Volume I Part 15 (2/2)

Among the North American Indians any stone which has a resemblance to the human or animal figure is explained as an example of metamorphosis.

Three stones among the Aricaras were a girl, her lover and her dog, who fled from home because the course of true love did not run smooth, and who were petrified. Certain stones near Chinook Point were sea-giants who swallowed a man. His brother, by aid of fire, dried up the bay and released the man, still alive, from the body of the giant. Then the giants were turned into rocks.(1) The rising sun in Popol Vuh (if the evidence of Popol Vuh, the Quichua sacred book, is to be accepted) changed into stone the lion, serpent and tiger G.o.ds. 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.(2) 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 wors.h.i.+p.(3) 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 Actaeon(4) near Little Muniton Creek, ”resembling the bust of a man whose head is decorated with the horns of a stag”.(5) A crowd of myths of metamorphosis into stone will be found among the Iroquois legends in Report of Bureau of Ethnology, 1880-81. If men may become stones, on the other hand, in Samoa (as in the Greek myth of Deucalion), stones may become men.(6) G.o.ds, too, especially when these G.o.ds happen to be cuttlefish, might be petrified. They were chased in Samoa by an Upolu hero, who caught them in a great net and killed them. ”They were changed into stones, and now stand up in a rocky part of the lagoon on the north side of Upolu.”(7) Mauke, the first man, came out of a stone.

In short,(8) men and stones and beasts and G.o.ds and thunder have interchangeable forms. In Mangaia(9) the G.o.d Ra was tossed up into the sky by Maui and became pumice-stone. Many samples of this petrified deity are found in Mangaia. In Melanesia matters are so mixed that it is not easy to decide whether a wors.h.i.+pful stone is the dwelling of a dead man's soul or is of spiritual merit in itself, or whether ”the stone is the spirit's outward part or organ”. The Vui, or spirit, has much the same relations with snakes, owls and sharks.(10) Qasavara, the mythical opponent of Qat, the Melanesian Prometheus, ”fell dead from heaven”

(like Ra in Mangia), and was turned into a stone, on which sacrifices are made by those who desire strength in fighting.

(1) See authorities ap. Dorman, Primitive Superst.i.tions, pp. 130-138.

(2) Dorman, p. 133.

(3) Many examples are collected by J. G. Muller, 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 and Pflanzen verwandelt.” Cf. p. 220. Instances (from Balboa) of men turned into stone by wizards, p. 309.

(4) Preller thinks that Actaeon, devoured by his hounds after being changed into a stag, is a symbol of the vernal year. Palaephatus (De Fab. Narrat.) holds that the story is a moral fable.

(5) Dorman, p. 137.

(6) Turner's Samoa, p. 299.

(7) Samoa, p. 31.

(8) Op. cit., p. 34.

(9) Gill, Myths and Songs, p. 60.

(10) Codrington, Journ. Anthrop. Inst., February, 1881.

Without delaying longer among savage myths of metamorphosis into stones, it may be briefly shown that the Greeks retained this with all the other vagaries of early fancy. Every one remembers the use which Perseus made of the Gorgon's head, and the stones on the coast of Seriphus, which, like the stones near Western Point in Victoria, had once been men, the enemies of the hero. ”Also he slew the Gorgon,” sings Pindar, ”and bare home her head, with serpent tresses decked, to the island folk a stony death.” Observe Pindar's explanatory remark: ”I ween there is no marvel impossible if G.o.ds have wrought thereto”. In the same pious spirit a Turk in an isle of the Levant once told Mr. Newton a story of how a man hunted a stag, and the stag spoke to him. ”The stag spoke?” said Mr.

Newton. ”Yes, by Allah's will,” replied the Turk. Like Pindar, he was repeating an incident quite natural to the minds of Australians, or Bushmen, or Samoans, or Red Men, but, like the religious Pindar, he felt that the affair was rather marvellous, and accounted for it by the exercise of omnipotent power.(1) The Greek example of Niobe and her children may best be quoted in Mr. Bridges' translation from the Iliad:--

And somewhere now, among lone mountain rocks On Sipylus, where couch the nymphs at night Who dance all day by Achelous' stream, The once proud mother lies, herself a rook, And in cold breast broods o'er the G.o.ddess' wrong.

--Prometheus the fire-bringer.(2)

In the Iliad it is added that Cronion made the people into stones. The att.i.tude of the later Greek mind towards these myths may be observed in a fragment of Philemon, the comic poet. ”Never, by the G.o.ds, have I believed, nor will believe, that Niobe the stone was once a woman. Nay, by reason of her calamities she became speechless, and so, from her silence, was called a stone.”(3)

(1) Pindar, Pyth. x., Myers's translation.

(2) xxiv. 611.

(3) The Scholiast on Iliad, xxiv. 6, 7.

There is another famous petrification in the Iliad. When the prodigy of the snake and the sparrows had appeared to the a.s.sembled Achaeans at Aulis, Zeus displayed a great marvel, and changed into a stone the serpent which swallowed the young of the sparrow. Changes into stone, though less common than changes into fishes, birds and beasts, were thus obviously not too strange for the credulity of Greek mythology, which could also believe that a stone became the mother of Agdestis by Zeus.

<script>