stone-worship is carried on by different races are multifarious, and the analogy may be misleading. It is remarkable to what late times full and genuine stone-worship has survived in Europe. In certain mountain districts of Norway, up to the end of the last century, the peasants used to preserve round stones, washed them every Thursday evening (which seems to show some connection with Thor), smeared them with butter before the fire, laid them in the seat of honour on fresh straw, and at certain times of the year steeped them in ale, that they might bring luck and comfort to the house.[1] In an account dating from 1851, the islanders of Inniskea, off Mayo, are declared to have a stone carefully wrapped in flannel, which is brought out and worshipped at certain periods, and when a storm arises it is supplicated to send a wreck on the coast.[2] No savage ever showed more clearly by his treatment of a fetish that he considered it a personal being, than did these Norwegians and Irishmen. The ethnographic argument from the existence of stock-and-stone worship among so many nations of comparatively high culture seems to me of great weight as bearing on religious development among mankind. To imagine that peoples skilled in carving wood and stone, and using these arts habitually in making idols, should have gone out of their way to invent a practice of worshipping logs and pebbles, is not a likely theory. But on the other hand, when it is considered how such a rude object serves to uncultured men as a divine image or receptacle, there is nothing strange in its being a relic of early barbarism holding its place against more artistic models through ages of advancing civilization, by virtue of the traditional sanctity which belongs to survival from remote antiquity.
- ↑ Nilsson, 'Primitive Inhabitants of Scandinavia,' p. 241. See also Meiners, vol. ii. p. 671 (speaking stones in Norway, &c.).
- ↑ Earl of Roden, 'Progress of Reformation in Ireland,' London, 1851, p. 51. Sir J. E. Tennent in 'Notes and Queries,' Feb. 7, 1852. See Borlase, 'Antiquities of Cornwall,' Oxford, 1754, book iii. ch. 2.
