e been deposited by
ancestors or other beings, sometimes as depositories of their
souls.[521] Meteorites, having fallen from the sky, needed no other
explanation. Popular science (that is, popular imagination), perhaps
from fancied resemblances to the human form, assumed of some stones that
they were human beings turned to stone, and stories grew up to account
for the metamorphoses. In many different ways, according to differences
of physical surroundings and of social conceptions, men accounted for
such of these objects as interested them particularly.

+288+. That stones were believed to be alive and akin to men is shown by
the stories of the birth of men and gods from stones,[522] the turning
of human beings to stone (Niobe, Lot's wife), the accounts of their
movements (rocks in Brittany).[523]

+289+. Small stones, especially such as are of peculiar shape, are in
many parts of the world regarded as having magic power; the peculiarity
of shape seems mysterious and therefore connected with power. Doubtless
accidental circumstances, such as the occurrence of a piece of good
fortune, have often endowed a particular stone with a reputation for
power. Certain forms, especially flat disks with a hole in the center,
have preserved this reputation down to the present day. The Roman lapis
manalis is said by Festus to have been employed to get rain.[524]

+290+. Magical stones were, doubtless, believed to possess souls. In
accordance with the general law such stones and others were regarded
later as the abodes of independent movable spirits.[525] When the power
of a fetish seems to be exhausted, and a new object is chosen and by
appropriate ceremonies a spirit is induced to take up its abode in it,
there seems to be no theory as to whether the incoming spirit is the old
one or a new one, or, if it be a new one, what becomes of the old one,
about which little or no interest is felt.[526] The pneumatology is
vague; the general view is that the air is full of spirits, whose
movements may be controlled by magical means: spirits, that is, are
subject to laws, and these laws are known to properly trained men.

+291+. Reverence for divine stones continues into the period of the rise
of the true gods. When god and stone stand together in a community, both
revered, they may be and generally are combined into a cultic unity: the
stone becomes the symbol or the abode or the person of the god.[527] It
was, doubtless, in some such way a