found in Arabia, and which Dr. Sprenger thinks he even acknowledged as divine during a moment when he well-nigh broke down in his career, were Manah and Lât, the one a rock, the other a stone or a stone idol; while the veneration of the black stone of the Kaaba, which Captain Burton thinks an aërolite, was undoubtedly a local rite which the Prophet transplanted into his new religion, where it flourishes to this day.[1] The curious passage in Sanchoniathon which speaks of the Heaven-god forming the 'bætyls, animated stones' (θεὸς Οὐρανὸς Βαιτύλια, λίθους ἐμψύχους, μηχανησάμενος) perhaps refers to meteorites or supposed thunderbolts fallen from the clouds. To the old Phœnician religion, which made so deep a contact with the Jewish world on the one side and the Greek and Roman on the other, there belonged the stone pillars of Baal and the wooden ashera-posts, but how far these objects were of the character of altars, symbols, or fetishes, is a riddle.[2] We may still say with Tacitus, describing the conical pillar which stood instead of an image to represent the Paphian Venus — 'et ratio in obscuro.'
There are accounts of formal Christian prohibitions of stone-worship in France and England, reaching on into the early middle ages,[3] which show this barbaric cultus as then distinctly lingering in popular religion. Coupling this fact with the accounts of the groups of standing-stones set up to represent deities in South India, a corresponding explanation has been suggested in Europe. Are the menhirs, cromlechs, &c., idols, and circles and lines of idols, worshipped by remotely ancient dwellers in the land as representatives or embodiments of their gods? The question at least deserves consideration, although the ideas with which
- ↑ Sprenger, 'Mohammad,' vol. ii. p. 7, &c. Burton, 'El Medinah,' &c., vol. ii. p. 157.
- ↑ Euseb. Præp. Evang. i. 10. Deut. xii. 3; Micah v. 13, &c. Movers, 'Phönizier,' vol. i. pp. 105, 569, and see index, 'Säule,' &c. See De Brosses, 'Dieux Fétiches,' p. 135 (considers bætyl=beth-el, &c.).
- ↑ For references see Ducange s.v. 'petra'; Leslie, 'Early Races of Scotland,' vol. i. p. 256.
