The best known of these stones is perhaps that which was believed to be--not to belong to, but actually to be--the Mother of the Gods. Livy (xxix. II) tells of the embassy sent from Rome to Attalus to fetch the Great Mother; and how the king took the legates to Pessinûs in Phrygia and handed over to them the sacred stone which the natives affirmed to be the Mother of the Gods. Arnobius describes its appearance: ‘a stone not large, which could be carried in a man’s hand without noticeable weight, in colour black and _furvus_, in shape more or less round with projecting corners, which is now to be seen in the mouth of the image of the Great Mother.’ Superstitious Rome was ready to accept and to worship the Mother in the form of a stone; but common-sense Rome did at least demand that the Great Mother should have a decently anthropomorphic image, and the stone was then placed in the image’s mouth.
So far, then, we are clear. But there remain some difficult questions. Why was the stone in Hesiod wrapped in swaddling clothes? I do not understand this. But the ritual practice is well attested. Pausanias tells how this Kronos stone was anointed and wrapped in wool.[59] A coin in Macdonald’s Hunter Catalogue (ii. 68. 145) represents the Great Mother stone covered with a goat-skin. This may be merely because of the _hagos_ or taboo, just as the omphalos on vases is commonly covered with an ἄγρηνον and Semitic betyls are wrapped in cloths. The actual body of a god would be dangerous to touch; but it looks as if there was some special connexion between stones and infants. The Orphic poem called Lithica is, of course, full of magic stones, which might be cited here. But take one in especial, the ‘Live Siderite’. This stone has to be prayed to, like a god; it has also to be washed daily for ten days and nursed and wrapped in clean robes, like a baby. At the end of that time it will reward its benefactor by uttering the scream of a young baby when hungry; then, the poet remarks, the great thing is not to drop it.[60]
In some Mexican dances, Preuss tells us, the souls of infants come through the air in the likeness of five stones. Among the Kaitish and the Arunta there are stones inhabited by infant souls, which are induced in one way or another to come out of the stones and be born. And we all remember the stones flung by Deucalion and Pyrrha, and the race of man which is--or is not--sprung ἀπὸ δρυὸς ἡδ’ ἁπὸ πέτρης.[61]