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Snake Stones.
numerable snakes meeting together in a kind of congress which was supposed to take place on Midsummer Eve or May Eve.[1] From the general hissing at this meeting of snakes, amicably interlocked, or, in a Welsh version, engaged in a desperate struggle,[2] a kind of bubble of frothy slime was formed which hardened into stone.[3]
The objects which passed for snake stones of this kind seem for the most part to have been fossil sea-urchins, pieces of coral or most frequently of all the glass beads found in barrows of an earlier age.[4] These latter, it may be noticed, were often doubly snake stones, for the lines with which they are sometimes marked suggested a snake imprisoned in the stone.[5] Similarly, in
- ↑ Some authorities less definitely say spring or summer. Pliny's Druids put the congress of snakes in summer and at a particular phase of the moon.
- ↑ Trevelyan, loc. cit.
- ↑ Pliny reports that the stone was projected into the air by the hissing. It had to be caught in a cloak before touching the ground, and the fortunate captor fled on horseback pursued by the snakes until he crossed running water.
- ↑ Pliny's example seems to be an echinus. Fossil sea urchins are sometimes called "cock knee stones" and used for magical purposes in Scotland (Dalyell, op. cit. p. 141). For echinites as "thunderstones" see Blinkenberg, The Thunder Weapon in Religion and Folklore, pp. 74, 77-83, 95. Pliny's adder-egg may have resembled the early Danish amulet figured by Blinkerberg, op. cit. p. 85. An eye-witness described a milpreve as a piece of coral the size of a pigeon's egg (Hunt, op. cit. p. 220). A Welsh specimen is described as "a perfectly round and highly polished pebble, a soft pink shade blended with lilac. The tints resemble those of an opal; it is very cold to the touch, especially if placed against the eyes, lips or temples." Sometimes these stones are of a pale terra-cotta, sometimes light green and often of a soft azure blue (Trevelyan, op. cit. p. 171).
- ↑ "They are small glass amulets, commonly about half as wide as our finger rings but much thicker, usually of a green colour, though some are blue and others curiously waved with blue, red and white " (Brand, op. cit. iii. p. 370, quoting Gough's Camden (1789), ii. p. 571). Carew in the seventeenth century says that "snakes by breathing upon a hazel wand doe make a stone ring of blue colour in which there appeareth the yellow figure of a snake" (Survey of Cornwall, quoted Hunt, op. cit. p. 221). Cf. the blood red streak in the Cherokee snake-stone mentioned above.
