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 a 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 hypæthral temples, often with 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 paid 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.