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Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples by marquis de Jean-François-Albert du Pouget Nadaillac
page 23 of 350 (06%)

May we not also attribute to the worship of stones some of the
religious and funeral rites of antiquity? According to Porphyry,
Pythagoras, on his arrival on the island of Crete, was purified with
thunder-stones by the dactyl priests of Mount Ida. The Etruscans wore
flint arrow-heads on their collars. They were sought after by the Magi,
and the Indians gave them an honored place in their temples. According
to Herodotus, the Arabs sealed their engagements by making an incision
in their hands with a sharp stone; in Egypt the body of a corpse before
being embalmed was opened with a flint knife; a similar implement
was used by the Hebrews for the rite of circumcision; and it was also
with cut stones that the priests of Cybele inflicted self-mutilation
in memory of that of Atys. At Rome the stone hatchet was dedicated to
Jupiter Latialis, and solemn treaties were ratified by the sacrifice
of a pig, the throat of which was cut with a sharp flint. According
to Virgil, this custom was handed down to the ancient Romans by the
uncouth nation of the Equicoles. At the beginning of the Christian
era., the heroes commemorated by Ossian still had in the centre
of their shields a polished stone consecrated by the Druids, and a
saga maintains that the CERAUNIA assured certain victory to their
owners. On the other side of the Atlantic, the Aztecs used obsidian
blades for the sacrifices, in which hundreds of human victims perished
miserably; and similar blades are used by the Guanches of Teneriffe
to open the bodies of their chiefs after death. At the present day,
the Albanian Palikares use pointed flints to cut the flesh off the
shoulder-blade of a sheep with a view to seeking in its fibres the
secrets of the future, and when the god Gimawong visits his temple
of Labode, on the western coast of Africa, his worshippers offer
him a bull slain with a stone knife. Lumholtz,[23] in the second of
his recent explorations in Queensland, tells us that the natives
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