The Legends of Krishna. 33
incident in the ritual to burn candles or incense before such images ; and an ancient Madonna would naturally become darkened in this way, as the fetish stone in an Indian village becomes dark from repeated oblations of oil and butter. The famous Black Rood of Scotland, for instance, seems to have presented the appearance of being blackened all over.-^ It was possibly the natural reverence felt towards old blackened images which suggested to the Greeks the con- struction of so many of their Xoana from ebony.^
In the same way, too, many of these images are said to have been blackened by fire. Thus we have the image of the Ithomatian Zeus, which was said to have been found in a burned forest, and there was another charred image of Athena.-'^ So Fryer describes a pagoda at Gokarna in Kanara made of black marble, and particularly venerated because it had escaped the fire.* The same tale is told of a Lingam at Mandhata in the Central Provinces.^ Al Azraki tells us that the black stone of Mecca Avas once of a reful- gent bright colour, but became repeatedly blackened by fire both before and after the rise of Islam.** We have a similar instance in the image of the rough black stone which repre- sents the jungle goddess Pora Mai, which is said to have been rescued from a burning forest.'^
At any rate the worship of black stones is a well-marked phase in the history of early religion. Among these we have the Baetuli of Syria, a word which is another form of the better known Hebrew Bethel.^ One of the Fiji gods is
' 1st Series Notes and Queries, ii., 409.
" Pausanias, i., 35, 3 ; 42, 5 ; ii., 22, 5 ; viii., 17, 2 ; 53, 11.
3 Ibid. , iii. , 26, 6 ; i., 27, 6.
■* East India and Persia, 1 59 seqq.
^ Central Provinces Gazetteer, 261.
^ Burckhardt, Travels, i. , 297.
' Crooke, loc. cit., i. , 114 seqq. The same story is told of the Santo Nino de Cebu and of a famous Cross in the Philippine Islands. Foreman, Philippine Islands (2nd ed.), 196 seqq.
- Pliny, Nat. Hist., xxxvii., 135 ; Enivclopcedia Biblica, 569 note.
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