A late writer, speaking upon the subject of the loadstone, tells us: 

“Hercules, it was said, being once overpowered by the heat of the sun, drew his bow against that luminary; whereupon the god Phoebus, admiring his intrepidity, gave him a golden cup, with which he sailed over the ocean.  This cup was the compass, which old writers have called Lapis Heracleus.  Pisander says Oceanus lent him the cup, and Lucian says it was a sea-shell.  Tradition affirms that the magnet originally was not on a pivot, but set to float on water in a cup.  The old antiquarian is wildly theoretical on this point, and sees a compass in the Golden Fleece of Argos, in the oracular needle which Nero worshipped, and in everything else.  Yet undoubtedly there are some curious facts connected with the matter.  Osonius says that Gama and the Portuguese got the compass from some pirates at the Cape of Good Hope, A.D. 1260.  M. Fauchet, the French antiquarian, finds it plainly alluded to in some old poem of Brittany belonging to the year A.D. 1180.  Paulo Venetus brought it in the thirteenth century from China, where it was regarded as oracular.  Genebrand says Melvius, a Neapolitan, brought it to Europe in A.D. 1303.  Costa says Gama got it from Mohammedan seamen.  But all nations with whom it was found associate it with regions where Heraclean myths prevailed.  And one of the most curious facts is that the ancient Britons, as the Welsh do to-day, call a pilot llywydd (lode).  Lodemanage, in Skinner’s ‘Etymology,’ is the word for the price paid to a pilot.  But whether this famous, and afterward deified, mariner (Hercules) had a compass or not, we can hardly regard the association of his name with so many Western monuments as accidental.”

Hercules was, as we know, a god of Atlantis, and Oceanos, who lent the magnetic cup to Hercules, was the Dame by which the Greeks designated the Atlantic Ocean.  And this may be the explanation of the recurrence of a cup in many antique paintings and statues.  Hercules is often represented with a cup in his hand; we even find the cup upon the handle of the bronze dagger found in Denmark, and represented in the chapter on the Bronze Age, in this work. (See p. 254 ante.)

So “oracular” an object as this self-moving needle, always pointing to the north, would doubtless affect vividly the minds of the people, and appear in their works of art.  When Hercules left the coast of Europe to sail to the island of Erythea in the Atlantic, in the remote west, we are told, in Greek mythology (Murray, p. 257), that he borrowed “the cup” of Helios, in (with) which “he was accustomed to sail every night.”  Here we seem to have a reference to the magnetic cup used in night sailing; and this is another proof that the use of the magnetic needle in sea-voyages was associated with the Atlantean gods.

Ancientcoins of Tyre

Lucian tells us that a sea-shell often took the place of the cup, as a vessel in which to hold the water where the needle floated, and hence upon the ancient coins of Tyre we find a sea-shell represented.