In the early Semitic records we often read of Beth-el, the House of God. This was usually nothing but an amorphous stone, which the god was supposed to inhabit. The holy Kaaba of Mahometanism is no doubt such an one, a rough, black piece of rock. The sacred image of Diana of the Ephesians was nothing more, and the Latin father Arnobius tells us that the image of earth, the Great Mother, brought to Rome from Phrygia with sumptuous pomp, was merely “a small black stone, rough and unhewn.”[176] To this instance, where the stone represents the Earth as the common mother, we find many exact parallels in savage faiths. In the Tahitian myths, _Papa_, Rock, was the name of the wife of the first man, mother of the race of men, and under this form she was adored.[177] The Zulus considered certain stones as sacred, because from one such, which split in two, their ancestors emerged. Their neighbours, the Basutos, entertain the same notion of a spheroidal granite boulder in their country, and their worship of it consists in dancing around it and spitting at it. The Indians of Colombia asserted that all men were once stones, and all will again become such.[178] Those of Guatemala were wont to place a small polished stone in the mouth of the dying to receive the soul, and thus supply it with a permanent abode. The most common of mascots is a “lucky stone,” and this goes back to the time when such was the favourite material for household fetishes. To this day the Canaras of India believe that the Bhutas, or familiar spirits, inhabit rough stones, and in Melanesia similar stones are held to be the abode of the _vui_ or demonic intelligences.[179] Another source of the sacredness of stones was their identification as “thunderbolts.” Certain ones were believed to be the missiles hurled from the sky by the Thunder God in the lightning flash; though the Peruvians had the prettier belief that, as the product of the heavenly fire, they must retain its ardency, and therefore used them as love charms.[180] Flint, which when struck with a bit of pyrites emits a spark, and meteoric stones were especially recognised by these marks as of celestial origin. Such a flint stone, say the legends of the Nahuas, in the beginning of the world fell from heaven to earth; as it broke to pieces each fragment rose to life as a demi-god. All men, added the Mexicans, came originally from such stones.[181] Yet another origin of god-stones was the custom of erecting them as monuments of the dead. We can see this in its simplicity in Southern Polynesia. When a chief dies, a coral slab about three feet long is placed erect over his grave—a tombstone, in other words. This is decked with flowers and garlands, food is offered it, and invocations pronounced before it, precisely as to a divinity. This is because the spirit of the departed chief is believed to dwell within it.[182]