Religions of Primitive Peoples

by Daniel G. Brinton

The most venerable god of Chaldean mythology was Êa, lord of the earth and “the waters under the earth.” He was the deity in whose gift were the harvest, the germination of seeds, the fertility of the soil. Extending the idea to embrace all life, the Aztecs worshipped the earth as Tonantzin, Our Beloved Mother, and the Peruvians as Mama Cocha, Mother Earth. From her womb, said they, do all that live proceed, and to her silent breast will all again return. Far below her opaque surface is the realm which the sun lights at night, the abode of happy souls, said the Aztecs, ruled by the clement Quetzalcoatl, who there abides until the time fixed for his return to men.

From beneath the earth, repeat a hundred mythologies, did the first of men emerge seeking the light above but losing the joy below. So that in such distant points as Kamtschatka and the Andaman Islands we meet the same prophetic myth that at the end of the world the present earth will be turned upside down, and its then inhabitants will rejoice in the perennial warmth and light of the happier under-world.[174]

Intimately associated with the worship of the four elements, and also with the myths of the cosmical concepts, we trace through primitive religions the sacredness and symbolism of colours. Everywhere, in all cults, they are connected with certain trains of religious thoughts, certain expressions of religious emotions, though by no means always the same. But I can only refer, in passing, to this extended subject, which has not yet received the psychologic analysis which its importance demands.[175]

3. Stones and Rocks.—When we turn from these universal elements, which we can readily conceive portrayed with some commensurate greatness the idea of the supernatural, to such a gross and material object as a stone, a common stone or rock, it is at first difficult to understand its wide-spread acceptance as a symbol of the divine. But if we reflect on its hardness and durability, on its colour and lustre, and on the strange shapes in which it is found, we can see why it was so chosen.

In the early Semitic records we often read of Beth-el, the House of God. This was usually nothing but an amorphous stone, which the god was supposed to inhabit. The holy Kaaba of Mahometanism is no doubt such an one, a rough, black piece of rock. The sacred image of Diana of the Ephesians was nothing more, and the Latin father Arnobius tells us that the image of earth, the Great Mother, brought to Rome from Phrygia with sumptuous pomp, was merely “a small black stone, rough and unhewn.”[176]

To this instance, where the stone represents the Earth as the common mother, we find many exact parallels in savage faiths. In the Tahitian myths, Papa, Rock, was the name of the wife of the first man, mother of the race of men, and under this form she was adored.[177] The Zulus considered certain stones as sacred, because from one such, which split in two, their ancestors emerged. Their neighbours, the Basutos, entertain the same notion of a spheroidal granite boulder in their country, and their worship of it consists in dancing around it and spitting at it. The Indians of Colombia asserted that all men were once stones, and all will again become such.[178] Those of Guatemala were wont to place a small polished stone in the mouth of the dying to receive the soul, and thus supply it with a permanent abode.

The most common of mascots is a “lucky stone,” and this goes back to the time when such was the favourite material for household fetishes. To this day the Canaras of India believe that the Bhutas, or familiar spirits, inhabit rough stones, and in Melanesia similar stones are held to be the abode of the vui or demonic intelligences.[179]

Another source of the sacredness of stones was their identification as “thunderbolts.” Certain ones were believed to be the missiles hurled from the sky by the Thunder God in the lightning flash; though the Peruvians had the prettier belief that, as the product of the heavenly fire, they must retain its ardency, and therefore used them as love charms.[180] Flint, which when struck with a bit of pyrites emits a spark, and meteoric stones were especially recognised by these marks as of celestial origin.

Such a flint stone, say the legends of the Nahuas, in the beginning of the world fell from heaven to earth; as it broke to pieces each fragment rose to life as a demi-god. All men, added the Mexicans, came originally from such stones.[181]