APRIL — sept. 1858.] Notes Antiquarian and Mythical 57 



ed by Pausanius to be placed in the temple at Delphi, and anoint- 

 ed daily with oil, seems very like a lingam. The practice of 

 anointing stones with oil dates from the days of the patriarchs, 

 and is no doubt the cause why in most instances sacred stones are 

 described as black. Porphyry informs us that the Deity was 

 represented as a black stone as being of obscure and inscrutable 

 nature. The ancient Arabians, says Maximus Tyrius in the above 

 cited Essay, " Worship I know not whom, but the image I saw 

 was a quadrangular stone," from Suidas we further learn it was 

 black, and is evidently the same meteoric stone now preserved in 

 the Caaba at Mecca.J The chief idol of the Germanic tribes, the 

 Hermansaul, appears to have been at first a tall black stone. In 

 Gladwin's Clyeen Akbari is mentioned a pillar of black stone, 

 octagonal, and 50 cubits high before the gate of the Temple of the 

 Sun at Jaganath. A good Mussulman must needs be a bad 

 mythologist, but it is hard to conjecture what could have led the 

 Emperor to see a sun-temple at Jaganath. Hindu fanes do not 

 readily change, and nothing of the sort can be gathered from an 

 account of Puri and J aganath published some years ago in English 

 by an intelligent native. Were it so, there would be a remarkable 

 coincidence between this and the Phoenician sun-pillar the Elaia- 

 gabalom. Captain Hamilton, apparently referring to the same 

 object, describes an idol at Jaganath as a huge black pyramidal 

 stone, (it must exist there now, qu. how is it regarded ?) Similar 

 was the Siamese Sommonocodom. In Masson's Travels the idol 

 of the mysterious Sia-posh of Central Asia is affirmed to be " an 

 erect image of black or dark coloured stone the size of a man." 

 The aboriginal tribes of Rajmahal worship a black stone in an 

 enclosure. 



The foregoing instances give evidence of the wide diffusion in 

 ancient as well as in recent times of a black stone worship in 

 which the symbol, nearly always of a peculiar shape, appears to 

 have been, more or less openly, an emblem of reproduction. In 

 some cases the signification may have become obscured, but that 



X Hardly less remarkable have been the fortunes of another black stone, that 

 on which the King of Ireland was crowned, called the Stone of Destiny ; if the 

 coronation was auspicious it emitted a clear sound. This palladium or national 

 talisman, was afterwards brought to Scone, and thence carried to Westminster, 

 and placed under the old coronation chair, where it still remains. 



