Fetish Stones the Abode of Spirits.
The virtue of all these fetish stones rests in their embodying the spirits of gods or deified men. As we have shown, this is a common principle of popular belief. In one of Miss Stokes’s Indian tales, “The man who went to seek his fate,” the fate is found in stones, some standing up and some lying down. The man beats the stone which embodies his fate because he is miserably poor. Mr. H. Spencer thinks that the idea of persons being turned into stones may have arisen from instances of actual petrifaction of trees and the like; but this is not very probable, and it is much simpler to believe with Dr. Tylor that it depends on the principles of animism.107