The so-called thunderbolt is confused with the prehistoric stone axe, both bearing the same name in many lands. As this axe is often also a hammer it is evident that it may have been sacred to Thor. “The South Slavonian”—or gypsy—“does not distinguish,” says Dr. Krauss, “between the thunderbolt and prehistoric axe. He calls both strelica.” The possession of one brings luck and prosperity in all business, but it must be constantly carried on the person. Among the “thirties” there lived in Gaj in Slavonia a poor Jewish peddler named David. Once he found a strelica. He always carried it about with him. The peasants envied him greatly its possession. They came to him in the market-place and cried, “Al si sretan, Davide!” (“Ha, how lucky thou art, David!”) The Slavonian Jews called him, for a joke, “Strelica.”
The prehistoric axe was probably regarded as gifted with fetish power, even in the earliest age, especially when it was made of certain rare materials. Thus among the Red Indians of Massachusetts stone “tomahawks” of veined, petrified wood were specially consecrated to burial-places, while in Europe axe-heads of jade were the most coveted of possessions. A. B. Meyer has written a large work, “Jade und Nephrit Objecte aus dem Ethnographische Museum zu Dresden, America und Europe” (Leipzig, 1882). It has always been supposed that the objects of true jade came only from Tartary, and I believe that I was the first person to discover that it existed in quantities in Western Europe. The history of this “finding” is not without interest.
It has been usual—it is said for a thousand years—for pilgrims to Iona to bring away with them as souvenirs a few green pebbles of a peculiar kind, and to this day, as every tourist will remember, the children who come to the steamboat offer handsful of them for sale. When I was there many years ago—in Iona—I also went away with perhaps twenty of them. One evening, after returning to London, there were at my home three Chinese gentlemen attached to the Legation. The conversation turned on Buddhist pilgrimages and Fusang, and the question, founded on passages in the Chinese annals, as to whether certain monks had really passed from the Celestial Kingdom to Mexico in the fifth century and returned. This reminded me of Iona, and I produced my green pebbles, and told what I knew about them.
My visitors regarded the stones with great interest and held an animated conversation over them in Chinese, which I did not understand. Observing this I made them presents of the pebbles, and was thanked with an earnestness which seemed to me to be out of all proportion to the value of the gifts. Thinking this over the next day, I wrote to the clergyman at Iona asking him to be so kind as to send me some of the pebbles, and offering to pay for them. He did so, sending me by mail a box of the stones. Two or three were very pretty, one especially. It is of a dark green colour and slightly transparent.
Two years after, when in Philadelphia, meeting with an old friend, Dr. Joseph Leidy, well known as a man of science, and, inter alia, as a mineralogist. I showed him my pebble and asked him what it was. He replied, “It is jade.” To my query whether it might not be nephrite he answered no, that it was true jade of fine quality.
Jade is in China a talismanic stone, many occult virtues and luck-bringing qualities being ascribed to it. It is very curious, and possibly something more than a mere chance coincidence, that the green pebbles of Iona were also carried as charms. It would be remarkable if even in prehistoric times, or in the stone age, Iona and Tartary had been connected by superstition and tradition.
Among the gypsies as well as Christians in Servia, nuts, especially those which are heart-shaped (i.e., double), are carried as fetishes or amulets. In very early times a nut, as containing like a seed the principle of germination and self-reproduction, was typical of life. Being enclosed in a shell it seemed to be in a casket or box which was of itself a mystical symbol. Hence nuts are often found in ancient graves. There are many stories accordingly in all countries in which a nut or egg is represented as being connected with the life of some particular being or person. The ogre in several tales can live until a certain egg is broken. In the Graubunden or Grisons there is the following legend:—
“Once there lived near Fideriseau a rich peasant. To him came a poor beggar, who asked for alms in vain. Then the man replied, ‘If thou wilt give me nothing yet will I give thee something. Thou shalt keep thy treasure and also thy daughter after thee; yea, and for years after she is dead her spirit shall know no rest for taking care of it. But I give thee this nut. Plant it by yonder great stone, thou stony-hearted fool. From the nut will grow a tree, and from the tree twigs from which a cradle will be made in which a child will be rocked who will redeem thy daughter from her penance.’ And after the girl died, a spirit of a pale woman with dark hair was seen flying nightly near Fideris, and that for many years, for it takes a long time for an acorn to grow up into an oak. But as she is no longer seen it is believed that the cradle has been made and the child born who became the deliverer.”
A. B. Elysseeff, in his very interesting article based on Kounavine’s “Materials for the Study of the Gypsies,” gives the representation of four gypsy amulets, also “a cabalistic token” that brings good luck to its wearer.
“The amulets,” writes M. Elysseeff, “are made of wrought iron and belong to M. Kounavine. The cabalistic sign is designed” (copied?) “by ourselves, thanks to the amiability of a gypsy djecmas (sorcerer) of the province of Novogorod. The amulet A was found by M. Kounavine among the gypsies who roam with their camps in the Ural neighbourhood; some Bessarabian gypsies supplied B; C was obtained from a gypsy sorcerer of the Persian frontier, and D formed a part of some ornaments placed with their dead by gypsies of Southern Russia.
“The cabalistic sign” (vide illustration at head of chapter) “represents roughly a serpent, the symbol of Auromori, the evil principle in gypsy mythology. The figure of an arch surrounded with stars is, according to M. Kounavine, held by the gypsies as symbolizing the earth, the meaning of the triangle △ is not known. The moon and stars which surround the earth and which are, so to speak, enclosed in the serpent’s coils, symbolize the world lying in evil. This sign is engraved by gypsies upon the plates of the harness of the horses, of garments, and as designed ornaments.”