Meteorites and Celestial Stones Kunz: Magic of Jewels Page 98



	ON METEORITES, OR CELESTIAL STONES 81 The site of the city of Seleucia is said to have been determined by the fall of an aerolite, and this stone is figured on some of the coins of the Seleucidœ, a thunderbolt appearing in its stead on other coins. In the Temple of Diana, at Ephesus, there was a stone partly fashioned into the conventional form of the Ephesian Diana. This, it was asserted, had fallen down from the heavens. The stone is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles (xix. 35), where we read that the city of the Ephesians was "a worshipper of the great goddess Diana, and of the image which fell down from Jupiter." In this text the word "image" has been supplied by the translators, a more literal rendering being "that which fell down from the sky." This clearly shows that the stone only faintly indicated the human form. Tacitus says of the stone sacred to the Astarte (or Aphrodite) of Paphos, that it was a symbol of the goddess, not a human effigy, since it was an obscurely formed cone.¹⁷In his life of Apollonius of Tyana, Philostratus, also, mentions this stone and tells us that when Apollonius visited Paphos, he admired there "the famous symbolic figure of Aphrodite."¹⁸ These "living stones" were often covered with ornaments and vestments, and it has been conjectured that these adornments were, in some cases, changed so as to accord with the garments appropriate to certain special festivals of the respective gods.¹⁹ The colossal emerald of the temple of Melkarth at Tyre is designated in the fragments of Sanchoniathon as an or star fallen from heaven. It was said to have been raised up by Astarte, and this last myth is " Cornelii Taciti, " Opera," Lipsiae, 1885, p. 52. ^u Philostratus, " Apollonius of Tyana," trans, by Baltzer, Rudoletadt i. Th., 1883, p. 143 (iii, 59). " Lenormant, in Daremberg and Saglio's Diet, des antiq. grecques et romaines, vol. i, Parie, 1873, p. 645.