How this comes about we can readily understand if we recollect that by a gradual transference of sentiment the stone itself is at last identified with the associated spirit. Here, once more, is a transitional instance from our Polynesian storehouse.
The great god of Bowditch Island “was supposed to be embodied in a stone, which was carefully wrapped up with fine mats, and never seen by any one but the king” (note this characteristic touch of kingly priesthood), “and that only once a year, when the decayed mats were stripped off and thrown away. In sickness, offerings of fine mats were taken and rolled round the sacred stone, and thus it got busked up to a prodigious size; but as the idol was exposed to the weather out of doors, night and day, the mats soon rotted. No one dared to appropriate what had been offered to the god, and hence the old mats, as they were taken off, were heaped in a place by themselves and allowed to rot.”
Now the reasonableness of all this is immediately apparent if we remember that the stones which stand on graves are habitually worshipped, and anointed with oil, milk, and blood. It is but a slight further step to regard the stone, not only as eating and drinking, but also as needing warmth and clothing. As an admirable example of the same train of thought, working out the same result elsewhere, compare this curious account of a stone idol at Inniskea (a rocky islet off the Mayo coast), given by the Earl of Roden, as late as 1851, in his Progress of the Reformation in Ireland: “In the south island, in the house of a man named Monigan, a stone idol, called in the Irish ‘Neevougi,’ has been from time immemorial religiously preserved and worshipped. This god resembles in appearance a thick roll of home-spun flannel, which arises from the custom of dedicating a dress of that material to it whenever its aid is sought; this is sewn on by an old woman, its priestess, whose peculiar care it is. Of the early history of this idol no authentic information can be procured, but its power is believed to be immense; they pray to it in time of sickness; it is invoked when a storm is desired to dash some hapless ship upon their coast; and, again, the exercise of its power is solicited in calming the angry waves, to admit of fishing or visiting the mainland.”
Nor is this a solitary instance in modern Europe. “In certain mountain districts of Norway,” says Dr. Tylor, “up to the end of the last century, the peasants used to preserve round stones, washed them every Thursday evening,.... 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.”
The first transitional step towards the idol proper is given in some rude attempt to make the standing stone at the grave roughly resemble a human figure. In the later Sardinian examples, two conical lumps, representing the breasts, seem to mark that the figure is intended to be female—either because a woman is buried there, or to place the spot under the protection of a goddess. From this rude beginning we get every transitional form, like the Hermæ and the archaic Apollos, till we arrive at the perfect freedom and beauty of Hellenic sculpture. Says Grote, in speaking of Greek worship, “their 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 [notice the resemblance to ordinary grave-marks] receiving care and decoration from the neighbourhood as well as worship.” Dr. Tylor, to whose great collection of instances I owe many acknowledgments, says in comment on this passage, “Such were the log that stood for Artemis in Euboea; the stake that represented Pallas Athene ‘sine effigie rudis palus, et informe lignum;’ the unwrought stone at Hyethos, which ‘after the ancient manner’ represented Heracles; the thirty such stones which the Pharæans in like fashion worshipped for the gods; and that one which received such honour in Boeotian festivals as representing the Thespian Eros.” Such also was the conical pillar of Asiatic type which stood instead of an image of the Paphian Aphrodite, and the conical stone worshipped in Attica under the name of Apollo. A sacred boulder lay in front of the temple of the Trozenians, while another in Argos bore the significant name of Zeus Kappotas. “Among all the Greeks,” says Pausanias, “rude stones were worshipped before the images of the gods.” Among the Semites, in like manner, Melcarth was reverenced at Tyre under the form of two stone pillars.
Intermediate forms, in which the stone takes successively a face, a head, arms, legs, a shapely and well-moulded body, are familiar to all of us in existing remains. The well-known figures of Priapus form a good transitional example. “At Tâbala, in Arabia,” says Professor Robertson Smith, “a sort of crown was sculptured on the stone of al-Lat to mark her head.” Indeed, to the last, the pillar or monolithic type is constantly suggested in the erect attitude and the proportions of the statue among all except the highest Hellenic examples. I may add, that even in Islam itself, which so sternly forbids images of any sort, some traces of such anthropomorphic gravestones may still be found. I noticed in the mosque of Mehemet Ali at Cairo that the headstones of the Vice-regal family were each adorned with a fez and tassel.
It is worth noting that the obelisk, also, doubtless owes its origin to the monolith or standing stone. Whatever fresh sacredness it may later have obtained from the associations of sun-worship, as a solar ray, cannot mask for any wide anthropological enquirer the fact that it is by descent a mere shapeless head-stone, with a new symbolic meaning given to it (as so often happens) in a new religion. The two obelisks’ which stand so often before Egyptian temples are clearly the analogues of the two pillars of Melcarth at Tyre, and the sacred pair at Paphos, Hera-polis, and Solomon’s temple. In the same way, the Indian tope and the pyramid are descendants of the cairn, as the great stone-built tombs of the Numidian kings in Algeria seem to be more advanced equivalents of the tumulus or round barrow. And let me clear the ground here for what is to follow by adding most emphatically that the genesis of stone-worship here sketched out precludes the possibility of phallic worship being in any sense a primitive form of it. The standing stone may have been, and doubtless often was, in later stages; identified with a phallus; but if the theory here advocated is true, the lingam, instead of lying at the root of the monolith, must necessarily be a later and derivative form of it. At the same time, the stone being regarded as the ancestor of the family, it is not unnatural that early men should sometimes carve it into a phallic shape. Having said this, I will say no more on the subject, which has really extremely little to do with the essentials of stone worship, save that on many gravestones of early date a phallus marked the male sex of the occupant, while breasts, or a symbolical triangle, or a mandorla, marked the grave of a woman.
Sometimes, both forms of god, the most primitive and the most finished, the rude stone and the perfect statue, exist side by side in the same community.
“In the legendary origin of Jagannath,” says Sir William Hunter, “we find the aboriginal people worshipping a blue stone in the depths of the forest. But the deity at length wearies of primitive jungle offerings, and longs for the cooked food of the more civilised Aryans, upon whose arrival on the scene the rude blue stone gives place to a carved image. At the present hour, in every hamlet of Orissa, this twofold worship coexists. The common people have their shapeless stone or block, which they adore with simple rites in the open air; while side by side with it stands a temple to one of the Aryan gods, with its carved idol and elaborate rites.”
Where many sacred stones exist all round, marking the graves of the dead, or inhabited by their spirits, it is not surprising, once more, that a general feeling of reverence towards all stones should begin to arise—that the stone per se, especially if large, odd, or conspicuous, should be credited to some extent with indwelling divinity. Nor is it astonishing that the idea of men being descended from stones should be rife among people who must often, when young, have been shown headstones, monoliths, boulders, or cromlechs, and been told that the offerings made upon them were gifts to their ancestors. They would accept the idea as readily as our own children accept the Hebrew myth of the creation of Adam, our prime ancestor, from “the dust of the ground”—a far less promising material than a block of marble or sandstone. In this way, it seems to me, we can most readily understand the numerous stories of men becoming stones, and stones becoming men, which are rife among the myths of savage or barbarous peoples.