Popol Vuh (if the evidence of Popol Vuh, the Quichua sacred book, is to be accepted) changed into stone the lion, serpent, and tiger gods. The Standing Rock on the Upper Missouri is adored by the Indians, and decorated with coloured ribbons and skins of animals. This stone was a woman, who, like Niobe, became literally petrified with grief when her husband took a second wife. Another stone-woman in a cave on the banks of the Kickapoo was wont to kill people who came near her, and is even now approached with great respect. The Oneidas and Dacotahs claim descent from stones to which they ascribe animation.[1] Montesinos speaks of a sacred stone which was removed from a mountain by one of the Incas. A parrot flew out of it and lodged in another stone, which the natives still worship.[2] The Breton myth about one of the great stone circles (the stones were peasants who danced on a Sunday) is a well-known example of this kind of myth surviving in folk-lore. There is a kind of stone Actæon[3] near Little Muniton Creek, "resembling the bust of a man whose head is decorated with the horns of a stag."[4] A crowd of myths of metamorphosis into stone will be found among the Iroquois legends in Report of Bureau of Ethnology, 1880–81.
- ↑ Dorman, p. 133.
- ↑ Many examples are collected by J. G. Müller, Amerikanischen Urreligionen, pp. 97, 110, 125, especially when the stones have a likeness to human form, p. 17a. "Im der That werden auch einige in Steine, oder in Thiere und Pflanzen verwandelt." Cf. p. 220. Instance (from Balboa) of men turned into stone by wizards, p. 309.
- ↑ Preller thinks that Actæon, devoured by his hounds after being changed into a stag, is a symbol of the vernal year. Palæphatus (De Fab. Narrat.) holds that it is a moral fable.
- ↑ Dorman, p. 137.
