But a third theory supposes that the worship of stones was derived from the unskilfulness of the primitive sculptors, who, unable to frame, by their meagre principles of plastic art, a true image of the God whom they adored, were content to substitute in its place a rude or scarcely polished stone.  Hence the Greeks, according to Pausanias, originally used unhewn stones to represent their deities, thirty of which that historian says he saw in the city of Pharas.  These stones were of a cubical form, and as the greater number of them were dedicated to the god Hermes, or Mercury, they received the generic name of Hermaa.  Subsequently, with the improvement of the plastic art, the head was added.[227]

One of these consecrated stones was placed before the door of almost every house in Athens.  They were also placed in front of the temples, in the gymnasia or schools, in libraries, and at the corners of streets, and in the roads.  When dedicated to the god Terminus they were used as landmarks, and placed as such upon the concurrent lines of neighboring possessions.

The Thebans worshipped Bacchus under the form of a rude, square stone.

Arnobius[228] says that Cybele was represented by a small stone of a black color.  Eusebius cites Porphyry as saying that the ancients represented the deity by a black stone, because his nature is obscure and inscrutable.  The reader will here be reminded of the black stone Hadsjar el Aswad, placed in the south-west corner of the Kaaba at Mecca, which was worshipped by the ancient Arabians, and is still treated with religious veneration by the modern Mohammedans.  The Mussulman priests, however, say that it was originally white, and of such surprising splendor that it could be seen at the distance of four days’ journey, but that it has been blackened by the tears of pilgrims.

The Druids, it is well known, had no other images of their gods but cubical, or sometimes columnar, stones, of which Toland gives several instances.

The Chaldeans had a sacred stone, which they held in great veneration, under the name of Mnizuris, and to which they sacrificed for the purpose of evoking the Good Demon.

Stone-worship existed among the early American races.  Squier quotes Skinner as asserting that the Peruvians used to set up rough stones in their fields and plantations, which were worshipped as protectors of their crops.  And Gam a says that in Mexico the presiding god of the spring was often represented without a human body, and in place thereof a pilaster or square column, whose pedestal was covered with various sculptures.

Indeed, so universal was this stone-worship, that Higgins, in his “Celtic Druids,” says that, “throughout the world the first object of idolatry seems to have been a plain, unwrought stone, placed in the ground, as an emblem of the generative or procreative powers of nature.”  And the learned Bryant, in his “Analysis of Ancient Mythology,” asserts that “there is in every oracular temple some legend about a stone.”