There is also a noteworthy assemblage of thirty-six stones at Kursunno in Britanny near a dolmen, which has been used as a burying-place. These stones are not arranged in a circle but placed round the sides of a square. There are ten stones on each side, and thus the two sides uniting the two opposite sides of ten stones only contain eight stones each, so that the whole number of stones is 10 X 10 x 8 x 8 = 36. There was no monolith in the centre, and the square field formed by these stones was apparently a reproduction of the primitive augur field of Roman ritual. The stone circles, with the Hir-men-sols in the centre, within which no living victims were offered, were clearly erected for the adoration of the rising sun of day, and not of the setting sun of night of the Southern races. But these circles were certainly much later in date than the solitary Hir-men-sols or Menhirs, such as that at Tournai in Belgium, and the gigantic stone menhir at St. Renan in Britanny, which abound everywhere in Europe where megalithic stones are found. These show that the original cult of the sun in the stone age in North Europe was an indigenous worship introduced into southern countries by the worshippers of the deer-sun. It was these worshippers of the sun gnomon -stone who introduced the custom of setting it up in villages as the village god. This became the Perron or sign of municipal liberty still found in so many German and Flemish towns and depicted on their arms. That these were sun-stones is clear from the Pyr of Augsburg, which is a fir-cone, still borne on the arms of the town, but on a Roman monument called the altar of the "duumviri," now in the town museum, it is placed on the top of a pillar. This pine-cone, like that on the top of the "Thyrsus" of Bacchus, consecrated the pillar to the sun. This rude stone menhir, which was the image of the sun-god in the early age of Orion's year, was "the holy white stone of the sun," by which it is said in the Saga of Gudrun that all Scandinavians swore 1.

* Goblet d'Alviella, The Migration of Symbols, pp. 103-110; Godrunar Saga.

E. The southward emigration of the Neolithic builders of stone monuments, and of the men of the Paleolithic age, and the history of Pottery.

These menhirs became the Beth-els of the Jews and the Betuli of the Arabians, and they and the dolmens and suncircles, which were not generally sun sextants as at Solwaster, mark the track southward of the men of the Neolithic age. They in every country through which they passed in Europe, Asia Minor, Syria, and the land of the stone cities of Bashan and India, have left these megalithic monuments as evidence of their rule of these lands, where they pitched their camps. In Moab these monuments seem to be arranged in districts, as, according to Dr. Tristram, the stone circles of Callirrhoe are not associated with dolmens as they are to the North and in Ataroth, consecrated to Atar, the god of fire; there are dolmens without circles 1.

The whole system, when thoroughly examined over tracts where these megalithic monuments abound, shows a continually changing theology of sun-worship, varying, as will be seen in the sequel, with the measurements of annual time. This culminates in the two columns at the entrance of all Phoenician temples, and the sacred obelisks of Egypt and Arabia dedicated to the Vulture Pole Star goddess Vega, the Egyptian Ma'at, the Arabian El Nasr, the vulture, the Pole Star from 10,000 to 8000 B.C. These builders of megalithic monuments were among the earliest emigrants from Europe and Asia Minor to India, and they are represented now by the most primitive of the caste-races, whose marriage ceremony is completed by the bridegroom's marking the forehead and parting of the bride's hair with red sindur. This symbolises, as is proved by the actual interfusion of blood enjoined in some caste rituals, the formation of blood

Strophe 47. The ancient pillars of cut stone set up in the centre of the village as successors to the primeval menhirs still exist in the villages of Garsington and Cuddesdon near Oxford. In the latter place the original pillar has become the shaft of a cross.

Tristram, Land of Moab, chap. xiv. p. 269, xvi. p. 300 ff.

brotherhood between the alien races of the bridegroom and bride, and as almost all these marriages are accompanied by a simulated capture of the bride, the ceremony proves that this almost universal form of marriage was introduced by a conquering race.

The tribe to which the origin of these customs is assigned is that called in the Gond traditions of the Song of Lingal the Kolamis who captured their brides, and these formed one of the four divisions of the Gond race called in the poem the primitive Gonds. These divisions are, (1) The Korkus or Mundas; (2) The Bhils or men of the bow (billa), whose immigration I have already accounted for; (3) The Kototyul or sons of a log of wood, the aboriginal Dravidians; and (4) The Kolamis.

These last are the people who introduced into India the family organisation of exogamous marriages, instead of that of the matriarchal village, and of the inter-tribal community of women common among the non-marrying Northern races. These marrying conquerors are represented in Bengal and Central India by the Malés and Mal Paharias of the hills of South Behar and the Kharias and Kharwars of Chutia Nagpur, who ultimately became the Chiroos or sons of the bird (Chir), who are one of the three Dasyu or country (desh) born races descended from Agastya, the star Canopus. These people all worship the god Gumi Gosain, the god of the wooden pillar (gumo), which supports the house-roof, and against which the family hearth is placed. This pillar is called in the theology of the Mahabharata the blind king Dhritarashtra, he who upholds (dhrita) the kingdom (rāshtra). Round the central pillar are placed balls of hardened clay, representing the ancestors of the family, and on these the firstfruits of the earth are offered, and the blood of fowls and goats poured over them. This ritual shows that they introduced the goat as a sacrificial animal in addition to the fowls of the Mundas. They are all sun-worshippers, and a pole consecrated to the sun as the god Dharma Gosain, "the prophet of law," is set up in front of each house, but

they also imitate the Mundas in worshipping the god of the Sal tree in the village grove. These Malés, Mal Paharias and Khariás are still in the stone age, for they manufacture no metal 1.

The first Indian immigrants of these races began by worshipping the Menhir or sun-gnomon-stone, still erected by the Kossias and by the Mundas, which latter use it as a memorial of their dead. This became, after their union with the sons of the tree, the wooden pillars of the Malés worshipped by the Jews as the Asherah, and the gnomonstones and wooden tree pillars of the northern Eberones, or sons of the boar (eber), the name assumed by the earliest confederacy who ruled in the Ardennes. These latter people were believers in magic, who claimed the bear as their mother totem, and worshipped the stars of the Great Bear, the mother-stars of the sons of the third Hindu queen of heaven Ambālikā; and they were the Pandya or fair (pandu) race, who formed the third of the three Dasyu descendants of Agastya, the Kolas or Cholas, Chiroos and Pandyas.

These sons of the bear seem to belong to a distinctly Northern race, whose original home was in North Europe. In the Magic Songs of the Finns the birth of the bear is traced to the sky-maiden who walked along the navel of heaven, the centre Polar circle, with a wool box in her hand, whence she threw five tufts of spinning-wool on the waves of the sea. These were picked up by the forest-mother Mielikki, who placed the wool in her bosom, whence the bear was born, and she rocked the babe in a cradle of the mother-pine-tree 2. In other words, the bear-mother was the daughter of the spinning Pleiades who went round the Pole Star navel of the sky in the year of five-day weeks, and

Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. ii., Malés, p. 57 ff., Mal Paharias, pp. 69-71, vol. i. Khariás, pp. 468–471.

2

Abercromby, Magic Songs of the Finns, iii., The Origin of the Bear, Folklore, 1890, pp. 26, 27.

of the mother-fir-tree. She was Besla, the bear-mother of Odin, who was also the son of Bör the tree 1.

But we have in geology and comparative ethnology a still more certain guide than that given by tradition to the great antiquity of the bear race sons of Artemis, called Arktos the Great Bear. These people who were traditionally ruled by Thoas or Dumu-zi, the star Orion, king of the Tauric Chersonnesus and Asia Minor, can be traced back to the race which has furnished the earliest human skulls and skeletons yet found in the North, a race far older than that of the Furfooz men of the Hesbeyenne deluge, who worshipped, as we have seen, the reindeer. They are called by Quatrefages, the men of Cannstadt, whose skulls are of the type called Neanderthal. The oldest skeletons of this group, those of the Spy Onoz man and woman, are far older than those of the other dominant race of the Paleolithic age, the Cro-Magnon or archer-men, whom I have already described. These were found eight metres outside the cave of Spy Onoz on the Ormian, a tributary of the Sambre to the North-west of Namur. They lay at a depth of about four metres from the surface in the lowest of four successive undisturbed layers of (1) brown, (2) yellow, (3) red, and (4) yellow clay, the last of which was stained with burnt charcoal 2. The skulls were ten and nine millimetres, or nearly half-an-inch thick, long and narrow, with a very receding forehead, so that the cranial vault was very low. The cranial capacity of the male skull was 70, and that of the female 75, about that of the modern Australians, Hottentots, and Peruvian Indians. One of the most remarkable features in these skulls is the great pent-house formed above the eyes by the eye-brow ridges, like that found among the Ainos in Japan, and the Todas in South India, both of which races have abnormally hairy bodies. The

1 Prose Edda, chap. vi.; Mallet, Northern Antiquities, p. 403.

2 Procés Verbal, signed by MM. I. Braconnier, De Puydt, Fraipont, and Lehest, attached to a report of the investigations made at Spy by MM. De Puydt and Lehest, the latter of whom is Geological Professor at the University of Liège.