De Mirville, in his enormous works, “Mémoires Adressées aux Académies,” carrying out the task of proving the reality of the Devil and showing his abode in every ancient and modern idol, has collected several hundred pages of “historical evidence” that, in the days of “miracle,” both pagan and biblical, stones walked, spoke, delivered oracles, and even sang. That finally, the “Christ-stone,” or Christ-rock, “the spiritual Rock” that followed Israel,[757] “became a Jupiter-lapis,” swallowed by his father Saturn, “under the shape of a stone.”[758] We will not stop to discuss the evident misuse and materialization of biblical metaphors simply for the sake of proving the “Satanism” of idols, though a good deal might be said[759] on this subject. But without claiming any such peripateticism and innate psychic faculties for our [pg 357] stones, we may collect, in our turn, every available evidence to hand, to show that: (a) had there been no giants to move such colossal rocks, there could never have been a Stonehenge, a Carnac (Brittany), or other such Cyclopean structures; and (b) were there no such thing as Magic, there could never have been so many witnesses to “oracular” and “speaking” stones.
In the Achaica we find Pausanias confessing that, in beginning his work, he had regarded the Greeks as mighty stupid “for worshipping stones.” But, having reached Arcadia, he adds: “I have changed my way of thinking.”[760] Therefore, without worshipping stones or stone idols and statues, which is the same thing—a crime with which Roman Catholics are unwise to reproach Pagans, as they do—one may be allowed to believe in what so many great Philosophers and holy men have believed in, without deserving to be called an “idiot” by modern Pausaniuses.
The reader is referred to the Académie des Inscriptions, if he would study the various properties of flints and pebbles from the standpoint of magic and psychic powers. In a poem on “Stones” attributed to Orpheus, these stones are divided into Ophites and Sideritês, the “Serpent-stone” and “Star-stone.”
The Ophitês is shaggy, hard, heavy, black, and has the gift of speech; when one prepares to cast it away, it produces a sound similar to the cry of a child. It is by means of this stone that Helenus foretold the ruin of Troy, his fatherland.[761]
Sanchuniathon and Philo Byblus, in referring to these “bétyles,” call them “animated stones.” Photius repeats what Damascius, Asclepiades, Isidorus and the physician Eusebius had asserted before him. Eusebius especially never parted with his Ophitês, which he carried in his bosom, and received oracles from it, delivered in a small voice resembling a low whistling.[762] Arnobius, a holy man, who “from a Pagan had become one of the lights of the Church,” as Christians tell their readers, confesses he could never meet with one of such stones without putting it a question, “which it answered occasionally in a clear and sharp small voice.” Where, then, is the difference between the Christian and the Pagan Ophitês, we ask?
The famous stone at Westminster was called liafail, “the speaking stone,” and raised its voice only to name the king that had to be [pg 358] chosen. Cambry, in his Monuments Celtiques, says he saw it when it still bore the inscription:[763]
Ni fallat fatum, Scoti quocumque locatum
Invenient lapidem, regnasse tenentur ibidem.
Finally, Suidas speaks of a certain Heræscus, who could distinguish at a glance the inanimate stones from those which were endowed with motion; and Pliny mentions stones which “ran away when a hand approached them.”[764]
De Mirville—who seeks to justify the Bible—enquires very pertinently, why the monstrous stones of Stonehenge were called in days of old chior-gaur or the “dance of giants” (from côr, “dance,” whence chorea, and gaur, “giant”)? And then he sends the reader to receive his reply from the Bishop St. Gildas. But the authors of such works as Voyage dans le Comté de Cornouailles, sur les Traces des Géants, and of various learned works on the ruins of Stonehenge,[765] Carnac, and West Hoadley, give far fuller and more reliable information upon this particular subject. In those regions—true forests of rocks—immense monoliths are found, “some weighing over 500,000 kilograms.” These “hanging stones” of Salisbury Plain are believed to be the remains of a Druidical temple. But the Druids were historical men and not Cyclopes, or giants. Who then, if not giants, could ever raise such masses—especially those at Carnac and West Hoadley—range them in such symmetrical order that they should represent the planisphere, and place them in such wonderful equipoise that they seem to hardly touch the ground, and though set in motion at the slightest touch of the finger, would nevertheless resist the efforts of twenty men should they attempt to displace them.