Irish Druids and Old Irish Religions

2 20 Old Irish Relio-ions.
Conchobar mac Nesse, where it stayed seven years, but fell
out one Good Friday. Another stone was mentioned, in
the Book of Leinster, as causing the death of an old woman,
150 years old, who, having been brought into a great
plain, was so charmed with the sight, that she would never
go back to her mountains, preferring death there by
knocking her old head upon the stone.
Elf-shots—the stone arrow-heads of their ancestors—were
long regarded with reverence. As with Western Islanders,
they served as charms for the Irish— being sometimes set
in silver, and worn as amulets about the neck, protecting
the wearer against the spiritual discharges of elf-shots from
malignant enemies. They were the arrows of fairies.
They ought not to be brought into a house. In 17 13 Llwyd
found this superstition existing in the west.
Martin speaks of finding at Inniskea a rude-looking
stone kept wrapped up in flannel, and only in the charge
of an old woman, as formerly with a pagan priestess. On
a stormy day it might be brought out, with certain magical
observances, in the confident expectation of bringing a
ship on shore, for the benefit of the wreck-loving Islanders.
The Neevougi, as the stone was called, did service in
calming the sea when the men went out fishing. It was
equally efficacious in sickness, when certain charms were
muttered over the stone. We have been privately shown,
by an Australian aborigine, a similar sacred stone, a quartz
crystal in that case, wrapped up in a dirty rag, protected
from the eyes of women. Pococke, in 1760, saw pieces of
a stone on Icolmkill used to cure a prevalent flux.
Walhouse regarded such superstitions as belonging "to
the Turanian races, and as antagonistic to the Aryan genius
and feeling." Gomme esteems " stone-worship as opposed
to the general basis of Aryan culture." The unshapely
stones worshipped in India belong to non-Aryan tribes.