In Africa, stock-and-stone worship is found among the Damaras of the South, whose ancestors are represented at the sacrificial feasts by stakes cut from trees or bushes consecrated to them, to which stakes the meat is first offered;[1] among the Dinkas of the White Nile, where the missionaries saw an old woman in her hut offering the first of her food and drink before a short thick staff planted in the ground, that the demon might not hurt her;[2] among the Gallas of Abyssinia, a people with a well-marked doctrine of deities, and who are known to worship stones and logs, but not idols.[3] In the island of Sambawa, the Orang Dongo attribute all supernatural or incomprehensible force to the sun, moon, trees, &c.,but especially to stones, and when troubled by accident or disease, they carry offerings to certain stones to implore the favour of their genius or dewa.[4] Similar ideas are to be traced through the Pacific islands, both among the lighter and the darker races. Thus in the Society Islands, rude logs or fragments of basalt columns, clothed in native cloth and anointed with oil, received adoration and sacrifice as divinely powerful by virtue of the atua or deity which had filled them.[5] So in the New Hebrides worship was given to water-worn pebbles,[6] while Fijian gods and goddesses had their abodes or shrines in black stones like smooth round milestones, and there received their offerings of food.[7] The curiously anthropomorphic idea of stones being husbands and wives, and even having children, is familiar to the Fijians as it is to the Peruvians and the Lapps.
The Turanian tribes of North Asia display stock-and-stone worship in full sense and vigour. Not only were
- ↑ Hahn, 'Gramm. des Hereró,' s.v. 'omu-makisina.'
- ↑ Kaufmann, 'Central-Afrika,' (White Nile), p. 131.
- ↑ Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 518, 523.
- ↑ Zollinger in 'Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. ii. p. 692.
- ↑ Ellis, 'Polyn. Res.' vol. i. p. 337. See also Ellis, 'Madagascar,' vol. i. 399.
- ↑ Turner, 'Polynesia,' pp. 347, 526.
- ↑ Williams, 'Fiji,' vol. i. p. 220; Seemann, 'Viti,' pp. 66, 89.
