Lastly, many stones lend themselves directly to the needs of the phallic cultus.
One form of stone is regarded with special reverence, those that have holes or perforations. Among these may be mentioned the Sâlagrâma, a sort of ammonite found in the Gandak river, which has perforations, said to be the work of the Vajrakîta insect and hence sacred to Vishnu. The story goes that the divine Nârâyana once wandered through the world in the form of the Vajrakîta or golden bee. The gods, attracted by his beauty, also took the form of bees, and whirled about him in such numbers that Vishnu, afraid of the consequences, assumed the form of a rock and stopped the moving of Garuda and the gods. On this Garuda, followed by all the gods, made each a separate dwelling in the rock for the conversion of the infidels. So the Cornish Milpreve, or adder stone which is a preservative against vipers, is a ball of coralline limestone, the sections in the coral being thought to be entangled young snakes.[46] In Italy, pieces of stalagmite full of cavities are valued as amulets.
The respect for these perforated stones rests, again, on the well-known principle that looking through a stone which has a hole bored through it improves the sight.
All over the world it is a recognized theory that creeping through the orifice in a perforated stone or under an arching stone or tree is a valuable remedy in cases of disease. Mr. Lane describes how women in Cairo walk under the stone on which the decapitated bodies of criminals are washed, in the hope of curing ophthalmia or procuring offspring. The woman must do this in silence, and with the left foot foremost.[47] In Cornwall, Mr. Hunt writes: “In various parts of the country there are, amongst the granitic masses, rocks which have fallen across each other, leaving small openings, or there are holes, low and narrow, extending under a pile of rocks. In nearly every case of this kind, we find it is popularly stated that any one suffering from rheumatism or lumbago would be cured if he crawled through the opening. In some cases nine times are insisted on to make the charm complete.”[48] So, walking under a bramble which has formed a second root in the earth is a cure for rheumatism, and strumous children were passed nine times through a cleft ash tree, against the sun. The tree was then bound up, and if the bark grew the child was cured, if the tree died the death of the child was sure to follow.[49]
In the same way at many shrines it is part of the worship to creep through a narrow orifice from one side to the other. At Kankhal, worshippers at the temple of Daksha creep through a sort of tunnel from one side to the other. The same is the rule at the temple at Kabraiya in the Hamîrpur District, and at many other places of the same kind.[50]
The same principle probably accounts for the respect paid to the grindstone. Part of the earliest form of the marriage ritual consisted in the bride standing on the family grindstone. At the present day she puts her foot upon it and knocks down little piles of heaped grain. It is waved over the heads of the pair to scare evil spirits. In Bombay it is said that sitting on a grindstone shortens life, and the Kunbis of Kolâba place a grindstone in the lying-in room, and on it set a rice flour image of a woman, which is worshipped as the goddess, and the baby is laid before it. Such a stone readily passes into a fetish, as at Ahmadnagar, where there is a stone with two holes, which any two fingers of any person’s hand can fill, and the mosque where it stands is, in consequence, much respected.[51]
Much, however, of the worship of stones appears to be the result of the respect paid to the tombstone or cairn, which, as we have already said, keeps down the ghost of the dead man, and is often a place in which his spirit chooses to reside.
These rude stones are very often smeared with ruddle or red ochre. We have here a survival of the blood sacrifice of a human being or animal which was once universal.[52] Such sacrifices rest on the principle that it is necessary to supply attendants to the dead or to the tribal gods in the other world; and the commutation of human sacrifices, first into those of animals, and then into a mere scarlet stain on the fetish stone, is a constantly recurring fact in the history of custom.[53] It may be worth while to discuss this transition from the Indian evidence.