back to immemorial antiquity is a passage of Pliny, which in Holland's translation (p. 627) is given as under:—
"The pretious stone called Hammons-horne, is reckoned among the most sacred gemms of Aethiopia: of a gold colour it is, and sheweth the forme of a rams home: the magicians promise, that by the vertue of this stone, there will appeare dreames in the night which represent things to come."[1]
Upon this passage Professor W. M. Flinders Petrie comments to me, in a letter of June 24th, 1911, that the reference in Pliny "evidently refers to pyrites casts of ammonites which are found from Lias up to Chalk." Professor Petrie adds that he does not know of such late strata in Ethiopia, and that he has never found an ammonite in any Egyptian tomb or ruin. But he informs me that there is a coiled serpent amulet with head and tail, which is sometimes found in the prehistoric age in Egypt. This, he says "might be deduced from an ammonite, just as people in Wiltshire [and, as we have already seen, in other parts of England for centuries past] used to carve heads on the great ammonites and call them serpent stones."
It remains to add some particulars of a most remarkable parallel to Pliny in the snakestone belief of India. For it has been conclusively shown that the Salagrama, a celebrated mystic emblem of Brahman ritual in north-west India, which is considered to be the embodiment of Vishnu, is in reality a specimen of black ammonite. After describing how the tulasi or "Holy Basil," which is considered (inter alia) to be an embodiment of Krishna's wife Rukmini, is annually married in November to the god Krishna in every Hindu family, Mr. Frazer proceeds:[2]—
- ↑ Pliny, Natural History, xxxvii., cap. 60. Mr. A. B. Cook writes to me that, according to Eratosthenes, quoted by Strabo (1. i, cap. 3, s. 4), the precinct of Zeus Ammon (the oasis of Siwah), which is a deep depression, is strewn with shells and a salt deposit. He infers that this oracle became famous while still a coast-town on the arm of a vanished sea. The shells, Mr. Cook thinks, are asterites.
- ↑ Frazer, Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, pp. 157-8.
