Old and pagan in their nature as are these beliefs,
they yet survive so thoroughly into Christian times that I have seen a
stone hatchet built into the steeple of a church to protect it from
lightning. Indeed, steeples have always of course attracted the electric
discharge to a singular degree by their height and tapering form,
especially before the introduction of lighting-rods; and it was a sore
trial of faith to mediaeval reasoners to understand why heaven should
hurl its angry darts so often against the towers of its very own
churches. In the Abruzzi the flint axe has actually been Christianised
into St. Paul's arrows--_saetti de San Paolo_. Families hand down the
miraculous stones from father to son as a precious legacy; and mothers
hang them on their children's necks side by side with medals of saints
and madonnas, which themselves are hardly so highly prized as the stones
that fall from heaven.
Another and very different form of thunderbolt is the belemnite, a
common English fossil often preserved in houses in the west country with
the same superstitious reverence as the neolithic hatchets. The very
form of the belemnite at once suggests the notion of a dart or
lance-head, which has gained for it its scientific name. At the present
day, when all our girls go to Girton and enter for the classical tripos,
I need hardly translate the word belemnite 'for the benefit of the
ladies,' as people used to do in the dark and unemancipated eighteenth
century; but as our boys have left off learning Greek just as their
sisters are beginning to act the 'Antigone' at private theatricals, I
may perhaps be pardoned if I explain, 'for the benefit of the
gentlemen,' that the word is practically equivalent to javelin-fossil.
Pages:
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187