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Rh altars, are not of the nature of fetishes, and it is first necessary to ascertain that worship is actually addressed to them. Then arises the difficult question, are the stocks and stones set up as mere ideal representatives of deities, or are these deities considered as physically connected with them, embodied in them, hovering about them, acting through them? In other words, are they only symbols, or have they passed in the minds of their votaries into real fetishes? The conceptions of the worshippers are sometimes in this respect explicitly stated, may sometimes be fairly inferred from the circumstances, and are often doubtful.

Among the lower races of America, the Dacotas would pick up a round boulder, paint it, and then, addressing it as grandfather, make offerings to it and pray to it to deliver them from danger; in the West India Islands, mention is made of three stones to which the natives paid great devotion — one was profitable for the crops, another for women to be delivered without pain, the third for sunshine and rain when they were wanted; and we hear of Brazilian tribes setting up stakes in the ground, and making offerings before them to appease their deities or demons. Stone-worship held an important place in the midst of the comparatively high culture of Peru, where not only was reverence given to especial curious pebbles and the like, but stones were placed to represent the penates of households and the patron-deities of villages. It is related by Montesinos that when the worship of a certain sacred stone was given up, a parrot flew from it into another stone, to which adoration was paid: and though this author is not of good credit, he can hardly have invented a story which, as we shall see, so curiously coincides with the Polynesian idea of a bird conveying to and from an idol the spirit which embodies itself in it.