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Trigonometrical Effect of the Great Pyramid.

CHAPTER THE TWELFTH.

DRUIDICAL STONES AND THEIR WORSHIP.

HE monolith, talisman, mysterious pillar, or stone memorial, raised in attestation of the fire-tradition, and occupying the principal square or place, Forum, or middlemost or navel-point of the city in ancient times, is the original of our British market-crosses. The cromlech, or bilithon, or trilithon; the single, double, or grouped stones found in remote places,—in Cornwall, in Wales, in various counties of England, in by-spots in Scotland, in the Scottish Isles, in the Isle of Man, and in Ireland,*—all these stones of memorial—older than history -speak the secret faith of the ancient peoples. Stonehenge, with its inner and outer circles of stones, enclosing the central mythic object, or altar; all the Druidic or Celtic remains; stones on the tops of mountains, altar-tables in the valley; the centre measuring, or obelisk, stones, in market-places or centre-spaces in great towns, from which the highways radiated, spaced—in mileage-to distance; that time-honoured relic, "London Stone," still extant in Cannon Street, London; the Scottish "sacred stone," with its famous oracular gifts, vulgarly called Jacob's Pillow,

* Also in Brittany, in various parts of France and Spain; nay, throughout Europe, and occurring to recognition, in fact, in all parts of the world-old and new.

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transported to England by the dominant Edward the First, and preserved in the seat of the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey; even the placing of upright stones as tombstones, which is generally accepted as a mere means of personal record,-for, be it remembered, the ancients placed tablets against their walls by way of funeral register; -all follow the same rule. We consider all these as variations of the upright commemorative pillar.

The province of Brittany, in France, is thickly studded with stone pillars, and the history and manners of its people teem with interesting, and very curious, traces of the worship of them. In these parts, and elsewhere, they are distinguished by the name of Menhirs and Penlvans. The superstitious veneration of the Irish people for such stones is well known. M. de Fréminville says in his Antiquités du Finisterre, p. 106: "The Celts worshipped a divinity which united the attributes of Cybele and Venus." This worship prevailed also in Spain, as, doubtless, throughout Europe,―inasmuch as we find the Eleventh and Twelfth Councils of Toledo warning those who offered worship to stones that they were sacrificing to devils.

We are taught that the Druidical institution of Britain was Pythagorean, or patriarchal, or Brahminical. The presumed universal knowledge which this order possessed, and the singular customs which they practised, have afforded sufficient analogies and affinities to maintain the occult and remote origin of Druidism. A Welsh antiquary insists that the Druidical system of the Metempsychosis was conveyed to the Brahmins of India by a former emigration from Wales. But the reverse may have occurred, if we trust the elaborate researches which would demonstrate that the Druids were a scion of the Oriental family. The reader is referred to Toland's History of the Druids, in his Miscellaneous Works, vol. ii. p. 163; also to a book published in London in 1829, with the title, The Celtic Druids; or, An Attempt to show that the Druids were the Priests of Oriental Colonies, who emigrated from India,-by Godfrey Higgins. A recent writer confidently intimated that the knowledge

of Druidism must be searched for in the Talmudical writings; but another, in return, asserts that the Druids were older than the Jews.

Whence and when the British Druids transplanted themselves to this lone world amid the ocean, no historian can write. We can judge of the Druids simply by the sublime monuments which are left of them, surviving, in their majestic loneliness, through the ages of civilisation. Unhewn masses or heaps of stones tell alone their story; such are their cairns, and cromlechs, and corneddes, and that wild architecture, whose stones hang on one another, still frowning on the plains of Salisbury.

Among the most remarkable ancient remains in Wales (both North and South) are the Druidical stones: poised in the most extraordinary manner, a real engineering problem, the slightest touch will sometimes suffice to set in motion the Logan, or rocking, stones, whether these balanced masses are found in Wales or elsewhere. We think that there is very considerable ground for concluding that all these mounted stones were oracular, or, so to express it, speaking; and that, when sought for divine responses, they were caused first to tremble, then to heave, and finally, like the tables of the modern (so-called) Spiritualists, to tip intelligibly. To no other reason than this could we satisfactorily refer the name under which they are known in Wales: namely, "bowing-stones." For the idea that they were denominated "bowing-stones" because to the people they formed objects of adoration is a supposition infinitely less satisfactory. The reader will perceive that we admit the phenomenon, when the mysterious rapport is effected, of the spontaneous sensitiveness and ultimate sympathetic motion of solid objects. No one who has witnessed the strange, unexplained power which tables, after proper preparation, acquire of supplying intelligent signals,-impossible as it may seem to those who have not witnessed and tested these phenomena, but will see that there is great likelihood of these magic stones having been reared and haunted by the people for this special sensitive capacity. This idea

KING ARTHUR'S "ROUND TABLE.”

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would greatly increase the majesty and the wonder of them; in other respects, except for some extraordinary and superstitious use, these mysterious, solitary stones appear objectless.

The famous" Round Table" of King Arthur—in regard to which that mystic hero is understood to have instituted an order of knighthood*-may have been a magical consulting-disc, round which he and his peers sat for oracular directions. As it is of large dimensions, it presents a similarity not only to some of the prophesying-stones, but also, in a greater degree, to the movable enchanted drums of the Lapps and Finns, and to the divining-tables of the Shamans of Siberia. There lies an unsuspected purpose, doubtless of a mysterious (very probably of a superstitious and supernatural) character, in this exceedingly ancient memorial of the mythic British and heroic time at Winchester.

When spires or steeples were placed on churches, and succeeded the pyramidal tower, or square or round tower, these pointed erections were only the perpetuations of the original monolith. The universal signal was reproduced through the phases of architecture. The supposition that the object of the steeple was to point out the church to the surrounding country explains but half its meaning. At one period of our history, the signal-lights abounded all over the country as numerously as church-spires do in the present days. Exalted on eminences, dotting hills, spiring on cliffs, perched on promontories,—from sea inland, and from the interior of the country to broad river-side and to the seashore, rising from woods, a universal telegraph, and a picturesque landmark,-the tower, in its meaning, spoke the identical, unconscious tradition with the blazing Baal, Bael, or Beltane Fires: those universal votive torches, which are lost sight of in the mists of antiquity, and which were so continual in the Pagan countries, so reiterated through the early ages, and which still remain so frequent in the feudal and monastic periods,-these were all connected

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* It was also something else to which we make reference in other parts of our book.

closely with religion. The stone tower was only, as it were, a "stationary flame." The origin of beacons may be traced to the highest antiquity. According to the original Hebrew (which language, as the Samaritan, is considered by competent judges as the very oldest), the word "beacon" may be rendered a mark, monolith, pillar, or upright. At one time the ancient Bale, Bel, or religious fires of Ireland were general all over the country. They have been clearly traced to a devotional origin, and are strictly of the same character as the magic, or Magian, fires of the East. During the political discontents of 1831 and 1832, the custom of lighting these signal-fires was very generally revived amidst the party-distractions in Ireland. In the ancient language of this country, the month of May is yet called "nic Beal tienne," or the month of Beal (Bel or Baal's) fire. The Beltane festival in the Highlands has been ascribed to a similar origin. Druidical altars are still to be traced on many of the hills in Ireland, where Baal (Bel or Beal) fires were lighted. Through the countries, in the present day, which formed the ancient Scandinavia, and in Germany, particularly in the North, on the first of May, as in celebration of some universal feast or festival, fires are even now lighted on the tops of the hills. How closely this practice accords with the superstitious usages of the Bohemians, or "Fire-kings," of Prague, is discoverable at a glance. All these western flames are representative of the early fire, which was as equally the object of worship of the Gubhs, Guebres, or Gaurs of Persia, as it is the admitted natural principle of the Parsees. Parsees, Bohemians, the Gipsies or Zingari, and the Guebres, all unite in a common legendary fire-worship.

Beside the ancient market-crosses and wayside Gothic uprights, of which so many picturesque specimens are yet to be found in England, Wales, and Scotland, we may enumerate the splendid funeral-crosses raised by the brave and pious King Edward to the memory of his wife. Holinshed writes: "In the nineteenth yeare of King Edward, quéene Elianor, King Edward's wife, died, upon saint

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