The Circle in South African Myth. 183 



In a recent paper to the Philosophical Society, Mr. Peringuey 

 establishes that the holed stones were certainly used in some instances 

 as make-weights for the kibis, but the fact remains that the Bushmen 

 to-dav find it easier to dig without the Tikoe, though these are to 

 be found ready to hand almost everywhere. 



Holed stones occur over the whole globe. They are especially 

 common in India, where every village has a familiar one, to which 

 people repair when they wish to transact some serious business or 

 to swear an oath ; placing their fingers in the hole, they bind them- 

 selves with an inviolable bond. Mr. Rivett Carnac calls attention 

 to the whole discs and polished balls found at Hirsarlik, which are 

 preciselv similar to those found amid ancient Indian remains in the 

 Falegarh district of upper Bengal.* The work Tikoe means the 

 Strong Hand, and no one who knows of the significance of the hand 

 in the ritualism of primitive people would ever construe the meaning 

 of the phrase to be the literal one of muscular power. The Strong 

 Hand means the Hand of Testimony, and we find the hand depicted 

 in the act of testifying on sculptures from every land. Bryant, in 

 an old book on Mythology, states that holed stones were found 

 throughout Assyria, and he gives the name for them as Titaia, which 

 many authors connect with Titan, the Sun God, the circle being the 

 symbol for the sun. But n-d/i/o; in Greek means to " draw one's 

 bow," and the Assyrian sun image is shown as an archer with drawn 

 bow emerging from a winged circle. In the illustration of the 

 Assyrian Sun God it will be noticed that the leather kilt of the 

 archer forms a tail to the winged circle, and one can find sculptures 

 in which there is only the circle without the man, or the man's head 

 becomes that of a bird, and we gradually lead up to the idea of 

 Venus' dove, whose symbol is the ring, or circle. 



In the Egyptian paintings we find the winged circle flying over 

 manv of the figures, and the explanation of this symbol is currently 

 given for the edification of the vulgar, as " the wings of incubation 

 hatching the orb of chaos." Sometimes two bulls are depicted 

 butting the orb of chaos to liberate the newly-hatched universe. 

 These, however, are deliberate sophisms meant to snislead, and the 

 true nature of the circle as a circle is shown by the attendant ursei, 

 or asps, in the Sun of Thebes. Wherever a circle is a sacred circle, 

 it is marked by having a serpent connected with it in some way ; 

 thus, if the priests see something holy in the curvature of a bull's 

 horns, thev show that the curvature is that of the sacred circle by 

 depicting a small serpent rising from the bull's forehead. 



On one of the Egyptian monuments there is a picture of the 

 hawk god very like the soap-stone birds from the Zimbabwe ruins,, 

 surmounted by the sacred circle, and opposite sits a lady with the 

 so-called feather in her cap, the circle and feather in reality standing 

 in the same relation as the holed stone and gnomon in the men-an-tol, 

 and here also we have a second gnomon which both are worshipping. 



* Journal Asiatic Soc, Bengal, XLIX., I., p. 127. 



