The Book-Hunter
with his disciples. The Magi looked on with a malignant smile to see
the accursed well produce its usual effect; but the saint and his
followers came away uninjured: the demon was driven out of the well, and
it became ever afterwards a holy fountain, curing many of their
infirmities. Another miracle, bearing against the Magi, introduces us to
one of their number by name, and gives a little of his domestic history.
His name is Broichan, and he is tutor to Brud, king of the Picts, with
whom he dwells on the banks of the Ness. It might have relieved the mind
of the historical inquirer to be told that Brud built for himself the
remarkable vitrified fort of Craig-Phadric, which rises high above the
Ness, and to be informed of the manner in which its calcined rampart was
constructed; but nothing is said on the subject, and Craig-Phadric
stands on its own isolated merits, still to be guessed at, without one
tangible word out of record or history to help any theory about its
object or construction home to a conclusion. One is free, however, to
imagine Brud, the heathen king of the Picts, living on the scarped top
of the hill, in a lodging of wattled or wooden houses, surrounded by a
rampart of stones fused by fire, as the only cement then known. Such we
may suppose to have been the "domus regia," whence the saint walked out
in a very bad humour to the river Ness, from the pebbles of which he
selected one white stone, to be turned to an important use. Broichan,
the Magus, had in his possession a female slave from Ireland. Columba,
who seems to have held with him such intercourse as a missionary to the
Chocktaws might have with a great medicine-man, desired that the Magus
should manumit the woman, for what reason we are not distinctly told;
but it is easy to suppose strong grounds for intervention when a
Christian missionary finds a woman, of his own country and creed, the
slave of a heathen priest. Columba's request was refused. Losing
patience, he had resort to threats; and at length, driven to his
ultimatum, he denounced death to Broichan if the slave were not released
before his own return to Ireland. Columba told his disciples to expect
two messengers to come from the king to tell of the sudden and critical
illness of Broichan. The messengers rushed in immediately after to claim
the saint's intervention. Broichan had been suddenly stricken by an
angel sent for the purpose; and as if he had been taking his dram in a
modern gin-palace, we are told that the drinking-glass, or glass
drinking-vessel, "vitrea bibera," which he was conveying to his lips,
was smashed in pieces, and he himself seized with deadly sickness.
Columba sends the consecrated pebble, with a prescription that the water
in which it is dipped is to be drunk. If, before he drinks, Broichan
releases his slave, he is to recover; if not, he dies. The Magus
complies, and is saved. The consecrated stone, which had the quality of
floating in water like a nut, was afterwards, as we are told, preserved
in the treasury of the king of the Picts. It has been lost to the world,
along with the saint's white robe and his consecrated banner, both of
which performed miracles after his death. But the sanitary influence
attributed to the water in which consecrated stones have been dipped, is
a superstition scarcely yet uprooted in Scotland.
Sermons in Stones.
One of the clubs has lately deviated from the printing of letterpress,
which is the established function of clubs, into pictorial art. As it
threatens to repeat the act on a larger scale, it is proposed to take a
glance at the result already afforded, in order that it may be seen
whether it is a failure, or a success opening up a new vein for club
enterprise. In distributing a set of pictorial prints among its members,
the club in question may be supposed to have invaded the art-unions: but
its course is in another direction, since its pictures are entirely
subservient to archaeology. The innovator in question is the Spalding
Club, which has already distributed among its adherents a collection of
portraits of the sculptured stones in Scotland, and now proposes to do
the same by the early architectural remains of the north. In giving
effect to such a design, it will produce something like Dugdale's
Monasticon and the great English county histories.
If that which is to be done shall rival that which the club has
achieved, it will be worthy of all honour. No one can open the book of
The Sculptured Stones without being almost overwhelmed with astonishment
at the reflection that they are not monuments excavated in Egypt, or
Syria, or Mexico, but have stood before the light of day in village
churchyards, or in marketplaces, or by waysides throughout our own
country. As you pass on, the eye becomes almost tired with the endless
succession of grim and ghastly human figures--of distorted limbs--of
preternatural beasts, birds, and fishes--of dragons, centaurs, and
intertwined snakes--of uncouth vehicles, and warlike instruments, and
mystic-looking symbols--of chains of interlaced knots and complex
zigzags, all so crowding on each other that the tired eye feels as if it
had run through a procession of Temptations of St Anthony or Faust
Sabbaths. When this field of investigation and speculation is surveyed
in all its affluence, one is not surprised to find that it has been
taken in hand by a race of bold guessers, who, by the skilful appliance
of a jingling jargon of Asiatic, Celtic, and classical phraseology, make
nonsense sound like learning too deep to be fathomed. So, while
Rusticus will point out to you "the auld-fashioned standin' stane"--on
which he tells you that there are plain to be seen a cocked hat, a pair
of spectacles, a comb, a looking-glass, a sow with a long snout, and a
man driving a gig,--Mr Urban will describe to you "a hieroglyphed
monolith" in the terms following:--
"The Buddhist triad is conspicuously symbolised by what the peasantry
call a pair of spectacles. It consists of two circles, of which the one,
having its radius 1-3/4 inch wider than the other, is evidently Buddha,
the spiritual or divine intellectual essence of the world, or the
efficient underived source of all; the other is Dharma, the material
essence of the world--the plastic derivative cause. The ligamen
connecting them together, completes the sacred triad with the Sangha
derived from and composed of the two others. Here, therefore, is
symbolised the collective energy of spirit and matter in the state of
action, or the embryotic creation, the type and sum of all specific
forms, spontaneously evolved from the union of Buddha and Dharma. The
crescent, likened by the vulgar-minded peasantry to a cocked hat, is the
embodiment of the all-pervading celestial influence; and the decorated
sceptres or sacred wands of office, laid across it at the mystic angle
of forty-five degrees, represent the comprehensive discipline and
cosmopolite authority of the conquering Sarsaswete. The figure of the
elephant--undoubted evidence of the oriental origin of this
monoglyph--represents the embryo of organised matter; while in the
chariot of the sun the never-dying Inis na Bhfiodhlhadth threads the
sacred labyrinth, waving a branch of the Mimosa serisha, which has been
dipped in a sacred river, and dried beneath the influence of Osiris. The
figures called a comb and a looking-glass are the lingal emblems of the
sacred Phallic worship. The whole hierograph thus combines, in an
extremely simple and instructive unity, the symbolisation of Apis,
Osiris, Uphon, and Isis, Phallos, Pater AEther, and Mater Terra, Lingam
and Yoni, Vishnu, Brama, and Sarsaswete, with their Saktes, Yang and
Yiri, Padwadevi, Viltzli-pultzli, Baal, Dhanandarah, Sulivahna and Mumbo
Jumbo."
The honest transcripts in the club book clear away a great deal of that
unknown which is so convertible into the magnificent. It was extremely
perplexing to understand that the elephant was profusely represented
upon memorials familiar to the eyes of the inhabitants of Scotland, at a
period, if we might credit some theories, anterior to the time when
Roman soldiers were appalled in the Punic war by the sudden apparition
of unknown animals of monstrous size and preternatural strength. The
whole flood of oriental theory was let loose by this evidence of
familiarity with the usages of Hindostan. But it is pretty evident,
when we inspect him closely, that the animal, though a strange beast of
some peculiar conventional type, is no elephant. That spiral winding-up
of his snout, which passed for a trunk, is a characteristic refuge of
embryo art, repeated upon other parts of the animal. It is necessitated
by the difficulty which a primitive artist feels in bringing out the
form of an extremity, whatever it may be--snout, horn, or hoof. He finds
that the easiest termination he can make is a whirl, and he makes it
accordingly. Thus the noses, the tails, the feet of the characteristic
monster of the sculptured stones, all end in a whirl, as the final
letter of an accomplished and dashing penman ends in a flourish. The
same difficulty is met in repeated instances on these stones by another
ingenious resource. Animals are united or twined together by noses or
tails, to enable the artist to escape the difficulty of executing the
extremities of each separately.
There is a propensity to believe that whatever is old must have
something holy and mysterious about it. It is difficult to suppose that,
in making an ornament, men who would be so venerable, were they alive
now, as our ancestors of many centuries ago, can have been in the
slightest degree affected by the pomps and vanities of this wicked
world. Hence there is never a quaint Gothic decoration, floral or
animal, but it must be symbolic of some great mystery. So the
reticulated and geometrical tracery on the sculptured stones has been
invested with mythic attributes, under such names as "the Runic Knot."
It has been counted symbolical of a mysterious worship or creed, and has
been associated with Druids and other respectable, but not very
palpable, personages.[83]
[Footnote 83: It would not be difficult to trace a resemblance between
some of the exceedingly elaborate sculpture of the New Zealanders and
that of the sculptured stones, especially in the instance of the very
handsome country-house of the chief Rangihaetita, represented in Mr
Angas's New Zealanders Illustrated. Its name, by the way, in the native
Maori, is Kai Tangata, or Eat-man House--so called, doubtless, in
commemoration of the many jolly feasts held in it, on missionaries and
others coming within Wordsworth's description of
"A being not too wise and good
For human nature's daily food."]
Good theories are such a rarity in the antiquarian world, that it is a
luxury to find one which, in reference to this sort of decoration,
merits that character. The buildings, both ecclesiastical and civil, of
the early Christians of the North were, as we have seen, made of wattles
or wicker-ware. The skill, therefore, of the architectural decorator
took the direction of the variations in basket-work. We know that in the
Gothic age those forms which were found the most endurable and graceful
in which stone could be placed upon stone, became also the ruling forms
which guided the carver and the painter; so that all wood-work,
metal-work, seal-cutting, illumination of books, and the like, repeated
the ornaments of Gothic architecture. It would only, then, be a
prototype of an established phenomenon were it to be found that the
sculptor of an earlier age adopted the decorations developed by the
skillful platting of withes or wattles; and accordingly, this is just
the character of the platted ornaments so prevalent on the sculptured