AMERICAN INDIANS. Sacred rocks and stones together with
their spirits are highly venerated by the Indians of both
North and South America. One volcano in Ecuador has even
received human sacrifices by the Puruhá. The Dakota have
decorated and painted great boulders, praying to them and
sacrificing dogs upon them. The Crow keep small, animal-
shaped stones as powerful medicine. The Algonquin around
Lake Mistassini in Canada dare not cross the waters before
having sacrificed to the spirit who inhabits a massive, anoma-
lous block. Southward, in the United States, higher, person-
alized gods are also believed to dwell in stones. The Kiowa
in Texas possess a little stone god to whom they pray during
the Sun Dance. The Tao in New Mexico venerate at the foot
of a sacred mountain the “stone men” who represent two war
gods. The Pueblo Indians believe that the hunter’s good luck
depends on his possession of stones of a curious shape.
The statuettes of the West Indian Taino consist of
slightly sculptured stones that are venerated in caves. Among
the South American Indians of the Andes, stone worship is
very common, but stone gods are found also in the tropical
region to the east. The mother goddess of the Jivaroan people
in northern Peru and the supreme being of the Warao of the
delta of the Orinoco are both represented by stones (Hult-
krantz, 1979, pp. 60ff.).
This little catalog needs a supplementary description of
the modes of worship, but it can nevertheless be compared
(at least in part) with the corresponding examples from the
Saami. The ecological environment of North America and
Lapland is the same, both with regard to natural objects of
veneration and with regard to the motives for worship, pri-
marily to ensure good hunting and fishing.
SEE ALSO Altar; Amulets and Talismans; Crossroads; Mega-
lithic Religion, articles on Historical Cultures and Prehistor-
ic Evidence; Phallus and Vagina.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Buhl, Frants. “Nusb.” In The Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 3,
p. 967. Leiden, 1936.
Eliade, Mircea. Patterns in Comparative Religion. New York, 1958.
Eliade, Mircea. A History of Religious Ideas, vol. 1, From the Stone
Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries. Chicago, 1978.
Fauth, Wolfgang. “Baitylia.” In Der kleine Pauly: Lexikon der An-
tike, vol. l. Stuttgart, 1964. A very compressed, well-
documented survey.
Gese, Hartmut, Maria Höfner, and Kurt Rudolph. Die Religionen
Altsyriens, Altarabiens und der Mandäer. Die Religionen der
Menschheit, vol. 10.2. Stuttgart, 1970.
Hartland, E. Sidney, et al. “Stones.” In Encyclopaedia of Religion
and Ethics, edited by James Hastings, vol. 11. Edinburgh,
- A group of articles covering primitive, Greek and
Roman, Indian, and Semitic traditions by Hartland, Percy
Gardner, William Crooke, and George A. Barton, respective-
ly. See also R. A. W. Macalister’s “Stone Monuments,” in
volume 11, and D. Miller Kay’s “Mas:s:e ̄bna ̄h,” in volume 8
(1915). These articles include valuable material despite their
sometimes outdated theories.
Heiler, Friedrich. Erscheinungsformen und Wesen der Religion. Die
Religionen der Menschheit, vol. 1. Stuttgart, 1961. A rather
short but good cross-cultural survey of the subject. Subse-
quent volumes of this voluminous series contain reliable in-
formation on stone worship: for example, volumes 5.1 (In-
donesia), 5.2 (South Pacific and Australia), 7 (Old America),
18 (Celts), 20 (Tibet and Mongolia), 22.1 (Korea), 23
(Southeast Asia), and 26 (ancient Israel).
Herter, Hans. “Hermes.” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie
(Frankfurt) 119 (1976): 193–241.
Holmberg, Uno. The Mythology of All Races, vol. 4, Finno-Ugric,
Siberian (1927). Reprint, New York, 1964. A classic study
by a field-worker and cautious historian who is largely free
from now-abandoned theories.
Hultkrantz, A ̊ke. The Religions of the American Indians. Translated
by Monica Setterwall. Los Angeles, 1979. A restricted phe-
nomenological approach by a specialist. Hultkrantz has de-
posited a comprehensive unpublished manuscript on stone
worship among the Saami (Lapps) in the Nordic Museum,
Stockholm.
Kennedy, A. R. S., and John W. Wevers. “Pillar.” In Dictionary
of the Bible, 2d ed., revised by Frederick C. Grant and H. H.
Rowley, pp. 772–773. Edinburgh, 1963. An instructive
comparison can be made with the article in the first edition,
edited by James Hastings (Edinburgh, 1909).
Manker, Ernst. Lapparnas heliga ställen. Stockholm, 1957. A stan-
dard work; includes an English summary, “The Holy Places
of the Lapps.”
Renel, Charles. “Ancêtres et dieux.” Bulletin de l’Academie Mal-
gache (Tananarive), n.s. 5 (1923): 1–263.
Ruud, Jo⁄rgen. Guder og fedre: Religionshistoriskt stoff fra Madagas-
kar. Oslo, 1947.
CARL-MARTIN EDSMAN (1987)
Translated from Swedish by David Mel Paul and
Margareta PaulSTORM GODS SEE METEOROLOGICAL BEINGS
STRAUSS, DAVID FRIEDRICH (1808–1874),
German biblical critic, man of letters, and freethinker.
Strauss is best known for his monumental book The Life of
Jesus (1835). In some fifteen hundred pages, half of which
are devoted to an analysis of the miracle and the death-
resurrection stories in the New Testament, he argued that
neither a supernaturalistic nor a rationalistic interpretation
of them is credible. Rather, these narratives should be regard-
ed as the results of a naive, primitive mentality whose natural
form of expression is myth. Under the flush of religious en-
thusiasm, messianic fervor, and the personal influence of
Jesus, the early Christians applied specifically messianic
myths and legends to Jesus. In short, the “logic” of the New
Testament narratives is this: “When the expected messiah
comes, he will do all these miraculous things; Jesus is the
messiah; therefore, Jesus must have done these things.” In aSTRAUSS, DAVID FRIEDRICH 8747