The Clyde Mystery

As to traces of Totemism in Scotland and Ireland, I am not persuaded by Professor Rhys that they occur, and are attested by Celtic legends about the connection of men and kinships with animals, and by personal and kinship names derived from animals. The question is very obscure. [61 - See Prof. Zimmer’s Das Mutterrecht der Pickten, Rhys’s Celtic Britain, Rhind Lectures, and in Royal Commission’s Report on Wales, with my History of Scotland, vol. i. pp. 12, 14.] But as the topic of Totemism has been introduced, I may say that many of the mysterious archaic markings on rocks, and decorations of implements, in other countries, are certainly known to be a kind of shorthand design of the totem animal. Thus a circle, whence proceeds a line ending in a triple fork, represents the raven totem in North America: another design, to our eyes meaningless, stands for the wolf totem; a third design, a set of bands on a spear shaft, does duty for the gerfalcon totem, and so on. [62 - Bureau of Ethnology’s Report, 1896-97, p. 324. See also the essay on “Indian Pictographs,” Report of Bureau, for 1888-89.] Equivalent marks, such as spirals, and tracks of emu’s feet, occur on sacred stones found round the graves of Australian blacks on the Darling River. They were associated with rites which the oldest blacks decline to explain. The markings are understood to be totemic. Occasionally they are linear, as in Ogam writing. [63 - MSS. of Mr. Mullen, of Bourke, N.S.W., and of Mr. Charles Lang.]

Any one who is interested in the subject of the origin, in certain places, of the patterns, may turn to Mr. Haddon’s Evolution of Art. [64 - Scott, London, 1895.] Mr. Haddon shows how the Portuguese pattern of horizontal triangles is, in the art of the uncivilised natives of Brazil, meant to represent bats. [65 - Op. cit. p. 178.] A cross, dotted, within a circle, is directly derived, through several stages, from a representation of an alligator. [66 - Op. cit. p. 172.]

We cannot say whether or not the same pattern, found at Dumbuck, in Central Australia, and in tropical America, arose in the “schematising” of the same object in nature, in all three regions, or not. Without direct evidence, we cannot assign a meaning to the patterns.

XIV – THE POSSIBLE MEANINGS OF THE MARKS AND OBJECTS

My private opinion as to the meaning of the archaic marks and the Clyde objects which bear them, has, in part by my own fault, been misunderstood by Dr. Munro. He bases an argument on the idea that I suppose the disputed “pendants” to have had, in Clydesdale, precisely the same legendary, customary, and magical significance as the stone churinga of the Arunta tribe in Australia. That is not my theory. Dr. Munro quotes me, without indicating the source, (which, I learn, is my first letter on the subject to the Glasgow Herald, Jan. 10th, 1899), as saying that the Clyde objects “are in absolutely startling agreement” with the Arunta churinga. [67 - Munro, p. 246.]

Doubtless, before I saw the objects, I thus overstated my case, in a letter to a newspaper, in 1899. But in my essay originally published in the Contemporary Review, (March 1899,) and reprinted in my book, Magic and Religion, of 1901, [68 - Longmans.] I stated my real opinion. This is a maturely considered account of my views as they were in 1899-1901, and, unlike old newspaper correspondence, is easily accessible to the student. It is not “out of print.” I compared the Australian marks on small stones and on rock walls, and other “fixtures in the landscape,” with the markings on Scottish boulders, rock walls, cists, and so forth, and also with the marks on the disputed objects. I added “the startling analogy between Australia and old Scottish markings saute aux yeux,” and I spoke truth. Down to the designs which represent footmarks, the analogy is “startling,” is of great interest, and was never before made the subject of comment.

I said that we could not know whether or not the markings, in Scotland and Australia, had the same meaning.

As to my opinion, then, namely that we cannot say what is the significance of an archaic pattern in Scotland, or elsewhere, though we may know the meaning assigned to it in Central Australia, there can no longer be any mistake. I take the blame of having misled Dr. Munro by an unguarded expression in a letter to the Society of Scottish Antiquaries, [69 - Munro, p. 177.] saying that, if the disputed objects were genuine, they implied the survival, on Clyde, “of a singularly archaic set of ritual and magical ideas,” namely those peculiar to the Arunta and Kaitish tribes of Central Australia. But that was a slip of the pen, merely.

This being the case, I need not reply to arguments of Dr. Munro (pp. 248-250) against an hypothesis which no instructed person could entertain, beginning with the assumption that from an unknown centre, some people who held Arunta ideas migrated to Central Australia, and others to the Clyde. Nobody supposes that the use of identical or similar patterns, and of stones of superstitious purpose, implies community of race. These things may anywhere be independently evolved, and in different regions may have quite different meanings, if any; while the use of “charm stones” or witch stones, is common among savages, and survives, in England and Scotland, to this day. The reader will understand that I am merely applying Mr. E. B. Tylor’s method of the study of “survivals in culture,” which all anthropologists have used since the publication of Mr. Tylor’s Primitive Culture, thirty-five years ago.

XV – QUESTION OF METHOD CONTINUED

What is admitted to be true of survivals in the Family among the Picts may also be true as to other survivals in art, superstition, and so forth. I would, therefore, compare the disputed Clyde objects with others analogous to them, of known or unknown purpose, wheresoever they may be found. I am encouraged in this course by observing that it is pursued, for example, by the eminent French archaeologist, Monsieur Cartailhac, in his book Les Ages Préhistoriques de France et d’Espagne. He does not hesitate, as we shall see, to compare peculiar objects found in France or Spain, with analogous objects of doubtful purpose, found in America or the Antilles. M. Cartailhac writes that, to find anything resembling certain Portuguese “thin plaques of slate in the form of a crook, or crozier,” he “sought through all ethnographic material, ancient and modern.” He did find the parallels to his Portuguese objects, one from Gaudeloup, the other either French, or from the Antilles. [70 - Cartailhac, Ages Préhistoriques, p. 97.]

Sir John Evans, again, compares British with Australian objects; in fact the practice is recognised. I therefore intend to make use of this comparative method. On the other hand, Dr. Munro denies that any of my analogies drawn from remote regions are analogous, and it will be necessary to try to prove that they are, – that my Australian, American, Portuguese, and other objects are of the same kind, apparently, as some of the disputed relics of the Clyde.

If I succeed, one point will be made probable. Either the Clyde objects are old, or the modern maker knew much more of archaeology than many of his critics and used his knowledge to direct his manufacture of spurious things; or he kept coinciding accidentally with genuine relics of which he knew nothing.

XVI – MAGIC

Again, I must push my method beyond that of Dr. Munro, by considering the subject of Magic, in relation to perforated and other stones, whether inscribed with designs, or uninscribed. Among the disputed objects are many such stones, and it is legitimate for me to prove, not only that they occur in many sites of ancient life, but that their magical uses are still recognised, or were very recently recognised in the British Folk-lore of to-day.

A superstition which has certainly endured to the nineteenth century may obviously have existed among the Picts, or whoever they were, of the crannog and broch period on Clyde. The only a priori objection is the absence of such objects among finds made on British soil, but our discoveries cannot be exhaustive: time may reveal other examples, and already we have a few examples, apart from the objects in dispute.

XVII – DISPUTED OBJECTS CLASSIFIED

Dr. Munro classifies the disputed objects as Weapons, Implements, “Amulets” or Pendants, Cup-and-Ring Stones, “Human Figurines or Idols.”

For reasons of convenience, and because what I heard about group 3, the “amulets or pendants” first led me into this discussion, I shall here first examine them. Dr. Munro reproduces some of them in one plate (xv. p. 228). He does not say by what process they are reproduced; merely naming them.. “objects of slate and stone from Dumbuck.”

Dr. Munro describes the “amulets” or “pendants” thus:

“The largest group of objects (plate xv.) consists of the so-called amulets or pendants of stone, shale, and shell, some fifteen to twenty specimens of which have been preserved and recorded as having been found on the different stations, viz., three from Dunbuie (exclusive of a few perforated oyster shells), eleven from Dumbuck, and one from Langbank. Their ornamentation is chiefly of the cup-and-ring order, only a few having patterns composed of straight lines. Some of them are so large as to be unfit to be used as amulets or pendants, such, for example, as that represented by no. 14, which is 9 inches long, 3½ inches broad, and ½ inch thick. The ornamentation consists of a strongly incised line running downwards from the perforation with small branch lines directed alternately right and left. Any human being, who would wear this object, either as an ornament or religious emblem, would be endowed with the most archaic ideas of decorative art known in the history of human civilisation. Yet we can have no doubt that the individual who manufactured it, if he were an inhabitant of any of the Clyde sites, was at the same time living in a period not devoid of culture, and was in possession of excellent cutting implements, most likely of iron, with which he manipulated wood, deer-horn, and other substances. These objects are nearly all perforated, as if intended for suspension, but sometimes, in addition to this, there is a large central hole around which there is always an ornamentation, generally consisting of incised circles or semicircles, with divergent lines leading into small hollow points, the so-called cup-marks.”

I shall return to the theory that the stones were “ornaments”; meanwhile I proceed to the consideration of “cup-marks” on stones, large or small.

XVIII – CUP MARKS IN CRANNOGS

As to cup marks, or cupules, little basins styled also écuelles, now isolated, now grouped, now separate, now joined by hollowed lines, they are familiar on rocks, funeral cists, and so forth in Asia, Europe, and North America (and Australia), as M. Cartailhac remarks in reviewing Dr. Magni’s work on Cupped Rocks near Como. [71 - L’Anthropologie, vol. xiv. p. 338.] “Their meaning escapes us,” says M. Cartailhac.

These cups, or cupules, or écuelles occur, not only at Dumbuck, but in association with a Scottish crannog of the Iron age, admirably described by Dr. Munro himself. [72 - Proc. S.A.S., 1878-1879.] He found a polished celt, [73 - Op. cit. pp. 208, 210.] and a cupped stone, and he found a fragmentary block of red sandstone, about a foot in length, inscribed with concentric circles, surrounding a cup. The remainder of the stone, with the smaller part of the design, was not found.

Here, then, we have these archaic patterns and marks on isolated stones, one of them about 13 inches long, in a genuine Scottish crannog, of the genuine Iron age, while flint celts also occur, and objects of bronze. Therefore cup markings, and other archaic markings are not unknown or suspicious things in a genuine pile structure in Scotland. Why, then, suspect them at Dumbuck? At Dumbuck the cups occur on a triangular block of sandstone, 14½ inches long and 4 inches thick. Another cupped block is of 21½ inches by 16½. [74 - Bruce, ut supra, p. 446.]

No forger brought these cupped stones in his waistcoat pocket.

We have thus made good the point that an isolated cupped stone, and an isolated stone inscribed with concentric circles round a cup, do occur in a crannog containing objects of the stone, bronze, and iron ages. The meaning, if any, of these inscribed stones, in the Lochlee crannog, is unknown. Many of the disputed objects vary from them in size, while presenting examples of archaic patterns. Are they to be rejected because they vary in size?

We see that the making of this class of decorative patterns, whether they originally had a recognised meaning; or whether, beginning as mere decorations, perhaps “schematistic” designs of real objects, they later had an arbitrary symbolic sense imposed upon them, is familiar to Australians of to-day, who use, indifferently, stone implements of the neolithic or of the palaeolithic type. We also know that “in a remote corner of tropical America,” the rocks are inscribed with patterns “typically identical with those engraved in the British rocks.” [75 - Bureau of Ethnology, Report of 1888-1889, p. 193.] These markings are in the country of the Chiriquis, an extinct gold-working neolithic people, very considerable artists, especially in the making of painted ceramics. The Picts and Scots have left nothing at all approaching to their pottery work.

These identical patterns, therefore, have been independently evolved in places most remote in space and in stage of civilisation, while in Galloway, as I shall show, I have seen some of them scrawled in chalk on the flag stones in front of cottage doors. The identity of many Scottish and Australian patterns is undenied, while I disclaim the opinion that, in each region, they had the same significance.

I have now established the coincidence between the markings of rocks in Australia, in tropical America, and in Scotland. I have shown that such markings occur, in Scotland, associated with remains, in a crannog, of the Age of Iron. They also occur on stones, large (cupped) and small, in Dumbuck. My next business is, if I can, to establish, what Dr. Munro denies, a parallelism between these disputed Clyde stones, and the larger or smaller inscribed stones of the Arunta and Kaitish, in Australia, and other small stones, decorated or plain, found in many ancient European sites. Their meaning we know not, but probably they were either reckoned ornamental, or magical, or both.

XIX – PARALLELISM BETWEEN THE DISPUTED OBJECTS AND OTHER OBJECTS ELSEWHERE

On Clyde (if the disputed things be genuine) we find decorated plaques or slabs of soft stone, of very various dimensions and shapes. In Australia some of these objects are round, many oval, others elongated, others thin and pointed, like a pencil; others oblong – while on Clyde, some are round, one is coffin-shaped, others are palette-shaped, others are pear-shaped (the oval tapering to one extremity), one is triangular, one is oblong. [76 - Munro, plate xv. p. 228, p. 249, cf. fig. 63, p. 249.] In Australia, as on Clyde, the stones bear some of the archaic markings common on the rock faces both in Scotland and in Central Australia: on large rocks they are painted, in Australia, in Scotland they are incised. I maintain that there is a singularly strong analogy between the two sets of circumstances, Scottish and Australian; large rocks inscribed with archaic designs; smaller stones inscribed with some of these designs. Is it not so? Dr. Munro, on the other hand, asserts that there is no such parallelism.

But I must point out that there is, to some extent, an admitted parallelism. “The familiar designs which served as models to the Clyde artists” – “plain cups and rings, with or without gutter channels, spirals, circles, concentric circles, semicircles, horseshoe and harp-shaped figures, etc.,” occur, or a selection of them occurs, both on the disputed objects, and on the rocks of the hills. So Dr. Munro truly says (p. 260).

The same marks, plain cups, cups and rings, spirals, concentric circles, horseshoes, medial lines with short slanting lines proceeding from them, like the branches on a larch, or the spine of a fish, occur on the rocks of the Arunta hills, and also on plaques of stone cherished and called churinga (“sacred”) by the Arunta. [77 - Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, figs. 20, 21, 22, 133; Northern Tribes of Central Australia, figs. 89, 92, 80, 81.] Here is what I call “parallelism.”

Dr. Munro denies this parallelism.

There are, indeed, other parallelisms with markings other than those of the rocks at Auchentorlie which Dr. Munro regards as the sources of the faker’s inspiration. Thus, on objects from Dumbuck (Munro, plate xv. figs, 11 and 12), there are two “signs”: one is a straight line, horizontal, with three shorter lines under it at right angles, the other a line with four lines under it. These signs “are very frequent in Trojan antiquities,” and on almost all the “hut urns” found “below the lava at Marino, near Albano, or on ancient tombs near Corneto.” Whatever they mean, (and Prof. Sayce finds the former of the two “signs” “as a Hittite hieroglyph,”) I do not know them at Auchentorlie. After “a scamper among the surrounding hills,” the faker may have passed an evening with Dr. Schliemann’s Troja (1884, pp. 126, 127) and may have taken a hint from the passages which have just been cited. Or he may have cribbed the idea of these archaic markings from Don Manuel de Góngora y Martinez, his Antigüedades Pre-históricas de Andalucía (Madrid, 1868, p. 65, figures 70, 71). In these Spanish examples the marks are, clearly, “schematised” or rudimentary designs of animals, in origin. Our faker is a man of reading. But, enfin, the world is full of just such markings, which may have had one meaning here, another there, or may have been purely decorative. “Race” has nothing to do with the markings. They are “universally human,” though, in some cases, they may have been transmitted by one to another people.

The reader must decide as to whether I have proved my parallelisms, denied by Dr. Munro, between the Clyde, Australian, and other markings, whether on rocks or on smaller stones. [78 - I have no concern with an object, never seen by Dr. Munro, or by me, to my knowledge, but described as a “churinga”; in Journal of British Archaeological Association, Sept. 1904, fig. 4, Munro, p. 246.]

It suffices me to have tried to prove the parallelism between Australian and Clyde things, and to record Dr. Munro’s denial thereof – “I unhesitatingly maintain that there is no parallelism whatever between the two sets of objects.” [79 - Munro, p. 246.]

XX – UNMARKED CHARM STONES

It must be kept in mind that churinga, “witch stones,” “charm stones,” or whatever the smaller stones may be styled, are not necessarily marked with any pattern. In Australia, in Portugal, in Russia, in France, in North America, in Scotland, as we shall see, such stones may be unmarked, may bear no inscription or pattern. [80 - See Spencer and Gillen, Central Tribes, fig. 21, 6; Northern Tribes, fig. 87.] These are plain magic stones, such as survive in English peasant superstition.

In Dr. Munro’s Ancient Lake Dwellings of Europe, plain stone discs, perforated, do occur, but rarely, and there are few examples of pendants with cupped marks. Of these two, as being cupped pendants, might look like analogues of the disputed Clyde stones, but Dr. Munro, owing to the subsequent exposure of the “Horn Age” forgeries, now has “a strong suspicion that he was taken in” by the things. [81 - Munro, p. 55, referring to Ancient Lake Dwellings, fig. 13, nos. 17, 18, 19.]

To return to Scottish stones.

In Mr. Graham Callander’s essay on perforated stones, [82 - Proceedings Scot. Soc. Ant. 1902, p. 168, fig. 4, 1903.] he publishes an uninscribed triangular stone, with a perforation, apparently for suspension. This is one of several such Scottish stones, and though we cannot prove it, may have had a superstitious purpose. Happily Sir Walter Scott discovered and describes the magical use to which this kind of charm stone was put in 1814. When a person was unwell, in the Orkney Isles, the people, like many savages, supposed that a wizard had stolen his heart. “The parties’ friends resort to a cunning man or woman, who hangs about the [patient’s] neck a triangular stone in the shape of a heart.” [83 - Lockhart, iv. 208.] This is a thoroughly well-known savage superstition, the stealing of the heart, or vital spirit, and its restoration by magic.

This use of triangular or heart-shaped perforated stones was not inconsistent with the civilisation of the nineteenth century, and, of course, was not inconsistent with the civilisation of the Picts. A stone may have magical purpose, though it bears no markings. Meanwhile most churinga, and many of the disputed objects, have archaic markings, which also occur on rock faces.

XXI – QUALITY OF ART ON THE STONES

Dr. Munro next reproduces two wooden churinga (churinga irula), as being very unlike the Clydesdale objects in stone[84 - Munro, p. 247.] (figures 5, 6). They are: but I was speaking of Australian churinga nanja, of stone. A stone churinga [85 - Munro, fig. 62, p. 248.] presented, I think, by Mr. Spencer through me to the Scottish Society of Antiquaries (also reproduced by Dr. Munro), is a much better piece of work, as I saw when it reached me, than most of the Clyde things. “The Clyde amulets are,” says Dr. Munro, “neither strictly oval,” (nor are very many Australian samples,) “nor well finished, nor symmetrical, being generally water-worn fragments of shale or clay slate..” They thus resemble ancient Red Indian pendants.

As to the art of the patterns, the Australians have a considerable artistic gift; as Grosse remarks, [86 - Début de l’Art, pp. 124-138.] while either the Clyde folk had less, or the modern artists had not “some practical artistic skill.” But Dr. Munro has said that any one with “some practical artistic skill” could whittle the Clyde objects. [87 - Munro, p. 260.] He also thinks that in one case they “disclose the hand of one not altogether ignorant of art” (p. 231).

Let me put a crucial question. Are the archaic markings on the disputed objects better, or worse, or much on a level with the general run of such undisputably ancient markings on large rocks, cists, and cairns in Scotland? I think the art in both cases is on the same low level. When the art on the disputed objects is more formal and precise, as on some shivered stones at Dunbuie, “the stiffness of the lines and figures reminds one more of rule and compass than of the free-hand work of prehistoric artists.” [88 - Munro, p. 230.] The modern faker sometimes drew his marks “free-hand,” and carelessly; sometimes his regularities suggest line and compass.

Now, as to the use of compasses, a small pair were found with Late Celtic remains, at Lough Crew, and plaques of bone decorated by aid of such compasses, were also found, [89 - Munro, pp. 204, 205.] in a cairn of a set adorned with the archaic markings, cup and ring, concentric circles, medial lines with shorter lines sloping from them on either side, and a design representing, apparently, an early mono-cycle!