I cannot find room here for many detailed instances of similar migrations; but there are two examples in Britain so exceedingly interesting that even in so hasty a notice I cannot pass them by without a brief mention. The inner or smaller stones at Stonehenge are known to be of remote origin, belonging to rocks not found nearer Salisbury Plain than Cumberland in one direction or Belgium in the other. They are surrounded by a group of much larger stones, arranged as trilithons, but carved out of the common sarsen blocks distributed over the neighbouring country. I have tried to show elsewhere that these smaller igneous rocks, untouched by the tool, * were the ancient sacred stones of an immigrant tribe that came into Britain from the Continent, probably over a broad land-belt which then existed where the Straits of Dover now flow; and that the strangers on their arrival in Britain erected these their ancestral gods on the Plain of Amesbury, and further contributed to their importance and appearance by surrounding them with a circle of the biggest and most imposing grey-wethers that the new country in which they had settled could easily afford.
* So Moses in the legend commanded the children of Israel to
build “an altar of whole stones, over which no man hath lift
up any iron”; and so of the boulders composing the altar on
Mount Ebal it was said, “Thou shah not lift up any iron tool
upon them.” The conservatism of religion kept up the archaic
fashion for sacred purposes.
The other case is that of the Scone stone. This sacred block, according to the accredited legend, was originally the ancestral god of the Irish Scots, on whose royal tumulus at Tara it once stood. It was carried by them to Argyllshire on their first invasion, and placed in a cranny of the wall (say modern versions) at Dunstaffnage Castle. When the Scotch kings removed to Scone, Kenneth II. took the stone to his new lowland residence. Thence Edward I. carried it off to England, where it has ever since remained in Westminster Abbey, as part of the chair in which the sovereigns of Britain sit at their coronation. The immense significance of these facts or tales will be seen more clearly when we come to consider the analogies of the Hebrew ark. Meanwhile, it may help to explain the coronation usage, and the legend that wherever the Stone of Destiny is found “the Scots in place must reign,” if I add a couple of analogous cases from the history of the same mixed Celtic race. According to Dr. O’Donovan, the inauguration stone of the O’Donnells stood on a tumulus in the midst of a large plain; and on this sacred stone, called the Flagstone of the Kings, the elected chief stood to receive the white wand or sceptre of kingship. A cylindrical obelisk, used for the same purpose, stands to this day, according to Dr. Petrie, in the Rath-na-Riogh. So, too, M’Donald was crowned King of the Isles, standing on a sacred stone, with an impression on top to receive his feet. He based himself, as it were, upon the gods his ancestors. The Tara stone even cried aloud, Professor Rhys tells us, when the true king placed his feet above it. The coronation stone exists in other countries; for example, in Hebrew history, or half-history, we learn that when Abimelech was mads king it was “by the plain of the pillar that was in Shechem”; and when Jehoash was anointed by Jehoiada, “the king stood by a pillar, as the manner was.” In front of the church of Sant’ Ambrogio at Milan stands the stone pillar at which the Lombard kings and German emperors took the coronation oath, under the ancient lime-trees which overshadow the piazza.
Now, it is quite true that Mr. Skene, the best authority on Celtic Scotland, rejects this story of the Stone of Destiny in most parts as legendary: he believes the Scone stone to have been merely the sacred coronation-block of the Pictish Kings at Scone, and never to have come from Ireland at all. Professor Ramsay thinks it is a piece of red sandstone broken off the rock of that district of Scotland. Even Professor Rhys (who gives a most interesting account of the Tara Stone) seems to have doubts as to the migration. But, true or not, the story will amply serve my purpose here; for I use it only to illustrate the equally dubious wanderings of a Hebrew sacred stone, at which we will arrive in due time; and one legend is surely always the best possible parallel of another.
In the course of ages, as religions develop, and especially as a few great gods grow to overshadow the minor ancestral Lares and spirits, it often comes about that sacred stones of the older faith have a new religious significance given them in the later system. Thus we have seen the Argives worshipped their old sacred stone under the name of Zeus Kappotas; the Thespians identified theirs with the later Hellenic Eros; and the Megarians considered a third as the representative of Phoebus. The original local sacred stone of Delos has been found on the spot where it originally stood, beneath the feet of the statue of the Delian Apollo. And this, I am glad to see, is Mr. Andrew Lang’s view also; for he remarks of the Greek unwrought stones, “They were blocks which bore the names of gods, Hera, or Apollo, names perhaps given, as De Brosses says, to the old fetishistic objects of worship, after the anthropomorphic gods entered [I should say, were developed in] Hellas.” So, too, in India, the local sacred stones have been identified with the deities of the Hindu pantheon; Mr. Hislop remarks that in every part of the Deccan (where Hinduism is of comparatively late introduction) four or five stones may often be seen in the ryot’s field, placed in a row and daubed with red paint, which the peasants call the Five Pandavas; but, says Dr. Tylor, “he reasonably takes these Hindu names to have superseded more ancient appellations.” Islam, in like manner, has adopted the Kaaba, the great black stone of the Holy Place at Mecca; and the Egyptian religion gave a new meaning to the pillar or monolith, by shaping it as an obelisk to represent a ray of the rising sun-god.
Sometimes the sanctity of the antique stones was secured in the later faith by connecting them with some legend or episode of the orthodox religion. Thus the ancient sacred stone kept at Delphi—no doubt the original oracle of that great shrine, as the rude Delian block was the precursor of the Delian Apollo—was explained with reference to the later Hellenic belief by the myth that it was the stone which Kronos swallowed in mistake for Zeus: an explanation doubtless due to the fact that this boulder was kept, like Monigan’s Irish idol and the Samoan god, wrapped up in flannel; and in the myth, Rhea deceived Kronos by offering him, instead of Zeus, a stone wrapped in swaddling-bands. There is here indeed food for much reflection. The sacred stone of the Trozenians, in like manner, lay in front of the temple; but it was Hellenised, so to speak, by the story that on it the Trozenian elders sat when they purified Orestes from the murder of his mother.
In modern Europe, as everybody knows, a similar Christianisation of holy wells, holy stones, and holy places has been managed by connecting them with legends of saints, or by the still simpler device of marking a cross upon them. The cross has a threefold value: in the first place, it drives away from their accustomed haunts the ancient gods or spirits, always envisaged in early Christian and mediæval thought as devils or demons; in the second place, it asserts the supremacy of the new faith; and in the third place, by conferring a fresh sanctity upon the old holy place or object, it induces the people to worship the cross by the mere habit of resorting to the shrine at which their ancestors so long worshipped. Gregory’s well-known advice to St. Augustine on this matter is but a single example of what went on over all Christendom. In many cases, crosses in Britain are still found firmly fixed in old sacred stones, usually recognisable by their unwrought condition. The finest example in Europe is probably the gigantic monolith of Plumen in Brittany, topped by an insignificant little cross, and still resorted to by the peasants (especially the childless) as a great place of worship. The prehistoric monuments of Narvia in the Isle of Man have been Christianised by having crosses deeply incised upon them. Other cases, like the Black Stones of Iona, which gave sanctity to that Holy Isle long before the time of Columba, will doubtless occur at once to every reader. With many of the Scotch sculptured stones, it is difficult to decide whether they were originally erected as crosses, or are prehistoric monuments externally Christianised.
I have thus endeavoured briefly to suggest the ultimate derivation of all sacred stones from sepulchral monuments, and to point out the very large part which they bear in the essential of religion—that is to say, worship—everywhere. There is, however, one particular application to which I wish to call special attention, because of its peculiar interest as regards the origin of the monotheistic god of Judaism and Christianity. Hitherto in this chapter, I have intentionally made but very few allusions to the faith and the sacred stones of the Hebrews, because I wished first to give a general view of the whole ramifications and modifications of stone-worship before coming down to the particular instance in which we modern Europeans are most deeply interested. I will now, however, give a brief summary of what seems to me most suggestive and important in the early Semitic stone-cult. These results are no doubt already familiar in outline to most cultivated readers, but it is possible they may appear in a somewhat new light when regarded in connexion with the general history of stone-worship as here elucidated.
That the Semites, as well as other early nations, were stone-worshippers we know from a great number of positive instances. The stone pillars of Baal and the wooden Ashera cones were the chief objects of adoration in the Phoenician religion. The Stone of Bethel was apparently a menhir: the cairn of Mizpeh was doubtless a sepulchral monument. The Israelites under Joshua, we are told, built a Gilgal of twelve standing stones; and other instances in the early traditions of the Hebrews will be noticed in their proper place later on. Similarly, among the Arabs of the time of Mohammed, two of the chief deities were Manah and Lât, the one a rock, the other a sacred stone or stone idol: and the Kaaba itself, the great black stone of local worship, even the Prophet was compelled to recognise and Islamise by adopting it bodily into his monotheistic religion.
The stone worship of the Semites at large, though comparatively neglected by Professor Robertson Smith, must have played a large part in the religion of that race, from which the Hebrews were a special offshoot. “In Arabia,” says Professor Smith, “where sacrifice by fire was almost unknown, we find no proper altar, but in its place a rude pillar or heap of stones, beside which the victim is slain, the blood being poured out over the stone or at its base.” To the great orientalist, it is true, the sacred stone or altar, like the sacred tree and the sacred fountain, are nothing more than “common symbols at sanctuaries”; he thinks of them not as gods but merely as representatives of the god, arbitrarily chosen. After the evidence I have already adduced, however, I think it will be seen that this position is altogether untenable; indeed, Dr. Smith himself uses many phrases in this connexion which enables us to see the true state of the case far more clearly than he himself did. “The sacred stones [of the Arabs], which are already mentioned by Herodotus, are called ansab, i.e., stones set up, pillars. We also find the name ghariy, 'blood-bedaubed,’ with reference to the ritual just described [of sacrifice at the nosb or sacred pillar]. The meaning of this ritual will occupy us later: meantime the thing to be noted is that the altar is only a modification of the nosb, and that the rude Arabian usage is the primitive type out of which all the elaborate altar ceremonies of the more cultivated Semites grew. Whatever else was done in connexion with a sacrifice, the primitive rite of sprinkling or dashing the blood against the altar, or allowing it to flow down on the ground at its base, was hardly ever omitted; and this practice was not peculiar to the Semites, but was equally the rule with the Greeks and Romans, and indeed with the ancient nations generally.”