So far, then, we are clear. But there remain some difficult questions. Why was the stone in Hesiod wrapped in swaddling clothes? I do not understand this. But the ritual practice is well attested. Pausanias tells how this Kronos stone was anointed and wrapped in wool.[59] A coin in Macdonald’s Hunter Catalogue (ii. 68. 145) represents the Great Mother stone covered with a goat-skin. This may be merely because of the hagos or taboo, just as the omphalos on vases is commonly covered with an ἄγρηνον and Semitic betyls are wrapped in cloths. The actual body of a god would be dangerous to touch; but it looks as if there was some special connexion between stones and infants. The Orphic poem called Lithica is, of course, full of magic stones, which might be cited here. But take one in especial, the ‘Live Siderite’. This stone has to be prayed to, like a god; it has also to be washed daily for ten days and nursed and wrapped in clean robes, like a baby. At the end of that time it will reward its benefactor by uttering the scream of a young baby when hungry; then, the poet remarks, the great thing is not to drop it.[60]
In some Mexican dances, Preuss tells us, the souls of infants come through the air in the likeness of five stones. Among the Kaitish and the Arunta there are stones inhabited by infant souls, which are induced in one way or another to come out of the stones and be born. And we all remember the stones flung by Deucalion and Pyrrha, and the race of man which is—or is not—sprung ἀπὸ δρυὸς ἡδ’ ἁπὸ πέτρης.[61]
But again, why were the stones swallowed? What does all this swallowing mean? Zeus of course swallowed Metis in order to have her mana inside him. That is sensible enough. Do medicine men or Theoi ever actually swallow smooth stones in order to get the fire-power or other magic inside them? In Mexico the devils which are sucked out of the body in curing diseases are usually in the form of stones. For instance, in the ceremony of the Huichol tribe, where the gods are healed of their weariness by the Dawn-Star, Kaiumari, sucking ‘stones and the like’ out of them.[62] The same practice is common among Australian blacks.
Mr. Marett refers me to a still better case. Among the Yuin of New South Wales the word joïa, which is almost like mana and is used to denote the immaterial force in sacred animals, is actually the name of certain stones like these. They are commonly quartz-crystals or bits of glass, but also we hear of Kunambrun, a black stone, apparently lydianite. A black stone probably means thunder. The medicine man often carries these stones in his mouth, and when he sends out a curse or a blessing he projects them out of himself into his victim ‘like the wind,’ that is, invisibly and impalpably.[63]
The actual swallowing seems strange, unless it was a mere fraud. But I used to know an Australian blackfellow—I never thought of asking his tribe—who used to put stones in his mouth and give or sell them to the boys of the neighbourhood as bearing a charm in consequence. They were sure to hit what they were aimed at, unless the aim was very bad. I suppose he put a lot of his mana into them. One of the ways in which a Papuan chief causes death, according to the report of Dr. Bellamy in the White Book for 1907, is to send to a man a present of a smooth stone. The man recognizes the meaning of the stone, and wastes away. Dr. Bellamy cured some by the application of strong smelling salts, which drove away the devils. Presumably the chief had put his mana on the stone in some very strong way.
Lastly, there is another element in this story which calls for explanation from better anthropologists than myself; I mean the constant reference to ‘hiding’ or ‘concealment’. Ouranos (157) hid all his children in a secret place of the Earth; this gave pain to Earth, and she groaned, being squeezed by them. Earth again (482) took Zeus and hid him in a cave. Kronos put the stone inside him—surely a form of hiding. The Titans were hidden away—κεκρύφατο, by Kronos (729) till Zeus brought them again to light. Lastly and most important, Zeus hid away fire from man, κρύψε δὲ πῦρ.
This last case is pretty clear. Zeus had the fire hidden away in the heart of the flint or in the veins of Earth; Prometheus, or Pramanthas, the Fire-Stick, introduced the more open visible fire. But the other cases seem different. In them it is always a king or a would-be king, a deposed Theos or a conquered aspirant, who is made to disappear. We are reminded of Aeneas and Latinus who vanished in battles, of Romulus and Numa who vanished in thunderstorms.
In one case we find that the hiding was in a ‘monstrous cave’, and a cave in Crete, too. We know from other sources something about the kind of hiding which took place in that particular cave. At the end of the fatal nine years, if we are to believe the authors quoted by me in the Rise of the Greek Epic, p. 127, and much more completely by Mr. A. B. Cook in the articles mentioned above, the divine king Minos in his mask, as a god, went up into the Idaean cave to converse with Zeus. Doubtless the divine mask covered his head. A masked Minos went in, and a masked Minos came out; but one strongly suspects that it was not the same man beneath the mask. My friend Mr. Gordon, an education officer in Lower Nigeria, informs me that there is there a great oracle or ordeal in a cave called the Long Juju. It decides cases between litigants, or persons who have some dispute. And the method is that both go up into the cave, and only one returns. The other, presumably the guilty one, has vanished; he is hidden; κέκρυπται.
All through this pre-Hellenic realm of saga and half-history we find ourselves in contact with these god-kings, or medicine-chiefs, these βασιλῆες or, if I am right, Theoi. And we cannot but wonder whether we have not here the explanation of Herodotus’ famous statement about the origins of Greek Religion (Herod. ii. 52). The Pelasgians, he tells us, did not originally know the names of the Olympian gods; ‘they brought offerings and prayed to the Theoi.’ It was only at a later time that they sent to Dodona to ask if they should worship those definite gods with special names and attributes and ‘Olympian Houses’ which had come into Greece but were still in some sense foreign. And the oracle said ‘Yes’. I am quite aware that the passage may be differently interpreted; and I do not suggest that Herodotus knew all that lay behind his words when he spoke of the nameless Theoi of the Pelasgians in contrast to the Olympians of Homer and Hesiod. But I do suspect that the contrast between these medicine-chiefs and the Homeric gods is one of the cardinal differences between Hellenic and pre-Hellenic religion; and, further, that some reminiscence of this difference has shaped the tradition which Herodotus repeats. Clearer evidence will, no doubt, be forthcoming from some better-equipped anthropologist.