Stone Cults and Venerated Stones in the Graeco-Turkish Area

Abstract

The veneration of stones seems to have been world-wide at an early stage in religious development, and has left traces everywhere in the magical and ‘folklore’ practices of civilized peoples. Over the Semitic area stone worship, as such, survived later and more generally than among peoples more prone to anthropomorphism; and Islam, so far from being able to displace it, tacitly sanctioned it by allowing the reverence paid already by pagan Arabs to the Black Stone of the Kaaba to be perpetuated on the rather far-fetched hypothesis that the angel Gabriel had brought it to, Mecca.Christianity, somewhat in the same way, has permitted or encouraged the paying of reverence to stones associated by tradition with saintly personages, the Stone of Unction at Jerusalem being a typical example. In both the great religions of the Near East the arbitrary association of certain stones with sacred persons and events has been allowed to replace or mask the more primitive idea of worshipping stones as fetishes with independent power.