altar, on the other hand, is the creation and the outcome of the needs of totemism.1 Further, as long as it remains an altar pure and simple, it never becomes the embodiment of the god, nor, though highly sacred, does it acquire supernatural power. As long as totemism was a living force, it would be difficult or impossible to confuse the sacrificial pile, at which the deity manifested himself, with the god himself, or even to imagine that he was permanently present in the altar, for the totem animals were seen by the savage daily, and it was with their species that his clan made the bloodcovenant, and in each and every member of the species that the god dwelt. Mr. Williams has accurately observed and precisely stated the totemist's attitude towards his sacrificial piles, when, after noting that "idolatry-in the strict sense of the term-the Fijian seems never to have known; for he makes no attempt to fashion material representations of his gods," ,"2 he goes on to say, "stones are used to denote the locality of some gods and the occasional resting-places of others." The same observation has been made with regard to savages generally by Mr. Howard: "My personal inquiries amongst almost every variety of heathen worshippers, including the most degraded types in India, in China, and also the devil-worshippers in Ceylon, have never yet secured from any of them the admission which would justify me in thinking that the red-bedaubed stone or tree, or any image in front of which they worshipped, was supposed to contain in esse the god to which that worship was addressed." 4

In the course of time, however, three changes do undoubtedly take place: the rite of sacrifice tends to become formal; the god comes to be conceived as the ancestor of the race; the clan expands into a tribe, of which the majority of members dwell remote from the original monolithic altar. Consequently, when, at stated intervals, the tribe does gather together at the old altar-stone of their forefathers to do sacrifice, the stone itself, in which the god is to manifest himself, easily becomes identified with the god—the majority of the tribe know it only in this aspect and with the god as their common ancestor. Thus amongst the Red Indians,

1 Supra, p. 131.

3 Ibid. 221.

2 Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, 216. Howard, Trans-Siberian Savages, 202.

totemists, the place of national worship for the Oneidas was the famous Oneida stone from which they claim descent. The Dacotahs also claimed descent from a stone, and offered sacrifices to it, calling it grandfather. "They thought the spirit of their ancestor was present in this stone, which is their altar for national sacrifices. The Ojibways had such stones, which they called grandfather." That, in such circumstances, a rough likeness to the human face should be given to the monolith or pole, and the transition from the altar to the idol made, is easily comprehensible. But this did not always take place: the idol of Astarte at Paphos was never anthropomorphised, but remained a mere conical stone to the last; and countless other monolithic altars, which never attained to such dignity as to have a temple erected behind them, have survived all over the world. It is the fortunes of these unhewn stones-the posts and the cairns would soon perish and be forgotten when not renewed -that we have now to follow.

It seems to be a law that a people must either advance in religion or recede. The choice is always before it; and evolution-which is not the same thing as progress takes place, whichever course be chosen. Where no higher form of religion was evolved out of totemism, therefore, retrogression took place; and it is this retrogression, so far as it is exhibited in the fate of the monolithic altar, which now will be traced. The beginning of the process has been indicated in the last paragraph in the case of the Oneidas and other Red Indians: in the identification of the god with the father of the race was implicit the idea of the divine. fatherhood of man; but this germ, which in the Old World bore its fruit, thanks to certain select minds who dwelt upon what was thus disclosed to them, amongst the Indians mentioned was sterilised by the further identification of the god with the monolith. This was in part, as we said in the last paragraph, directly due to the expansion of the community; the framework of totemism is a narrow circle of blood-relations, and when that circle expands the framework cracks, and the disintegration of the system begins.

When the stone has in this way become, not the 1 Dorman, Primitive Superstitions, 133.

occasional, but the permanent dwelling-place of the god, the rite of sacrifice is in danger of becoming a meaningless and superfluous ceremony, for its object is to procure the presence of the god, and the god now is already present, or rather the stone is the god. Hence the rite dwindles until the only trace left of it is that the stone is painted red, as amongst the Waralis of Konkan. By this time the totem-alliance is so completely dissolved that the totem animal, which has hitherto been required to provide the blood for smearing the stone, now is completely dissociated from the worship, and drops altogether out of view. But when the totem animal is no longer sacrificed, when the stone has itself become the god, and its history has been forgotten, there is little left by which to distinguish it from the other class of stones, notable natural features of the landscape, to which supernatural powers were ascribed in the pre-totemistic period. There are, however, still some distinguishing marks. The natural stones still are what all supernatural powers were until man learnt to make allies amongst them, hostile; but the quondam altar stones are still, traditionally, friendly powers, who will, like the stone of the Monitarris, if a sacrifice is offered, cause an expedition to be successful, and not merely abstain from doing injury. The friendly relation of the primitive altar or rather god to its original circle of worshippers is clear in a case such as that mentioned by Caillié, of a stone which travelled of its own accord thrice round an African village whenever danger threatened the inhabitants. And the rock in Fougna, near Gouam, in the Marian Islands, which is regarded as the ancestor of men, ranks itself at once with the Oneida stone. In many cases, however, the quondam altar has lost even these traces of its once higher estate; natural stones have attracted to themselves, or have come to share in, the few remnants of the full rite of worship once accorded to the artificial structure; and all distinction between the two classes is obliterated. Thus the retrograde totemist

1 Bastian, Oest. Asien, v. 139.

2 This and the other examples of stone-worship in this chapter are taken, unless other references are given, from Girard de Rialle, Mythologie Comparée, 12-32, who, however, draws no distinctions between the various kinds of stone-worship.

apparently relapses into precisely the same stage as that which his pre-totemist forefather occupied. But as this is a matter which raises the important question, how far we can take the savage to represent " primitive" man, it is necessary to note that the post-totemistic stage, though in much it resembles the pre-totemistic, also differs much from it. In both stages, any and every rock that impresses the imagination of the savage may by him be credited with life and even with supernatural powers; he simply returns in the later period to the animism of the earlier, or rather he has never abandoned it. But he returns to it with an idea which was wholly unknown to him in the first period, namely, the conception of "worship," the idea, not merely of sacrifice, but of offering sacrifice "to" someone. Now, this conception, or rather these conceptions, as should be by this time clear, have their origin in totemism: "worship," as an act in its rudimentary stage, means only the sprinkling of blood upon the altar; the blood sprinkled is that of the totem animal, and the only object of the rite is to renew the blood-covenant between the totem clan and the totem species and to procure the presence of the totem god. The idea of offering a sacrifice "to" a god is a notion which can only be developed in a later stage of totemism, when, on the one hand, the monolith has come to be identified with the god, and, on the other, the god is no longer in the animal. Above all, 'worship," on its inner side and in the ideas and emotions correlated with the rite and the external act, implies the existence, for the worshipper, of a god, i.e. not merely of a supernatural being as such, but of a supernatural being who has "stated relations with a community." 1 The ex-totemist, therefore, who retains nothing of his forefathers' beliefs and rites but the idea that it is possible to appease a supernatural being by offering sacrifices "to" him, may gravely mislead the historian of "primitive" religion. Indeed, he has led some students to imagine that his inherited habit of offering sacrifices to stones and rocks is a primitive practice out of which religion has sprung, while the truth is that the worship of stones is a degradation of a higher form of worship. The mere existence of sacrifice is an indication of the former 1 Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 119.

existence of totemism. The very idea of a temporary compact between an individual man and a supernatural power is derived from the original form of alliance, which was always and necessarily between clans, not between individuals.

A more varied and interesting chapter in the history of the monolithic altar is that of its fortunes when a higher form of religion invades the land. If the cult of any given altar and the local sanctuary in which it stands is too vigorous to be extinguished, it may be adopted by the invading and dominant race, and incorporated into their religion. This amalgamation of cults bears the technical name of "syncretism." Thus, in the New World, the Incas, when they invaded Peru, bringing with them their worship of the Sun, built temples of the Sun in some of the local sanctuaries; and, in the Old World, the totem animals whose blood from of old had been dashed on the primitive monolith, continued to be offered at the same altar even when it had been appropriated to the service of the Sun-god or Sky-spirit, Zeus or Apollo. If, on the other hand, the local cult had already decayed, if sacrifice was rarely offered, and the monolith was but the object of traditional veneration, then the respect or the sanctity attaching to it came in course of time to require explanation, and an explanation spontaneously sprang up which commended itself to the now dominant beliefs and traditions of the new religion. Thus, in Mexico, the sanctity of the monolith of Tlalnepautla was accounted for by the belief that the great culture-god Quetzalcoatl had left on it the imprint of his hand; and, in the Old World, “monolithic pillars or cairns of stone are frequently mentioned in the more ancient parts of the Old Testament as standing at sanctuaries, generally in connection with a sacred legend about the occasion on which they were set up by some famous patriarch or hero." 1 But matters did not always progress so peaceably. Frequently, both in its own interests, and, we may add, to the ultimate benefit of mankind, the higher religion found it necessary to undertake the suppression of the older cults. Thus Inca Roca threw down the monolith worshipped by the inhabitants of a certain village; the Councils of Tours (567) and Nantes (895) ordered the 1 Robertson Smith, op. cit. 203.