impressive than the Sakhra of the Holy Temple at Jerusalem, where, amid the associations of three thousand years of history, the bare rock, with hollows, cavities, channels, and subterranean cave, preserves the primitive features without any essential change.[2]

[1] G. Dalman, Petra und seine Felsheiligtümer (Leipzig, 1908).

[2] R. Kittel, Studien zur Hebräischen Archäologie und Religionsgeschichte (Leipzig, 1908), chap. i. Chap. ii. illustrates primitive rock-altars of Palestine and their development.

The Modern Places of Cult.—Notwithstanding the religious and political vicissitudes of Palestine, the old centres of cult have never lost the veneration of the people, and their position in modern popular belief and ritual affords many a suggestive hint for their history in the past. Although Mohammedanism allows few sacred localities, the actual current practice, in Palestine as in Asia Minor, attaches conceptions of great sanctity to a vast number of places. The shrines and sacred buildings dotted here and there upon elevated sites form a characteristic feature of the modern land, and there is abundant testimony that they are the recipients of respect and awe far more real than that enjoyed by the more official or orthodox religion. Although they are often placed under the protection of Islam by being known as the tombs of saints, prophets, and holy sheikhs, this is merely a disguise; and although it is insisted that the holy occupants are only mediators, they are the centre of antique rites and ideas which orthodox Mohammedanism rejects. Their power is often rated above that of Allah himself. Oaths by Allah are freely taken and as freely broken, those at the local shrines rarely (if ever) fail; the coarse and painful freedom of language, even in connection with Allah, becomes restrained when the natives visit their holy place.

The religious life of the peasants is bound up with the shrines and saints. There they appeal for offspring, healing, and good harvests; there they dedicate the first-fruits, firstlings, and their children, and in their neighbourhood they prefer to be buried. No stranger may intrude heedlessly within the sacred precincts, and one may see the worshipper enter barefooted praying for permission as he carefully steps over the threshold. The saint by supernatural means is able to protect everything deposited in the vicinity of the tomb, which can thus serve as a store or treasure-house. He is supreme over a local area; he is ready even to fight for his followers against the foe; for all practical purposes he is virtually the god of the district. Some of the shrines are sacred to a woman who passes for the sister or the daughter of a saint at the same or a neighbouring locality. Even the dog has been known to have a shrine in his honour, and the animal enters into Palestinian folk-lore in a manner which this unclean beast of Mohammedanism hardly seems to deserve. As a rule the people will avoid calling the occupant of the shrine by name, and some circumlocutionary epithet is preferred: the famous sheikh, father of the lion, rain-giver, dwarf, full-moon, or (in case of females) the lady of child-birth, the fortunate, and the like.

The shrines are the centres of story and legend which relate their origin, legitimise their persistence, or illustrate their power. In the course of ages the name of the saint who once chose to reveal himself there has varied, and the legends of earlier figures have been transferred and adjusted to names more acceptable to orthodoxy. Some of the figures have grown in importance and have thus extended their sphere of influence, and as difference of sect is found to be no hindrance to a common recognition of the power of the saint, the more famous shrines have been accepted by worshippers outside the original circle. In course of time, too, isolated figures have gained supremacy, and have superseded earlier distinct authorities, with the result that the same name will be found under a number of locally diverging types. Most conspicuous of all are St. George and the ever-youthful prophet Elijah, who have inherited numerous sacred places and their cults, in the same manner as St. George has become the successor of Apollo in the Greek isles. Similarly the Virgin Mary, in her turn, has frequently taken the place formerly held by the female deities of antiquity.

CHAPTER III

SACRED OBJECTS

The modern holy places, under the care of some minister, dervish, or priestly family, are the scenes of periodic visits, liturgical unctions, processions, the festal display of lights, etc., and although in the course of their lengthy history there have been certain modifications, it is to them that one must look for the persisting religion which underlay the older official cults. The rocks with cup-marks and channels, the gloomy caves and grottoes, the mountain summits, the springs or fountains which still receive the offerings of worshippers, the holy trees, the sacred sacrificial stones—these form the fundamental substructure of the land's religion, and whatever be the true origin of their sanctity, they continue to be visited when superhuman aid is required.

Trees.—It is not the shrines alone which are sacred on the ground that some saint had once revealed his presence there; there are trees (the terebinth, and more especially the oak) which are inviolable because spirits have made them their abode, or which owe their supernatural qualities to some holy being who is currently supposed to have reclined beneath them. Such trees are virtually centres of worship. Incense is burned to them, and they receive sacrifices and offerings; they are loaded with food, gifts, and (on special occasions) with lamps. They give oracles, and the sick sleep beneath their shade, confident that a supernatural messenger will prescribe for their ailments. They are decked with rags, which thus acquire wonderful properties; and the worshipper who leaves a shred as a pledge of attachment or, it may be, to transfer a malady, will take away a rag which may serve as a charm. Sacred trees were well known to early writers, and according to the Talmud there were some beneath which priests sat but did not eat of their fruit, remains of heathen sacrifice might be found there, and the Jew who sat or passed in its shade became ceremonially impure. It is unnecessary, however, to multiply examples of a feature to which the Old Testament also attests; popular belief has universally associated religious and superstitious ideas with those beneficent objects which appear to be as much imbued with motion, animation, and feeling as man himself.

The sacred tree tends to become conventionalised and is replaced by the trunk or post. As the home of a powerful influence there is an inclination to symbolise it, and to identify it with the supernatural being, with the deity itself. The development of the image (not necessarily female) from an aniconic wooden post can be illustrated by the pillars representative of Osiris, by the head of Hathor of Byblos