Mystery dramas, in which the initiate actually passes through the circular gate of exit from "his mother's womb" to that new life, and domestic altars on which phallus and holed stone are not the accessories of indecent rites but the emblems of an exalted interpretation of the twin principles of life, must have been sufficiently common to perpetuate, as appears to have been the case, the esoteric significance of these symbols through long ages. We see the origin of the doubly solemn nature of an assevera tion or contract made by passing the hand through a holed stone, and of the idea of passing sick children bodily through such stones. The cult of the lingam stone in India to-day illustrates this point.
Thus, no doubt, many of the rude stone monuments char acteristic of Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, etc., came to have their connection in folk-lore and folk memory with fertility cults, the furtive practice of whose associated rites might well be condemned by the unthinking as fundamentally indecent, and by the early Christian Church as subversively pagan. Such monuments, therefore, are not so much primitive in themselves as relics of a highly elaborate order of ideas.
The ideas connected with pillar and holed-stone cults probably go back to 2500 or 300o B.C., although not introduced into West ern Europe till somewhere about 600 to 200 B.C. Long before that, however, men probably put up small rude bourns and memory stones (where stone was available) as more permanent than marked trees or wooden posts or cairns of loose stones. It is diffi cult to disentangle, from among a welter of stone monuments (such, e.g., as those at Carnac which range from small unhewn pil lars 2 feet high to elaborately chambered barrows), primitive com memorative menhirs that may have survived from an earlier day.
The more primitive-seeming stone monuments—menhirs in iso lation—are almost invariably found in districts where the elaborate chambered barrow, the cromlech and the stone avenue are equally characteristic. In the Naga Hills, lying between Assam and Burma, we can observe a rather primitive society erecting just such menhirs as we see in the megalithic districts of Western Europe, to mark social occasions and events of their lives. Such primitive monuments as standing-stones are erected by men according to a prescribed etiquette to commemorate contemporary events of their own lives and need not necessarily be either funereal or in the nature of witness-stones or boundary-marks. It is arguable that the stone-raising Nagas, like the peasants of Ireland or Brittany with their cults of the stones, are merely keeping alive customs which originated in a more complex society, and certain other Naga customs connected with the use of stone and the symbolism of horns bear this out.
When, therefore, we come to deal with such stone monuments as are really rude human effigies, we are far away from the symbolical ideas already discussed. Primitive folk to-day provide the disembodied spirit with an effigy, preferably near his grave, thus preventing him from taking up his abode in an already occupied body.
Alignments, cromlechs and denuded dolmens are not strictly primitive, as has been demonstrated by excavation in Brittany (see CARNAC, Megalithic Monuments).