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 Another Random Document on
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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 a 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 the 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 Hermæ
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
neighbourhood 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 Pharæans 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 Tâbala, 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 sacredness 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 whose 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 Peru 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 of 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, Miss 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 Æneas.
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,” says 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, and 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 Æneas 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 driven; 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. carried 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 sandstone 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 a 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
mediæval 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
example 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: the 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 Lât, 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 more 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 presence 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 with 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 narrative 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,” evidently 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 tent 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. Lang 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
curious 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 of 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.
 CHAPTER VI.—SACRED STAKES.

M
ILTON speaks in a famous sonnet of the time “when all our
fathers worshipped stocks and stones.” That familiar and
briefly contemptuous phrase of the Puritan poet does really
cover the vast majority of objects of worship for the human race at
all times and in all places. We have examined the stones; the stocks
must now come in for their fair share of attention. They need not,
however, delay us quite so long as their sister deities, both because
they are on the whole less important in themselves, and because
their development from grave-marks into gods and idols is almost
absolutely parallel to that which we have already followed out in
detail in the case of the standing stone or megalithic monument.
Stakes or wooden posts are often used all the world over as marks
of an interment. Like other grave-marks, they also share naturally in
the honours paid to the ghost or nascent god. But they are less
important as elements in the growth of religion than standing stones
for two distinct reasons. In the first place, a stake or post most often
marks the interment of a person of little social consideration; chiefs
and great men have usually stone monuments erected in their
honour; the commonalty have to be satisfied with wooden marks, as
one may observe to this day at Père Lachaise, or any other great
Christian cemetery. In the second place, the stone monument is far
more lasting and permanent than the wooden one. Each of these
points counts for something. For it is chiefs and great men whose
ghosts most often grow into gods; and it is the oldest ghosts, the
oldest gods, the oldest monuments that are always the most sacred.
For both these reasons, then, the stake is less critical than the stone
in the history of religion.
Nevertheless, it has its own special importance. As the sacred
stone derives ultimately from the great boulder piled above the
grave to keep down the corpse, so the stake, I believe, derives from
the sharp-pointed stick driven through the body to pin it down as we
saw in the third chapter, and still so employed in Christian England
to prevent suicides from walking. Such a stake or pole is usually
permitted to protrude from the ground, so as to warn living men of
the neighbourhood of a spirit.
At a very early date, however, the stake, I fancy, became a mere
grave-mark; and though, owing to its comparative
inconspicuousness, it obtains relatively little notice, it is now and
always has been by far the most common mode of preserving the
memory of the spot where a person lies buried. A good example,
which will throw light upon many subsequent modifications, is given
by Mr. Wyatt Gill from Port Moresby in New Guinea. “The body,” he
says, “was buried. At the side was set up a stake, to which were tied
the spear, club, bow and arrow of the deceased, but broken, to
prevent theft. A little beyond was the grave of a woman: her cooking
utensils, grass petticoats, etc., hung up on the stake.” Similar
customs, he adds, are almost universal in Polynesia.
Though worship of stakes or wooden posts is common all over the
world, I can give but few quite unequivocal instances of such
worship being paid to a post actually known to surmount an
undoubted grave. Almost the best direct evidence I can obtain is the
case of the grave-pole in Buru, already quoted from Mr. H. O.
Forbes. But the following account of a Samoyed place of sacrifice,
extracted from Baron Nordenskiold’s Voyage of the Vega, is certainly
suggestive. On a hillock on Vaygats Island the Swedish explorer
found a number of reindeer skulls, so arranged that they formed a
close thicket of antlers. Around lay other bones, both of bears and
reindeer; and in the midst of all “the mighty beings to whom all this
splendour was offered. They consisted’ of hundreds of small wooden
sticks, the upper portions of which were carved very clumsily in the
form of the human countenance, most of them from fifteen to
twenty, but some of them three hundred and seventy centimetres in
length. They were all stuck in the ground on the southeast part of
the eminence. Near the place of sacrifice there were to be seen
pieces of driftwood and remains of the fireplace at which the
sacrificial meal was prepared. Our guide told us that at these meals
the mouths of the idols were besmeared with blood and wetted with
brandy; and the former statement was confirmed by the large spots
of blood which were found on most of the large idols below the
holes intended to represent the mouth.” At a far earlier date,
Stephen Burrough in 1556 writes as follows to much the same effect
in his interesting narrative printed in Hakluyt: “There I met againe
with Loshak, and went on shore with him, and he brought me to a
heap of Samoeds idols, which were in number about 300, the worst
and the most unartificiall worke that ever I saw: the eyes and
mouthes of sundrie of them were bloodie, they had the shape of
men, women, and children, very grossly wrought, and that which
they had made for other parts was also sprinkled with blood. Some
of their idols were an olde sticke with two or three notches, made
with a knife in it. There was one of their sleds broken and lay by the
heape of idols, and there I saw a deers skinne which the foules had
spoyled: and before certaine of their idols blocks were made as high
as their mouthes; being all bloody, I thought that to be the table
wheron they offered their sacrifice.”
In neither of these accounts, it is true, is it distinctly mentioned
that the place of sacrifice was a Samoyed cemetery: but I believe
this to be the case, partly from analogy, and partly because
Nordenskiôld mentions elsewhere that an upturned sled is a frequent
sign of a Samoyed grave. Compare also the following account of a
graveyard among nominally Christian Ostyak Siberians, also from
Nordenskiôld: “The corpses were placed in large coffins above
ground, at which almost always a cross was erected.” [The
accompanying woodcut shews that these crosses were rude wooden
stakes with one or two crossbars.] “In one of the crosses a sacred
picture was inserted which must be considered a further proof that a
Christian rested in the coffin. Notwithstanding this, we found some
clothes, which had belonged to the departed, hanging on a bush
beside the grave, together with a bundle containing food, principally
dried fish. At the graves of the richer natives the survivors are even
said to place along with food some rouble notes, in order that the
departed may not be altogether without ready money on his
entrance into the other world.”
To complete the parallel, I ought to add that money was also
deposited on the sacrificial place on Vaygats Island. Of another such
sacrificial place on Yalmal, Nordenskiôld says, after describing a pile
of bones, reindeer skulls, and walrus jaws: “In the middle of the
heap of bones stood four erect pieces of wood. Two consisted of
sticks a metre in length, with notches cut in them.... The two others,
which clearly were the proper idols of this place of sacrifice,
consisted of driftwood roots, on which some carvings had been
made to distinguish the eyes, mouth, and nose. The parts of the
pieces of wood, intended to represent the eyes and mouth, had
recently been besmeared with blood, and there still lay at the heap
of bones the entrails of a newly killed reindeer.”
Indeed, I learn from another source that “the Samoyedes feed the
wooden images of the dead”; while an instance from Erman helps
further to confirm the same conclusion. According to that acute
writer, among the Ostyaks of Eastern Siberia there is found a most
interesting custom, in which, says Dr. Tylor, “we see the transition
from the image of the dead man to the actual idol.” When a man
dies, they set up a rude wooden image of him in the yurt, which
receives offerings at every meal and has honours paid to it, while
the widow continually embraces and caresses it. As a general rule,
these images are buried at the end of three years or so: but
sometimes “the image of a shaman (native sorcerer),” says Tylor, “is
set up permanently, and remains as a saint for ever.” For “saint” I
should say “god”; and we see the transformation at once completed.
Indeed, Erman adds acutely about the greater gods of the Ostyaks:
“That these latter also have a historical origin, that they were
originally monuments of distinguished men, to which prescription
and the interest of the Shamans gave by degrees an arbitrary
meaning and importance, seems to me not liable to doubt.”
 With regard to the blood smeared upon such Siberian wooden
idols, it must be remembered that bowls of blood are common
offerings to the dead; and Dr. Robertson Smith himself, no friendly
witness in this matter, has compared the blood-offerings to ghosts
with those to deities. In the eleventh book of the Odyssey, for
example, the ghosts drink greedily of the sacrificial blood; and
libations of gore form a special feature in Greek offerings to heroes.
That blood was offered to the sacred stones we have already seen;
and we noticed that there as here it was specially smeared upon the
parts representing the mouth. Offerings of blood to gods, or pouring
of blood on altars, are too common to demand particular notice; and
we shall also recur to that part of the subject when we come to
consider the important questions of sacrifice and sacrament. I will
only add here that according to Maimonides the Sabians looked on
blood as the nourishment of the gods; while the Hebrew Jahweh
asks indignantly in the fiftieth Psalm, “Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or
drink the blood of goats?”
To pass on to more unequivocal cases of stake-worship, where we
can hardly doubt that the stake represents a dead man, Captain
Cook noticed that in the Society Islands “the carved wooden images
at burial-places were not considered mere memorials, but abodes
into which the souls of the departed retired.” So Ellis observes of
Polynesians generally that the sacred objects might be either mere
stocks and stones, or carved wooden images, from six to eight feet
long down to as many inches. Some of these were to represent “tu,”
divine manes or spirits of the dead; while others were to represent
“tu,” or deities of higher rank and power. To my mind, this is almost
a distinction without a difference; the first being ghosts of recently
deceased ancestors, the second ghosts of remoter progenitors. The
ancient Araucanians again fixed over a tomb an upright log, “rudely
carved to represent the human frame.” After the death of New
Zealand chiefs, wooden images, 20 to 40 feet high, were erected as
monuments. I might easily multiply instances; but I refrain lest the
list grow tedious.
 Dr. Codrington notes that the large mouths and lolling tongues of
many New Zealand and Polynesian gods are due to the habit of
smearing the mouth with blood and other offerings.
Where men preserve the corpses of their dead, images are not so
likely to grow up; but where fear of the dead has brought about the
practice of burial or burning, it is reasonable that the feelings of
affection which prompted gifts and endearments to the mummy in
the first stage of thought should seek some similar material outlet
under the altered circumstances. Among ourselves, a photograph, a
portrait, the toys of a dead child, are preserved and cherished.
Among savages, ruder representations become necessary. They bury
the actual corpse safely out of sight, but make some rough wooden
imitation to represent it. Thus it does not surprise us to find that
while the Marianne Islanders keep the dried bodies of their dead
ancestors in their huts as household gods, and expect them to give
oracles out of their skulls, the New Zealanders, on the other hand,
“set up memorial idols of deceased persons near the burial-place,
talking affectionately to them as if still alive, and casting garments to
them when they pass by,” while they also “preserve in their houses
small carved wooden images, each dedicated to the spirit of an
ancestor.” The Coast Negroes “place several earthen images on the
graves.” Some Papuans, “after a grave is filled up, collect round an
idol, and offer provisions to it.” The Javans dress up an image in the
clothes of the deceased. So, too, of the Caribs of the West Indies,
we learn that they “carved little images in the shape in which they
believed spirits to have appeared to them; and some human figures
bore the names of ancestors in memory of them.” From such little
images, obviously substituted for the dead body which used once to
be preserved and affectionately tended, are derived, I believe, most
of the household gods of the world—the Lares and Penates of the
Romans, the huacas of the Peruvians, the teraphim of the Semites.
How absolutely image and ancestor are identified we can see
among the Tenimber Islanders, with whom “the matmate are the
spirits of their ancestors which are worshipped as guardian spirits or
household gods. They are supposed to enter the house through an
opening in the roof, and to take up their abode temporarily in the
skulls, or in images of wood or ivory, in order to partake of the
offerings.”
A few more facts in the same direction may help to bring out in
still stronger relief this close equivalence of the corpse and the
image. A New Guinea mother keeps the mummied body of her child,
and carries it about with her; whereas a West African mother, living
in a tribe where terror of the dead has induced the practice of burial,
makes a little image of her lost darling out of a gourd or calabash,
wraps it in skins, and feeds it or puts it to sleep like a living baby.
Bastian saw Indian women in Peru, who had lost an infant, carrying
about on their backs a wooden doll to represent it. At a somewhat
higher level, “the spiritual beings of the Algonquins,” says Dr. Tylor,
to whom I owe not a few of these instances, “were represented by,
and in language completely identified with, the carved wooden
heads” (note this point) “or more complete images, to which worship
and sacrifice were offered.” In all these instances we see clearly, I
think, the course of the genesis of household deities. In Siam, the
ashes of the dead are similarly moulded into Buddhist images, which
are afterwards worshipped as household gods.
Mr. Herbert Spencer has collected several interesting examples
some of which I will borrow, as showing incidentally how much the
growth of the idol or image depends upon such abstraction of the
real body for burial or its equivalent. While a deceased king of Congo
is being embalmed, a figure is set up in the palace to represent him,
and is daily furnished with meat and drink. When Charles VI. of
France was buried, “over the coffin was an image of the late king,
bearing a rich crown of gold and diamonds, and holding two
shields.... This image was dressed with cloth of gold.... In this state
was he solemnly carried to the church of Notre Dame.” Madame de
Motteville says of the father of the great Condé, “The effigy of this
prince was waited upon for three days, as was customary”—forty
days having been the original time during which food was supplied
to such effigies at the usual hours. Monstrelet describes a like figure
used at the burial of Henry V. of England: and the Westminster
Abbey images already noticed belong to the same category.
As in the case of sacred stones, once more, I am quite ready to
admit that when once the sanctity of certain stakes or wooden poles
came to be generally recognised, it would be a simple transference
of feeling to suppose that any stake, arbitrarily set up, might become
the shrine or home of an indwelling spirit. Thus we are told that the
Brazilian tribes “set up stakes in the ground, and make offerings
before them to appease their deities or demons.” So also we are
assured that among the Dinkas of the White Nile, “the missionaries
saw an old woman in her hut offering the first of her food before a
short thick staff planted in the ground.” But in neither of these cases
is there necessarily anything to show that the spot where the staff
was set up was not a place of burial; while in the second instance
this is even probable, as hut interments are extremely common in
Africa. I will quote one other instance only, for its illustrative value in
a subsequent connexion. In the Society Islands, rude logs are
clothed in native cloth (like Monigan’s idol) and anointed with oil,
receiving adoration and sacrifice as the dwelling-place of a deity.
This custom is parallel to that of the Caribs, who took a bone of a
dead friend from the grave, wrapped it up in cotton, and enquired of
it for oracles.
Mr. Savage Landor, in his interesting work The Hairy Ainu, figures
and describes some curious grave-stakes of those Japanese
aborigines. The stakes on the men’s graves are provided with a
phallic protuberance; those on the women’s with an equally phallic
perforation. This fact helps to illustrate the phallicism of sacred
stones in Syria and elsewhere.
Among the Semitic peoples, always specially interesting to us from
their genetic connexion with Judaism and Christianity, the worship of
stakes usually took the form of adoration paid to the curious log of
wood described as an ashera. What kind of object an ashera was we
learn from the injunction in Deuteronomy, “Thou shalt not plant an
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