In Africa, stock-and-stone worship is found among the Damaras of the South, 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 offered;[[344]] among the Dinkas of the White Nile, where the missionaries saw an old woman in her hut offering the first of her food and drink before a short thick staff planted in the ground, that the demon might not hurt her;[[345]] among the Gallas of Abyssinia, a people with a well-marked doctrine of deities, and who are known to worship stones and logs, but not idols.[[346]] In the island of Sambawa, the Orang Dongo attribute all supernatural or incomprehensible force to the sun, moon, trees, &c., but especially to stones, and when troubled by accident or disease, they carry offerings to certain stones to implore the favour of their genius or dewa.[[347]] Similar ideas are to be traced through the Pacific islands, both among the lighter and the darker races. Thus in the Society Islands, rude logs or fragments of basalt columns, clothed in native cloth and anointed with oil, received adoration and sacrifice as divinely powerful by virtue of the atua or deity which had filled them.[[348]] So in the New Hebrides worship was given to water-worn pebbles,[[349]] while Fijian gods and goddesses had their abodes or shrines in black stones like smooth round milestones, and there received their offerings of food.[[350]] The curiously anthropomorphic idea of stones being husbands and wives, and even having children, is familiar to the Fijians as it is to the Peruvians and the Lapps.
The Turanian tribes of North Asia display stock-and-stone worship in full sense and vigour. Not only were stones, especially curious ones and such as were like men or animals, objects of veneration, but we learn that they were venerated because mighty spirits dwelt in them. The Samoyed travelling ark-sledge, with its two deities, 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, may serve as a type of stone-worship. And as for the Ostyaks, had the famous King Log presented himself among them, they would without more ado have wrapped his sacred person in rags, and set him up for worship on a mountain-top or in the forest.[[351]] The frequent stock-and-stone worship of modern India belongs especially to races non-Hindu or part-Hindu in race and culture. Among such may serve as examples the bamboo which stands for the Bodo goddess Mainou, and for her receives the annual hog, and the monthly eggs offered by the women;[[352]] the stone under the great cotton-tree of every Khond village, shrine of Nadzu Pennu the village deity;[[353]] the clod or stone under a tree, which in Behar will represent the deified soul of some dead personage who receives worship and inspires oracles there;[[354]] the stone kept in every house by the Bakadâra and Betadâra, which represents their god Bûta, whom they induce by sacrifice to restrain the demon-souls of the dead from troubling them;[[355]] the two rude stones placed under a shed among the Shanars of Tinnevelly, by the medium of which the great god and goddess receive sacrifice, but which are thrown away or neglected when done with.[[356]] The remarkable groups of standing-stones in India are, in many cases at least, set up for each stone to represent or embody a deity. Mr. Hislop remarks that in every part of Southern India, four or five stones may often be seen in the ryot’s field, placed in a row and daubed with red paint, which they consider as guardians of the field and call the five Pândus; he reasonably takes these Hindu names to have superseded more ancient native appellations. In the Indian groups it is a usual practice 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.[[357]] In India, moreover, the rites of stone-worship are not unexampled among the Hindus proper. Shashtî, protectress of children, receives worship, vows, and offerings, especially from women; yet they provide her with no idol or temple, but her 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. Even Siva is worshipped as a stone, especially that Siva who will afflict a child with epileptic fits, and then, speaking by its voice, will announce that he is Panchânana the Five-faced, and is punishing the child for insulting his image; to this Siva, in the form of a clay idol or of a stone beneath a sacred tree, there are offered not only flowers and fruits, but also bloody sacrifices.[[358]]
This stone-worship among the Hindus seems a survival of a rite belonging originally to a low civilization, probably a rite of the rude indigenes of the land, whose religion, largely incorporated into the religion of the Aryan invaders, has contributed so much to form the Hinduism of to-day. It is especially interesting to survey the stock-and-stone worship of the lower culture, for it enables us to explain by the theory of survival the appearance in the Old World, in the very midst of classic doctrine and classic art, of the worship of the same rude objects, whose veneration no doubt dated from remote barbaric antiquity. As Mr. Grote says, speaking of Greek worship, ‘The 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, receiving care and decoration from the neighbourhood, as well as worship.’ Such were the log that stood for Artemis in Eubœa, the stake that represented Pallas Athene, ‘sine effigie rudis palus, et informe lignum,’ the unwrought stone (λίθος ἀργός) at Hyettos which ‘after the ancient manner’ represented Herakles, the thirty such stones which the Pharæans in like archaic fashion worshipped for the gods, and that one which received such honour in Bœotian festivals as representing the Thespian Eros. Theophrastus, in the 4th century B.C., depicts the superstitious Greek passing the anointed stones in the streets, taking out his phial and pouring oil on them, falling on his knees to adore, and going his way. Six centuries later, Arnobius could describe from his own heathen life the state of mind of the stock-and-stone worshipper, telling how when he saw one of the stones anointed with oil, he accosted it in flattering words, and asked benefits from the senseless thing as though it contained a present power.[[359]] The ancient and graphic passage in the book of Isaiah well marks stone-worship within the range of the Semitic race:
‘Among the smooth stones of the valley is thy portion:
They, they are thy lot:
Even to them hast thou poured a drink-offering,
Hast thou offered a meat-offering.’[[360]]
Long afterwards, among the local deities which Mohammed found in Arabia, and which Dr. Sprenger thinks he even acknowledged as divine during a moment when he well-nigh broke down in his career, were Manah and Lât, the one a rock, the other a stone or a stone idol; while the veneration of the black stone of the Kaaba, which Captain Burton thinks an aërolite, was undoubtedly a local rite which the Prophet transplanted into his new religion, where it flourishes to this day.[[361]] The curious passage in Sanchoniathon which speaks of the Heaven-god forming the ‘bætyls, animated stones’ (θεὸς Οὐρανὸς Βαιτύλια, λίθους ἐμψύχους, μηχανησάμενος) perhaps refers to meteorites or supposed thunderbolts fallen from the clouds. To the old Phœnician religion, which made so deep a contact with the Jewish world on the one side and the Greek and Roman on the other, there belonged the stone pillars of Baal and the wooden ashera-posts, but how far these objects were of the character of altars, symbols, or fetishes, is a riddle.[[362]] We may still say with Tacitus, describing the conical pillar which stood instead of an image to represent the Paphian Venus—‘et ratio in obscuro.’
There are accounts of formal Christian prohibitions of stone-worship in France and England, reaching on into the early middle ages,[[363]] which show this barbaric cultus as then distinctly lingering in popular religion. Coupling this fact with the accounts of the groups of standing-stones set up to represent deities in South India, a corresponding explanation has been suggested in Europe. Are the menhirs, cromlechs, &c., idols, and circles and lines of idols, worshipped by remotely ancient dwellers in the land as representatives or embodiments of their gods? The question at least deserves consideration, although the ideas with which stone-worship is carried on by different races are multifarious, and the analogy may be misleading. It is remarkable to what late times full and genuine stone-worship has survived in Europe. In certain mountain districts of Norway, up to the end of the last century, the peasants used to preserve round stones, washed them every Thursday evening (which seems to show some connection with Thor), 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.[[364]] In an account dating from 1851, the islanders of Inniskea, off Mayo, are declared to have a stone carefully wrapped in flannel, which is brought out and worshipped at certain periods, and when a storm arises it is supplicated to send a wreck on the coast.[[365]] No savage ever showed more clearly by his treatment of a fetish that he considered it a personal being, than did these Norwegians and Irishmen. The ethnographic argument from the existence of stock-and-stone worship among so many nations of comparatively high culture seems to me of great weight as bearing on religious development among mankind. To imagine that peoples skilled in carving wood and stone, and using these arts habitually in making idols, should have gone out of their way to invent a practice of worshipping logs and pebbles, is not a likely theory. But on the other hand, when it is considered how such a rude object serves to uncultured men as a divine image or receptacle, there is nothing strange in its being a relic of early barbarism holding its place against more artistic models through ages of advancing civilization, by virtue of the traditional sanctity which belongs to survival from remote antiquity.
By a scarcely perceptible transition, we pass to Idolatry. A few chips or scratches or daubs of paint suffice to convert the rude post or stone into an idol. Difficulties which complicate the study of stock-and-stone worship disappear in the worship of even the rudest of unequivocal images, which can no longer be mere altars, and if symbols must at least be symbols of a personal being. Idolatry occupies a remarkable district in the history of religion. It hardly belongs to the lowest savagery, which simply seems not to have attained to it, and it hardly belongs to the highest civilization, which has discarded it. Its place is intermediate, ranging from the higher savagery where it first clearly appears, to the middle civilization where it reaches its extreme development, and thenceforward its continuance is in dwindling survival and sometimes expanding revival. The position thus outlined is, however, very difficult to map exactly. Idolatry does not seem to come in uniformly among the higher savages; it belongs, for instance, fully to the Society Islanders, but not to the Tongans and Fijians. Among higher nations, its presence or absence does not necessarily agree with particular national affinities or levels of culture—compare the idol-worshipping Hindu with his ethnic kinsman the idol-hating Parsi, or the idolatrous Phœnician with his ethnic kinsman the Israelite, among whose people the incidental relapse into the proscribed image-worship was a memory of disgrace. Moreover, its tendency to revive is ethnographically embarrassing. The ancient Vedic religion seems not to recognize idolatry, yet the modern Brahmans, professed followers of Vedic doctrine, are among the greatest idolators of the world. Early Christianity by no means abrogated the Jewish law against image-worship, yet image-worship became and still remains widely spread and deeply rooted in Christendom.