The facts we have been noticing prove that early man cherished hopes of immortality. All was not ended for him with death; a new life commences beyond the tomb, marked—for his ideas could go no farther—by joys similar to those he had known on earth, and events such as had occurred during his life. What else could be the meaning of the weapons, the tools of his craft, the vases filled with food placed near the defunct, the ornaments and colors intended for his adornment, the wives, slaves, and horses flung into the same tomb or consumed upon the same pile? It is pleasing to find this supreme hope among our remote ancestors; and clumsily as it was expressed, it implies a belief in a being superior to man, a protecting divinity according to some, but according to some few others a malignant and tyrannical spirit. The proofs so far to hand are not enough to justify us in seriously asserting that ancestors were worshipped by prehistoric man. But the subject is too important for us to refrain from putting before the reader such indications of this worship as have been collected, and which are necessarily connected with the moral and material condition of our remote ancestors.
The radius of a mammoth was discovered at Chaleux, occupying a place of honor on a large sandstone slab near the hearth. The Chaleux Cave dates from the Reindeer period; at which time the mammoth had long since been extinct in Belgium, so that there can be no doubt that the cave man had taken this bone from the alluvial deposits of the preceding epoch, and this huge relic of an unknown creature had been the object of his veneration, a lar or protective divinity of his home. A somewhat similar fact was discovered at Laugerie-Basse and, by a strange coincidence, certain tribes of North America of the present clay preserve the bone of a mastodon or of a cetacean in their buts as a protection to their homes.
From Paleolithic times men were in the habit of cutting celts or hatchets in chalk, bitumen, and other fragile substances, which were certainly of no practical use. Thousands of similar objects in harder rock, but showing no sign of wear or tear, have also been found, and there is little doubt that they all alike served as amulets. This superstitious respect for certain objects lasted for many centuries, and was handed down from one generation to another. The tombs of the Bronze and Iron ages are often found to contain flint hatchets, some of them broken intentionally, a proof, as I have already said, that they were connected with funeral rites of the nature of which we are ignorant.
We also find votive hatchets beneath dolmens. By the side of some skeletons at Cissbury lay flint celts. A hatchet one and a quarter feet long was found in a Lake Station of Switzerland. It was of such friable rock that it can have been of no use but as a symbol; perhaps, indeed, it may have been a badge of office. Lastly, Merovingian tombs contain hundreds of small flint celts, the last pious offerings to the departed.[43]
We find hatchets engraved on the megalithic monuments of Brittany, on the walls of the caves of Marne, and we meet with them again on the other side of the Atlantic, evidently bearing the same signification, implying respect for them as means of protection. De Longpérier has published a description of a Chaldean cylinder, on which was represented a priest presenting his offering to a hatchet lying on a throne, and a ring was picked up at Mykenæ, on the stone of which was engraved a double-bladed celt. We find the same idea in many different mythologies. The word Nouter (God) is translated in Egyptian hieroglyphics by a sign resembling a celt, and the hatchet of Odin is engraved on the rocks of Kivrik. On a number of Gallo-Roman cippi, we find a hatchet beneath which we read the words, Dis Manibus, and lower down the dedication, Sub Ascia dedicavit. At all times and everywhere the hatchet appears as the emblem of force, and is the object of the respect of the people. The tradition of its value and importance is handed down from ancestors to descendants throughout many generations.
Figure 111.
Erratic block from Scania, covered with carvings.
May we give a religious interpretation to the basins and cups hollowed out on rocks and erratic blocks and on the so-called Roches Moutonnées, with other monuments that have endured for many centuries (Figs. [111] and [112])? Or must we attribute them merely to passing caprice? Their number and importance we think forbid the latter idea. We find such blocks in Switzerland, in England, France, Italy, Portugal, and on the frozen shores of the Baltic. They are no less numerous in India, and they figure in the curious pictographs of the two Americas. There is no doubt that we have here a common idea, and one it is impossible not to recognize. How. else can we account for the similarity of arrangement in the cup-shaped sculptures from the tumuli of Schleswig-Holstein and those on the Indian rocks of Kamaou, or between those of Algeria and of England?