Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/44

 34 T^^^ Lege7ids of Krishna.

a black milestone, and in Bengal, Ward informs us, all stone images are of black marble, and the same type is particularly common in Bombay.^ We may add the Sala- grama, or black ammonite, which represents Vishnu, and in Guatemala the famous oracular stone of Patinamit is black.2

We may suspect that many of these sacred black stones may have been originally meteorites.^ It is not difficult to understand why the sudden fall of a stone from the sky, the fall being often accompanied by terrifying sounds, or the train of fire flung behind it by a " falling star," should cause extreme terror to the beholders, and excite awe and reverence. We find in many places traditions of what the Greek called a Diopetes Agalma, which our authorised ver- sion of the Acts of the Apostles calls " the image which fell down from Jupiter."^ This was the famous image of Diana of Ephesus, of which we know little, save that it was black. Some say that it was a stone, others that it was made of ebony or vine wood, and had never been changed though the temple had been seven times rebuilt.^ Other Greek images were said to have fallen from heaven, like the Athena of the Akropolis, the Artemis of Taurus, the Sicilian Demeter, the Aphrodite of Paphos, and the Cybele of Pessinus. In the same way Elegabalus in Sun-form was worshipped at Emesa in the shape of a black conical stone,

' Williams, Fiji, i., 221 ; Ward, Hindoos, ii., 233 ; Asiatic Researches, v., 240 note ; iv., 46, 48 ; xi., 535 ; Atkinson, Himalayan Gazetteer, iii., 24 ; Bombay Gazetteer, xvi., 517; xix., 450, 486, 530, 546, 582, 611 ; xx., 438, 442, 448, 450, 452, 455, 459, 465,467 ; xxi., 521 ; xxii., 714, 807 ; xxiii., 550, 552, 679 ; xxiv., 300, 377 ; Journal of tha Asiatic Society, Bengal, xxxiii., 209.

- Bancroft, loc. cit., iv. 123.

^ On this see the paper by Professor H. A. Miers, F.R.S., read at the 1898 meeting of the British Association, from which I have taken several of the following instances.

^ Acts, xix., 35.

' Pliny, Nat. Hist., xvi., 79; Farrar, St. Paul, 35S ; Encyclopccdia Biblica, i., 1099.