Of the gods of Hudson’s Island, Mr. Turner gives this very interesting and suggestive account:
“Foelangi and Maumau were the principal gods. They had each a temple; and under the altars, on which were laid out in rows the skulls of departed chiefs and people, were suspended offerings of pearl-shell and other valuables. Foelangi had an unchiselled block of stone to represent him—something like a six feet high gravestone.... Offerings of food were taken to the temples, that the gods might first partake before anyone else ate anything.... Husked cocoanuts were laid down, one before each skull.”
And of St. Augustine Island he writes: “At the Temple of Maumau there stood a nine feet high coral sandstone slab from the beach.... Meat offerings were laid on the altars, accompanied by songs and dances in honour of the god.”
Similarly, about one of the Gilbert Group, Mr. Turner says:
“They had other gods and goddesses, and, as was common in this group, had sandstone slabs or pillars set up here and there among the houses. Before these shrines offerings of food were laid during the day, which the priests took away stealthily by night and made the credulous believe that gods and not mortals had done it. If the stone slab represented a goddess it was not placed erect, but laid down on the ground. Being a lady they thought it would be cruel to make her stand so long.”
In these cases, and in many others, it seems to me clear that the original gravestone or menhir itself is the object of worship, viewed as the residence of the ghost or god in whose honour it was erected. For in Samoa we know that the grave “was marked by a little heap of stones, a foot or two high,” and at De Peyster’s Island “a stone was raised at the head of the grave, and a human head carved on it”—a first step, as we have already seen, towards the evolution of one form of idol.
Similar instances abound everywhere. Among the Khonds of India, every village has its local god, represented by an upright stone under the big tree on the green, to use frankly an English equivalent. (The full importance of this common combination of sacred stone and sacred tree will only come out at a later stage of our enquiry.) In Peru, worship was paid to standing stones which, says Dr. Tylor, “represented the penates of households and the patron-deities of villages”—in other words, the ghosts of ancestors and of tribal chiefs. “Near Acora,” says the Marquis de Nadaillac, “the bodies were placed under megalithic stones, reminding us of the dolmens and cromlechs of Europe. One vast plain is covered with erect stones, some forming circles, some squares, and often covered in with large slabs which entirely closed round the sepulchral chamber.” In Fiji the gods and goddesses “had their abodes or shrines in black stones like smooth round milestones, and there received their offerings of food.” An immense number of similar instances have been collected by Dr. Tylor and other anthropologists.
But when once the idea of the sacredness of stones had thus got firmly fixed in the savage mind, it was natural enough that other stones, resembling those which were already recognised as gods, should come to be regarded as themselves divine, or as containing an indwelling ghost or deity. Of this stage, Mr. Turner’s Samoa again affords us some curious instances.
“Smooth stones apparently picked up out of the bed of the river were regarded as representatives of certain gods, and wherever the stone was, there the god was supposed to be. One resembling a fish would be prayed to as the fisherman’s god. Another, resembling a yam, would be the yam god. A third, round like a breadfruit, the breadfruit god—and so on.”
Now, the word “apparently” used by this very cautious observer in this passage shows clearly that he had never of his own knowledge seen a stone thus selected at random worshipped or deified, and it is therefore possible that in all such cases the stone may really have been one of sepulchral origin. Still, I agree with Mr. Spencer that when once the idea of a ghost or god is well developed, the notion of such a spirit as animating any remarkable or odd-looking object is a natural transition. *