Lang Andrew
The Clyde Mystery
XXII – SURVIVAL OF MAGIC OF STONES
If “incongruous with the earlier Scottish civilisation” the use of “charm stones” is not incongruous with the British civilisation of the nineteenth century.
In the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries (Scot.) (1902-1903, p. 166 et seq.) Mr. Graham Callander, already cited, devotes a very careful essay to such perforated stones, circular or triangular, or otherwise shaped, found in the Garioch. They are of slate, or “heather stone,” and of various shapes and sizes. Their original purpose is unknown. The perforation, or cup not perforated, is sometimes in the centre, in a few cases in “near the end.” Mr. Graham Callander heard of a recent old lady in Roxburghshire, who kept one of these stones, of irregularly circular shape, behind the door for luck. 91 “It was always spoken of as a charm,” though its ancient maker may have intended it for some prosaic practical use.
I take the next example that comes to hand.
“Thin flat oolite stones, having a natural perforation, are found in abundance on the Yorkshire coast. They are termed “witch stones,” and are tied to door keys, or suspended by a string behind the cottage door, “to keep witches out.” 92 “A thin flat perforated witch stone,” answers to an uninscribed Arunta churinga; “a magic thing,” and its use survives in Britain, as in Yorkshire and Roxburghshire. We know no limit to the persistence of survival of superstitious things, such as magic stones. This is the familiar lesson of Anthropology and of Folk Lore, and few will now deny the truth of the lesson.
XXIII – MODERN SURVIVAL OF MAGICAL WOOD CHURINGA
I take another example of modern survival in magic. Dr. Munro, perhaps, would think wooden churinga, used for magical ends, “incongruous with the earlier Scottish civilisation.” But such objects have not proved to be incongruous with the Scottish civilisation of the nineteenth century.
The term churinga, “sacred,” is used by the Arunta to denote not only the stone churinga nanja, a local peculiarity of the Arunta and Kaitish, but also the decorated and widely diffused elongated wooden slats called “Bull Roarers” by the English. These are swung at the end of a string, and produce a whirring roar, supposed to be the voice of a supernormal being, all over Australia and elsewhere.
I am speaking of survivals, and these wooden churinga, at least, survive in Scotland, and, in Aberdeenshire they are, or were lately called “thunner spells” or “thunder bolts.” “It was believed that the use of this instrument during a thunderstorm saved one from being struck by the thunner bolt.” In North and South America the bull roarer, on the other hand, is used, not to avert, but magically to produce thunder and lightning. 93 Among the Kaitish thunder is caused by the churinga of their “sky dweller,” Atnatu.
Wherever the toy is used for a superstitious purpose, it is, so far, churinga, and, so far, modern Aberdeenshire had the same churinga irula as the Arunta. The object was familiar to palaeolithic man.
XXIV – CONCLUSION OF ARGUMENT FROM SURVIVALS IN MAGIC
I have made it perfectly certain that magic stones, “witch stones,” “charm stones,” and that churinga irula, wooden magical slats of wood, exist in Australia and other savage regions, and survive, as magical, into modern British life. The point is beyond doubt, and it is beyond doubt that, in many regions, the stones, and the slats of wood, may be inscribed with archaic markings, or may be uninscribed. This will be proved more fully later. Thus Pictish, like modern British civilisation, may assuredly have been familiar with charm stones. There is no a priori objection as to the possibility.
Why should Pictish stones not be inscribed with archaic patterns familiar to the dwellers among inscribed rocks, perhaps themselves the inscribers of the rocks? Manifestly there is no a priori improbability. I have seen the archaic patterns of concentric circles and fish spines, (or whatever we call the medial line with slanting side lines,) neatly designed in white on the flag stones in front of cottage doors in Galloway. The cottagers dwelt near the rocks with similar patterns on the estate of Monreith, but are not likely to have copied them; the patterns, I presume, were mere survivals in tradition.
The Picts, or whoever they were, might assuredly use charm stones, and the only objection to the idea that they might engrave archaic patterns on them is the absence of record of similarly inscribed small stones in Britain. The custom of using magic stones was not at all incongruous with the early Pictish civilisation, which retained a form of the Family now long outworn by the civilisation of the Arunta. The sole objection is that a silentio, silence of archaeological records as to inscribed small stones. That is not a closer of discussion, nor is the silence absolute, as I shall show.
Moreover, the appearance of an unique and previously unheard-of set of inscribed stones, in a site of the usual broch and crannog period, is not invariably ascribed to forgery, even by the most orthodox archaeologists. Thus Sir Francis Terry found unheard-of things, not to mention “a number of thin flat circular discs of various sizes” in his Caithness brochs. In Wester broch “the most remarkable things found” were three egg-shaped quartzite pearls “having their surface painted with spots in a blackish or blackish-brown pigment.” He also found a flattish circular disc of sandstone, inscribed with a duck or other water-fowl, while on one side was an attempt, apparently, to write runes, on the other an inscription in unknown cursive characters. There was a boulder of sandstone with nine cup marks, and there were more painted pebbles, the ornaments now resembling ordinary cup marks, now taking the shape of a cross, and now of lines and other patterns, one of which, on an Arunta rock, is of unknown meaning, among many of known totemic significance.
Dr. Joseph Anderson compares these to “similar pebbles painted with a red pigment” which M. Piette found in the cavern of Mas d’Azil, of which the relics are, in part at least, palaeolithic, or “mesolithic,” and of dateless antiquity. In L’Anthropologie (Nov. 1894), Mr. Arthur Bernard Cook suggests that the pebbles of Mas d’Azil may correspond to the stone churinga nanja of the Arunta; a few of which appear to be painted, not incised. I argued, on the contrary, that things of similar appearance, at Mas d’Azil: in Central Australia: and in Caithness, need not have had the same meaning and purpose. 94
It is only certain that the pebbles of the Caithness brochs are as absolutely unfamiliar as the inscribed stones of Dumbuck. But nobody says that the Caithness painted pebbles are forgeries or modern fabrications. Sauce for the Clyde goose is not sauce for the Caithness gander. 95
The use of painted pebbles and of inscribed stones, may have been merely local.
In Australia the stone churinga are now, since 1904, known to be local, confined to the Arunta “nation,” and the Kaitish, with very few sporadic exceptions in adjacent tribes. 96
The purely local range of the inscribed stones in Central Australia, makes one more anxious for further local research in the Clyde district and south-west coast.
XXV – MY MISADVENTURE WITH THE CHARM STONE
As Dr. Munro introduces the subject, I may draw another example of the survival of charm stones, from an amusing misadventure of my own. I was once entrusted with a charm stone used in the nineteenth century for the healing of cattle in the Highlands. An acquaintance of mine, a Mac- by the mother’s side, inherited this heirloom with the curious box patched with wicker-work, which was its Ark. It was exactly of the shape of a “stone churinga of the Arunta tribe,” later reproduced by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen. 97 On the surfaces of the ends were faintly traced concentric rings, that well-known pattern. I wrote in the Glasgow Herald that, “if a Neolithic amulet, as it appears to be, it may supply the missing link in my argument,” as being not only a magic stone (which it certainly was), but a magic stone with archaic markings. 98 At the British Museum I presently learned the real nature of the object, to my rueful amusement. It had been the stone pivot of an old farm-gate, and, in turning on the upper and nether stones, had acquired the concentric circular marks. Not understanding what the thing was, the Highland maternal ancestors of my friend had for generations used it in the magical healing of cattle, a very pretty case of “survival.”
Writing on October 19th, I explained the facts in a letter to the Glasgow Herald. A pseudonymous person then averred, in the same journal, that I had “recently told its readers that I had found the missing link in the chain that was to bind together the magic stones of the Arunta and the discs, images, and ‘blue points’ of the Clyde crannog man.”
I never told any mortal that I had “found the missing link!” I said that “if” the stone be Neolithic, it “may” be the missing link in my argument. Dr. Munro prints the pseudonymous letter with approval, but does not correct the inaccurate statement of the writer. 99 Dr. Munro, I need not say, argues with as much candour as courtesy, and the omission of the necessary correction is an oversight.
However, here was a survival of the use of charm stones, and I think that, had the stone been uninscribed (as it was accidentally inscribed with concentric circles by turning in its stone sockets), my friend’s Highland ancestors might have been less apt to think it a fairy thing, and use it in cattle healing.
I trust that I have now established my parallelisms. The archaic patterns of countries now civilised and of savage countries are assuredly parallel. The use of charm stones in civilisation and savagery is assuredly parallel. The application to these stones of the archaic patterns, by a rude race in Clydesdale, familiar with the patterns on rocks in the district, has in it nothing a priori improbable.
XXVI – EUROPEAN PARALLELS TO THE DISPUTED OBJECTS
I am not so sure as Dr. Munro is that we have not found small perforated stones, sometimes inscribed with archaic patterns, sometimes plain, even in Scotland; I shall later mention other places. For the present I leave aside the small stone, inscribed with concentric horse-shoes, and found in a hill-fort near Tarbert (Kintyre), which a friend already spoken of saw, and of which he drew for me a sketch from memory. In country houses any intrinsically valueless object of this kind is apt to fall out of sight and be lost beyond recovery.
Sir John Evans, however, in his work on Ancient Stone Implements, p. 463 (1897), writes: “A pendant, consisting of a flat pear-shaped piece of shale, 2½ inches long, and 2 inches broad, and perforated at the narrow end, was found along with querns, stones with concentric circles, and cup-shaped indentations worked in them; stone balls, spindle whorls, and an iron axe-head, in excavating an underground chamber at the Tappock, Torwood, Stirlingshire. One face of this pendant was covered with scratches in a vandyked pattern. Though of smaller size this seems to bear some analogy with the flat amulets of schist of which several have been discovered in Portugal, with one face ornamented in much the same manner.”
For these examples Sir John Evans refers to the Transactions of the Ethnological Society. 100
If by “a vandyked pattern,” Sir John means, as I suppose, a pattern of triangles in horizontal lines (such as the Portuguese patterns on stone plaques), then the elements of this form of decoration appear to have been not unfamiliar to the designers of “cups and rings.” On the cover of a stone cist at Carnwath we see inscribed concentric rings, and two large equilateral triangles, each containing three contingent triangles, round a square space, uninscribed. 101 The photograph of the Tappock stone (figs. 9, 10), shows that the marks are not of a regular vandyked pattern, but are rather scribbles, like those on a Portuguese perforated stone, given by Vasconcellos, and on a Canadian stone pendant, published by Mr. David Boyle (figs. 12, 13).
Sir John Evans does not reject the pear-shaped object of shale, “a pendant,” found in a Scottish site, and associated with querns, and an iron axe, and cup and ring stones. Sir John sees no harm in the “pendant,” but Dr. Munro rejects a “pear-shaped” claystone “pendant” decorated with “cup-shaped indentations,” found at Dunbuie. 102 It has a perforation near each end, as is common in North American objects of similar nature (see fig. 11).
Why should the schist pendant of the Tappock chamber be all right, if the claystone pendant of Dunbuie be all wrong? One of them seems to me to have as good a claim to our respectful consideration as the other, and, like Sir John Evans, I shall now turn to Portugal in search of similar objects of undisputed authenticity.
XXVII – PORTUGUESE AND OTHER STONE PENDANTS
M. Cartailhac, the very eminent French archaeologist, found not in Portugal, but in the Cevennes, “plaques of slate, sometimes pierced with a hole for suspension, usually smaller than those of the Casa da Moura, not ornamented, yet certainly analogous with these.” 103 These are also analogous with “engraved plaques of schist found in prehistoric sites of the Rio Negro,” “some resembling, others identical with those shewn at Lisbon by Carlos Ribeiro.” But the Rio Negro objects appear doubtful. 104
Portugal has many such plaques, some adorned with designs, and some plain. 105 The late Don Estacio da Veiga devotes a chapter to them, as if they were things peculiar to Portugal, in Europe. 106 When they are decorated the ornament is usually linear; in two cases 107 lines incised lead to “cups.” One plaque is certainly meant to represent the human form. M. Cartailhac holds that all the plaques with a “vandyked” pattern in triangles, without faces, “are, none the less, des représentations stylisées de silhouette humaine.” 108
Illustrations give an idea of them (figs. 14, 15, 16); they are more elaborate than the perforated inscribed plaques of shale or schist from Dumbuck. Two perforated stone plaques from Volósova, figured by Dr. Munro (pp. 78, 79), fall into line with other inscribed plaques from Portugal. Of these Russian objects referred to by Dr. Munro, one is (his fig. 25) a roughly pear-shaped thing in flint, perforated at the thin end; the other is a formless stone plaque, inscribed with a cross, three circles, not concentric, and other now meaningless scratches. It is not perforated. Dr. Munro does not dispute the genuine character of many strange figurines in flint, from Volósova, though the redoubtable M. de Mortillet denounced them as forgeries; they had the misfortune to corroborate other Italian finds against which M. de Mortillet had a grudge. But Dr. Munro thinks that the two plaques of Volósova may have been made for sale by knavish boys. In that case the boys fortuitously coincided, in their fake, with similar plaques, of undoubted antiquity, and, in some prehistoric Egyptian stones, occasionally inscribed with mere wayward scratches.
For these reasons I think the Volósova plaques as genuine as any other objects from that site, and corroborative, so far, of similar things from Clyde.
To return to Portugal, M. Cartailhac recognises that the plain plaques of slate from sites in the Cevennes “are certainly analogous” with the plaques from the Casa da Moura, even when these are elaborately ornamented with vandyked and other patterns. I find one published case of a Portuguese plaque with cups and ducts, as at Dumbuck (fig. 16). Another example is in Antiguedades Prehistoricas de Andalucia, p. 109. 109 However, Dr. Munro leaves the Cevennes Andalusian, and Portuguese plaques out of his argument.
M. Cartailhac, then, found inscribed and perforated slate tablets “very common in Portugues neolithic sepulchres.” The perforated holes showed signs of long wear from attachment to something or somebody. One, from New Jersey, with two holes, exactly as in the Dunbuie example, was much akin in ornament to the Portuguese plaques. One, of slate, was plain, as plain as “a bit of gas coal with a round hole bored through it,” recorded by Dr. Munro from Ashgrove Loch crannog. A perforated shale, or slate, or schist or gas coal plaque, as at Ashgrove Loch, ornamented or plain, is certainly like another shale schist or slate plaque, plain or inscribed. We have shown that these occur in France, Portugal, Russia, America, and Scotland, not to speak of Central Australia.
My suggestion is that, if the Clyde objects are forged, the forger knew a good deal of archaeology – knew that perforated inscribed plaques of soft mineral occurred in many countries – but he did not slavishly imitate the patterns.
By a pleasant coincidence, at the moment of writing, comes to me the Annual Archaeological Report, 1904, of the Canadian Bureau of Education, kindly sent by Mr. David Boyle. He remarks, as to stone pendants found in Canadian soil, “The forms of what we call pendants varied greatly, and were probably made to adapt themselves to the natural shapes of water-worn stones..” This is exactly what Dr. Munro says about the small stone objects from the three Clyde stations. “The pendants, amulets, and idols appear to have been water-worn pieces of shale or slate, before they were perforated, decorated, and polished” (Munro, p. 254). The forger may have been guided by the ancient Canadian pendants; that man knows everything!
Mr. Boyle goes on, speaking of the superstitious still surviving instinct of treasuring such stones, “For some unknown reason, many of us exhibit a desire to pick up pebbles so marked, and examples of the kind are often carried as pocket pieces,” obviously “for luck.” He gives one case of such a stone being worn for fifty years as a “watch pendant.” Perforated stones have always had a “fetishness” attached to them, adds Mr. Boyle. He then publishes several figures of such stones. Two of these, with archaic markings like many in Portugal, and one with an undisputed analogue from a Scottish site, are reproduced (figs. 12, 13).
It is vain to tell us that the uses of such fetishistic stones are out of harmony with any civilisation. The civilisation of the dwellers in the Clyde sites was not so highly advanced as to reject a superstition which still survives. Nor is there any reason why these people should not have scratched archaic markings on the pebbles as they certainly cut them on stones in a Scottish crannog of the Iron age.
Dr. Munro agrees with me that rude scribings on shale or slate are found, of a post-Christian date, at St. Blane’s, in Bute. 110 The art, if art it can be called, is totally different, of course, from the archaic types of decoration, but all the things have this in common, that they are rudely incised on shale or slate.
XXVIII – QUESTION AS TO THE OBJECTS AS ORNAMENTS OF THE PERSON
Dr. Munro now objects that among the objects reckoned by me as analogous to churinga is a perforated stone with an incised line, and smaller slanting side lines, said to have been found at Dumbuck; “9 inches long, 3½ inches broad, and ½ an inch thick.” 111 I wish that he gave us the weight. He says, “that no human being would wear this as an ornament.”
No human being wears any churinga “as an ornament!” Nobody says that they do.
Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, moreover, speak of “a long stone churinga,” and of “especially large ones” made by the mythical first ancestors of the race. Churinga, over a foot in length, they tell us, are not usually perforated; many churinga are not perforated, many are: but the Arunta do not know why some are perforated. There is a legend that, of old, men hung up the perforated churinga on the sacred Nurtunja pole: and so they still have perforated stone churinga, not usually more than a foot in length. 112
If Dr. Munro has studied Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, he cannot but know that churinga are not ornaments, are not all oval, but of many shapes and sizes, and that churinga larger than the 9 inch perforated stone from Dumbuck are perforated, and attached to strings. I cannot tell the reason why, any better than the Arunta can; and, of course, I cannot know why the 9 inch stone from Dumbuck (if genuine) was perforated. But what I must admire is the amazing luck or learning of Dr. Munro’s supposed impostor. Not being “a semi-detached idiot” he must have known that no mortal would sling about his person, as an ornament, a chunk of stone 9 inches long, 3½ broad, and ½ an inch thick. Dr. Munro himself insists on the absurdity of supposing that “any human being” would do such a thing. Yet the forger drilled a neat hole, as if for a string for suspension, at the apex of the chunk. If he knew, before any other human being in England, that the Arunta do this very thing to some stone churinga, though seldom to churinga over a foot in length, – and if he imitated the Arunta custom, the impostor was a very learned impostor. If he did not know, he was a very lucky rogue, for the Arunta coincide in doing the same thing to great stone churinga: without being aware of any motive for the performance as they never suspend churinga to anything, though they say that their mythical ancestors did.
The impostor was also well aware of the many perforated stones that exist in Scotland, not referred to by Dr. Munro. He perforated some which could not be worn as ornaments, just as the Arunta do. We shall find that the forger, either by dint of wide erudition, or by a startling set of chance coincidences, keeps on producing objects which are analogous to genuine relics found in many sites of early life.
This is what makes the forger so interesting.
My theory of the forger is at the opposite pole from the theory of Dr. Munro. He says that, “in applying these local designs” (the worldwide archaic patterns,) to unworked splinters of sandstone and pieces of water-worn shale and slate, “the manufacturers had evidently not sufficient archaeological knowledge to realise the significance of the fact that they were doing what prehistoric man, in this country, is never known to have done before.” 113
But, (dismissing the Kintyre and Tappock stones,) the “manufacturers” did know, apparently, that perforated and inscribed, or uninscribed tablets and plaques of shale and schist and slate and gas coal were found in America, France, Russia, and Portugal, and imitated these things or coincided in the process by sheer luck. The “manufacturers” were, perhaps, better informed than many of their critics. But, if the things are genuine, more may be found by research in the locality.
