Stones of Light

It was inevitable that meteorites should inspire awe. They came from some remote region high up in the heavens and possessed a sacred quality enjoyed only by things celestial. In certain cultures there was a time when men thought the sky was made of stone, and even today the Australian aborigines believe the vault of heaven to be made of rock crystal and the throne of the heavenly deity of quartz. Rock crystals, supposedly broken away from the heavenly throne, do in fact play a special role in the shamanic initiation ceremonies of the Australian aborigines, among the Negritos of Malacca, in North America, and elsewhere. These ‘stones of light’, as they are called by the maritime Dyaks of Sarawak, reflect everything that happens on earth. They disclose to the shaman what has taken place in the sick man’s soul and the destination to which his soul takes flight. There is no need to remind the reader that the shaman is he who ‘sees’, because he is endowed with a supernatural vision. He sees just as far into space as into time. Likewise he can perceive what is invisible to the layman-spirits, gods, the soul. When he is being initiated the future shaman is fed with crystals of quartz. In other words, his capacity as a visionary, as well as his ‘science’, comes to him, at least in part, from a mystic solidarity with heaven.

We shall do well to bear in mind the early religious significance attaching to aeroliths. They fall to earth charged with celestial sanctity; in a way, they represent heaven. This would suggest why so many meteorites were worshipped or identified with a deity. The faithful saw in them the ‘first form’, the immediate manifestation of the godhead. The Palladium of Troy was supposed to have dropped from heaven, and ancient writers saw it as the statue of the goddess Athena. A celestial origin was also accorded to the statue of Artemis at Ephesus and to the cone of Heliogabalus at Emesus (Herodian, v, 3, 5). The meteorite at Pessinus in Phrygia was venerated as the image of Cybele and, following an injunction by the Delphic Oracle, it was transported to Rome shortly after the Second Punic War. A block of hard stone, the most ancient representation of Eros, stood side by side with Praxiteles’ sculptured image of the god (Pausanias, ix, 27, i). Other examples could easily be found, the most famous being the Ka’aba in Mecca. It is noteworthy that a certain number of meteorites are associated with goddesses, especially fertility goddesses such as Cybele. And here we come up against a transference of sanctity: the celestial origin is forgotten, to the advantage of the religious notion of the petra genitrix.

— The Forge and the Crucible, pp. 19-20