cases, crosses in Britain are still found firmly fixed in old sacred stones, usually recognisable by their unwrought condition. The finest 116example in Europe is probably the gigantic monolith of Plumen in Brittany, topped by an insignificant little cross, and still resorted to by the peasants (especially the childless) as a great place of worship. The prehistoric monuments of Narvia in the Isle of Man have been Christianised by having crosses deeply incised upon them. Other cases, like the Black Stones of Iona, which gave sanctity to that Holy Isle long before the time of Columba, will doubtless occur at once to every reader. With many of the Scotch sculptured stones, it is difficult to decide whether they were originally erected as crosses, or are prehistoric monuments externally Christianised.

I have thus endeavoured briefly to suggest the ultimate derivation of all sacred stones from sepulchral monuments, and to point out the very large part which they bear in the essential of religion—that is to say, worship—everywhere. There is, however, one particular application to which I wish to call special attention, because of its peculiar interest as regards the origin of the monotheistic god of Judaism and Christianity. Hitherto in this chapter, I have intentionally made but very few allusions to the faith and the sacred stones of the Hebrews, because I wished first to give a general view of the whole ramifications and modifications of stone-worship before coming down to the particular instance in which we modern Europeans are most deeply interested. I will now, however, give a brief summary of what seems to me most suggestive and important in the early Semitic stone-cult. These results are no doubt already familiar in outline to most cultivated readers, but it is possible they may appear in a somewhat new light when regarded in connexion with the general history of stone-worship as here elucidated.

That the Semites, as well as other early nations, were stone-worshippers we know from a great number of positive instances. The stone pillars of Baal and the wooden Ashera cones were the chief objects of adoration in the Phoenician religion. The Stone of Bethel was apparently a menhir: 117the cairn of Mizpeh was doubtless a sepulchral monument. The Israelites under Joshua, we are told, built a Gilgal of twelve standing stones; and other instances in the early traditions of the Hebrews will be noticed in their proper place later on. Similarly, among the Arabs of the time of Mohammed, two of the chief deities were Manah and L芒t, the one a rock, the other a sacred stone or stone idol: and the Kaaba itself, the great black stone of local worship, even the Prophet was compelled to recognise and Islamise by adopting it bodily into his monotheistic religion.

The stone worship of the Semites at large, though comparatively neglected by Professor Robertson Smith, must have played a large part in the religion of that race, from which the Hebrews were a special offshoot. “In Arabia,” says Professor Smith, “where sacrifice by fire was almost unknown, we find no proper altar, but in its place a rude pillar or heap of stones, beside which the victim is slain, the blood being poured out over the stone or at its base.” To the great orientalist, it is true, the sacred stone or altar, like the sacred tree and the sacred fountain, are nothing more than “common symbols at sanctuaries”; he thinks of them not as gods but merely as representatives of the god, arbitrarily chosen. After the evidence I have already adduced, however, I think it will be seen that this position is altogether untenable; indeed, Dr. Smith himself uses many phrases in this connexion which enables us to see the true state of the case far more clearly than he himself did. “The sacred stones [of the Arabs], which are already mentioned by Herodotus, are called ansab, i.e., stones set up, pillars. We also find the name ghariy, \'blood-bedaubed,’ with reference to the ritual just described [of sacrifice at the nosb or sacred pillar]. The meaning of this ritual will occupy us later: meantime the thing to be noted is that the altar is only a modification of the nosb, and that the rude Arabian usage is the primitive type out of which all the elaborate altar ceremonies of the 118more cultivated Semites grew. Whatever else was done in connexion with a sacrifice, the primitive rite of sprinkling or dashing the blood against the altar, or allowing it to flow down on the ground at its base, was hardly ever omitted; and this practice was not peculiar to the Semites, but was equally the rule with the Greeks and Romans, and indeed with the ancient nations generally.”

“It is certain,” says Professor Smith again, “that the original altar among the Northern Semites, as well as among the Arabs, was a great stone or cairn, at which the blood of the victim was shed.” There is no difference, he declares, between the Hebrew altar and the Arabian standing stone. “Monolithic pillars or cairns of stone are frequently mentioned in the more ancient parts of the Old Testament as standing at Sanctuaries, generally in connexion with a sacred legend about the occasion on which they were set up by some famous patriarch or hero. In the biblical story, they usually appear as mere memorial structures without any definite ritual significance; but the pentateuchal law looks on the use of sacred pillars as idolatrous. This is the best evidence that such pillars held an important place among the appurtenances of Canaanite temples; and as Hosea speaks of the pillar as an indispensable feature in the sanctuaries of Northern Israel in his time, we may be sure that by the mass of the Hebrews the pillars of Shechem, Bethel, Gilgal, and other shrines were looked upon, not as mere memorials of historical events, but as necessary parts of the ritual apparatus of a place of worship.... From these evidences, and especially from the fact that libations of the same kind are applied to both, it seems clear that the altar is a differentiated form of the primitive rude stone pillar. But the sacred stone is more than an altar, for in Hebrew and Canaanite sanctuaries the altar, in its developed form as a table or hearth, does not supersede the pillar; the two are found side by side at the same sanctuary, the altar as a piece of sacrificial apparatus, and the pillar as a visible symbol or embodiment of the 119presence of the deity, which in process of time comes to be fashioned and carved in various ways, till ultimately it becomes a statue or anthropomorphic idol of stone, just as the sacred tree or post was ultimately developed into an image of wood.”

In spite of much obvious groping in the dark in this and other passages of the Religion of the Semites, it is clear that the learned professor recognised at least one central fact—“the sacred stone at Semitic sanctuaries was from the first an object of worship, a sort of rude idol in which the divinity was somehow supposed to be present.” Again, he notes that “Jacob’s pillar is more than a mere landmark, for it is anointed, just as idols were in antiquity, and the pillar itself, not the spot on which it stood, is called ‘the house of God,’ as if the deity were conceived actually to dwell in the stone, or manifest himself therein to his worshippers. And this is the conception which appears to have been associated with sacred stones everywhere. When the Arab daubed blood on the nosh, his object was to bring the offering into direct contact with the deity; and in like manner the practice of stroking the sacred stone with the hand is identical with the practice of touching or stroking the garments or beard of a man in acts of supplication before him.” Elsewhere he says: “So far as evidence from tradition and ritual goes, we can only think of the sacred stone as consecrated by the actual presence of the godhead, so that whatever touched it was brought into immediate contact with the deity.” And he quotes a line from an Arab poet in which the Arabian gods are expressly described as “gods of stone.”

It is thus clear that sacred stones were common objects of worship with the Semites in general, and also with the Hebrew people in particular. But after the exclusive worship of Jahweh, the local Jewish god, had grown obligatory among the Jews, it became the policy of the “Jehovist” priests to Jehovise and to consecrate the sacred stones of Palestine by bringing them into connexion 120with the Jehovistic legend and the tales of the Patriarchs. Thus Professor Cheyne comments as follows upon the passage in Isaiah where the prophet mocks the partizan of the old polytheistic creed as a stone-worshipper—“Among the smooth stones of the valley is thy portion: They, they are thy lot: Even to them hast thou poured a drink offering: Thou hast offered a meat offering: “The large smooth stones referred to above were the fetishes of the primitive Semitic races, and anointed with oil, according to a widely spread custom. It was such a stone which Jacob took for a pillow, and afterwards consecrated by pouring oil upon it. The early Semites and reactionary idolatrous Israelites called such stones Bethels.... i.e., houses of El (the early Semitic word for God) *.... In spite of the efforts of the ‘Jehovist’ who desired to convert these ancient fetishes into memorials of patriarchal history, the old heathenish use of them seems to have continued especially in secluded places.”

     * Say rather, “for a god.”
 

Besides the case of the stone at Bethel, there is the later one (in our narrative) when Jacob and Laban made a covenant, “and Jacob took a stone, and set it up for a pillar. And Jacob said unto his brethren, Gather stones; and they took stones and made an heap: and they did eat there upon the heap.” So, once more, at Shalem, he erects an altar called El-Elohe-Israel; he sets a pillar upon the grave of Rachel, and another at the place at Luz where God appeared to him. Of like import is the story of the twelve stones which the twelve men take out of Jordan to commemorate the passage of the tribes. All are clearly attempts to Jehovise these early sacred stones or local gods by connecting them with incidents in the Jehovistic version of the ancient Hebrew legends.

That such stones, however, were worshipped as deities in early times, before the cult of Jahweh had become an exclusive one among his devotees, is evident from the Jehovistic 121narrative itself, which has not wholly succeeded in blotting out all traces of earlier religion. Samuel judged Israel every year at Bethel, the place of Jacob’s sacred pillar: at Gilgal, the place where Joshua’s twelve stones were set up; and at Mizpeh, where stood the cairn surmounted by the pillar of Laban’s covenant. In other words, these were the sanctuaries of the chief ancient gods of Israel. Samuel himself “took a stone and set it between Mizpeh and Shem and its very name, Eben-ezer, “the stone of help,” shows that it was originally worshipped before proceeding on warlike expeditions, though the Jehovistic gloss, “saying, Hitherto the Lord hath helped us,” does its best, of course, to obscure the real meaning. So at Peran, in New Guinea, Mr. Chalmers saw “a large peculiarly-shaped stone,” by name Ravai, considered very sacred. Sacrifices are made to it, and it is more particularly addressed in times of fighting. “Before setting forth, offerings are presented, with food,” and the stone is entreated to precede the warriors into battle. Wherever a stone has a name, it is almost certainly of mortuary origin. It was to the stone-circle of Gilgal, once more, that Samuel directed Saul to go, saying, “I will come down unto thee, to offer burnt-offerings, and to sacrifice sacrifices of peace-offerings.” It was at the cairn of Mizpeh that Saul was chosen king; and after the victory over the Ammonites, Saul went once more to the great Stonehenge at Gilgal to “renew the kingdom,” and “there they made Saul king before Jahweh in Gilgal; and there they sacrificed sacrifices of peace-offerings before Jahweh.” This passage is a very instructive and important one, because here we see that in the opinion of the writer at least Jahweh was then domiciled at Gilgal, amid the other sacred stones of that holy circle.

Observe, “however, that when Saul was directed to go to find his father’s asses, he was sent first to Rachel’s pillar at Telzah, and then to the plain of Tabor, where he was to meet “three men going up to God [not to Jahweh] at Bethel,” 122evidently to sacrifice, “one carrying three kids, and another carrying three loaves of bread, and another carrying a bottle of wine.” These and many other like memorials of stone-worship lie thickly scattered through the early books of the Hebrew Scriptures, sometimes openly avowed, and sometimes cloaked under a thin veil of Jehovism.

On the other hand, at the present day, the Palestine exploration has shown that no rude stone monuments exist in Palestine proper, though east of the Jordan they are common in all parts of the country. How, then, are we to explain their disappearance? Major Conder thinks that when pure Jehovism finally triumphed under Hezekiah and Josiah, the Jehovists destroyed all these “idolatrous” stones throughout the Jewish dominions, in accordance with the injunctions in the Book of Deuteronomy to demolish the religious emblems of the Canaanites. Jahweh, the god of the Hebrews, was a jealous God, and he would tolerate no alien sacred stones within his own jurisdiction.

And who or what was this Jahweh himself, this local and ethnic god of the Israelites, who would suffer no other god or sacred monolith to live near him?

I will not lay stress upon the point that when Joshua was dying, according to the legend, he “took a great stone” and set it up by an oak that was by the sanctuary of Jahweh, saying that it had heard all the words of Jahweh. That document is too doubtful in terms to afford us much authority. But I will merely point out that at the time when we first seem to catch clear historic glimpses of true Jahweh worship, we find Jahweh, whoever or whatever that mystic object might have been, located with his ark at the Twelve Stones at Gilgal. It is quite clear that in “the camp at Gilgal,” as the later compilers believed, Jahweh, god of Israel, who had brought his people up out of Egypt, remained till the conquest of the land was completed. But after the end of the conquest, the 123tent in which he dwelt was removed to Shiloh; and that Jahweh went with it is clear from the fact that Joshua cast lots for the land there “before Jahweh, our God.” He was there still when Hannah and her husband went up to Shiloh to sacrifice unto Jahweh; and when Samuel ministered unto Jahweh before Eli the priest. That Jahweh made a long stay at Shiloh is, therefore, it would seem, a true old tradition—a tradition of the age just before the historical beginnings of the Hebrew annals.

But Jahweh was an object of portable size, for, omitting for the present the descriptions in the Pentateuch, which seem likely to be of late date, and not too trustworthy, through their strenuous Jehovistic editing, he was carried from Shiloh in his ark to the front during the great battle with the Philistines at Ebenezer; and the Philistines were afraid, for they said, “A god is come into the camp.” But when the Philistines captured the ark, the rival god, Dagon, fell down and broke in pieces—so Hebrew legend declared—before the face of Jahweh. After the Philistines restored the sacred object, it rested for a time at Kirjath-jearim, till David, on the capture of Jerusalem from the Jebusites, went down to that place to bring up from thence the ark of the god; and as it went, on a new cart, they “played before Jahweh on all manner of instruments,” and David himself “danced before Jahweh.” Jahweh was then placed in the tent or tabernacle that David had prepared for him, till Solomon built the first temple, “the house of Jahweh,” and Jahweh’s ark was set up in it, “in the oracle of the house, the most holy place, even under the wings of the cherubim.” Just so Mr. Chalmers tells us that when he was at Peran, in New Guinea, the peculiarly-shaped holy stone, Ravai, and the two wooden idols, Epe and Kivava, “made long ago and considered very sacred,” were for the moment “located in an old house, until all the arrangements necessary for their removal to the splendid new dubu prepared for them are completed.” And so, too, at the opposite end of the scale of civilisation, as Mr. 124Lang puts it, “the fetish-stones of Greece were those which occupied the holy of holies of the most ancient temples, the mysterious fanes within dark cedar or cypress groves, to which men were hardly admitted.”

That Jahweh himself, in the most ancient traditions of the race, was similarly concealed within his chest or ark in the holy of holies, is evident, I think, to any attentive reader. It is true, the later Jehovistic glosses of Exodus and Deuteronomy, composed after the Jehovistic worship had become purified and spiritualised, do their best to darken the comprehension of this matter by making the presence of Jahweh seem always incorporeal; and even in the earlier traditions, the phrase “the ark of the covenant of Jahweh” is often substituted for the simpler and older one, “the ark of Jahweh.” But through all the disfigurements with which the priestly scribes of the age of Josiah and the sacerdotalists of the return from the captivity have overlaid the primitive story, we can still see clearly in many places that Jahweh himself was at first personally present in the ark that covered him. And though the scribes (evidently ashamed of the early worship they had outlived) protest somewhat vehemently more than once, “There was nothing in the ark save the two tables of stone which Moses put there at Horeb, when Jahweh made a covenant with the children of Israel, when they came out of the land of Egypt,” yet this much at least even they admit—that the object or objects concealed in the ark consisted of a sculptured stone or stones; and that to dance or sing before this stone or these stones was equivalent to dancing or singing before the face of Jahweh.

The question whether the mysterious body concealed in the ark was or was not a lingam or other phallic object I purposely omit to discuss here, as not cognate to our present enquiry. It is sufficient to insist that from the evidence before us, first, it was Jahweh himself, and second, it was an object made of stone. Further than that ‘twere 125curious to enquire, and I for one do not desire to pry into the mysteries.

Not to push the argument too far, then, we may say this much is fairly certain. The children of Israel in early times carried about with them a tribal god, Jahweh, whose presence in their midst was intimately connected with a certain ark or chest, containing a stone object or objects. This chest was readily portable, and could be carried to the front in case of warfare. They did not know the origin of the object in the ark with certainty, but they regarded it emphatically as “Jahweh their god, which led them out of the land of Egypt.” Even after its true nature had been spiritualised away into a great national deity, the most unlimited and incorporeal the world has ever known (as we get him in the best and purest work of the prophets), the imagery of later times constantly returns to the old idea of a stone pillar or menhir. In the embellished account of the exodus from Egypt, Jahweh goes before the Israelites as a pillar or monolith of cloud by day and of fire by night. According to Levitical law his altar must be built of unhewn stone, “for if thou lift up thy tool upon it thou hast polluted it.” It is as a Rock that the prophets often figuratively describe Jahweh, using the half-forgotten language of an earlier day to clothe their own sublimer and more purified conceptions. It is to the Rock of Israel—the sacred stone of the tribe—that they look for succour. Nay, even when Josiah accepted the forged roll of the law and promised to abide by it, “the king stood by a pillar (a menhir) and made a covenant before Jahweh.” Even to the last we see in vague glimpses the real original nature of the worship of that jealous god who caused Dagon to break in pieces before him, and would allow no other sacred stones to remain undemolished within his tribal boundaries.

I do not see, therefore, how we can easily avoid the obvious inference that Jahweh, the god of the Hebrews, who later became sublimated and etherealised into the God 126of Christianity, was in his origin nothing more nor less than the ancestral sacred stone of the people of Israel, however sculptured, and perhaps, in the very last resort of all, the unhewn monumental pillar of some early Semitic sheikh or chieftain.