In primitive times the worship of clefts in rocks, holes in the earth, or stones having a natural or artificial perforation, appears to have been almost universal.  We find traces of it in almost every country, and amongst almost every people.  These sacred chasms or holes were regarded as emblems of the celestial mother, and persons went into them and came out again, so as to be born anew, or squeezed themselves through the holes in order to obtain the remission of their sins.  In ancient Palestine this form of idolatry was known as the worship of Baal-perazim, or Baal of the clefts or breaches.  David obtained a signal victory over the Philistines at one of the shrines of this god, and burnt there the images peculiar to this mode of worship which the enemy had left behind in its flight.  About two miles from Bombay there is a rock on the promontory of the Malabar Hill, which has a natural crevice, communicating with a cavity below, and opening upon the sea.  This crevice is too narrow for corpulent persons to squeeze through, but it is constantly resorted to for purposes of moral purification.  Through natural or artificial caverns in India pilgrims enter at the south side, and make their exit at the northern, as was anciently the custom in the Mithraic mysteries.  Those who pass through such caves are considered to receive by this action a new birth of the soul.  According to the same idea the rulers of Travancore, who are Nairs by caste, are made into Brahmins when they ascend the throne by passing through a hole in a large golden image of a cow or lotus flower, which then becomes the property of the Brahmin priests.  It is possible that there may be an allusion to this primitive custom in the rule of the Jewish Temple, mentioned by Ezekiel,—­“He that entereth in by the way of the north gate to worship shall go out by the way of the south gate; and he that entereth by the way of the south gate shall go forth by the way of the north gate:  he shall not return by the way of the gate whereby he came in, but shall go forth over against it.”  This arrangement may have been made not as a mere matter of convenience, but as a survival of the old practice of “passing through” a sacred cave or crevice for the forgiveness of sins;—­a survival purified and ennobled in the service of God.

The oldest of all religious monuments of which we have any existing trace are cromlechs, found mostly in waste, uncultivated places.  These are of various forms, but they are mostly tripods, consisting of a copestone poised upon three other stones, two at the head and one at the foot.  The supports are rough boulders, the largest masses of stone that could be found or moved; and the copestone is an enormous flat square block, often with cup-shaped hollows carved upon its surface.  Under this copestone there was a vacant space, varying in size from a foot or two to the height of a man on horseback.  Through this vacant space persons used to pass; and the narrower