Thunderstone (folklore) - Decline of Thunderstone Mythology

Decline of Thunderstone Mythology

Andrew Dickson White described the discovery of the true origin of thunderstones as a "line of observation and thought... fatal to the theological view." In the last years of the sixteenth century Michael Mercati tried to prove that the "thunder-stones" were weapons or implements of early races of men; but for some reason his book was not published until the following century, when other thinkers had begun to take up the same idea. In 1723 Antoine Laurent de Jussieu addressed the French Academy on "The Origin and Uses of Thunder-stones". He showed that recent travellers from various parts of the world had brought a number of weapons and other implements of stone to France, and that they were essentially similar to what in Europe had been known as "thunderstones". A year later this fact was firmly embedded in the minds of French scientists by the Jesuit Joseph-Francois Lafitau, who published a work showing the similarity between the customs of aborigines then existing in other lands and those of the early inhabitants of Europe. So began, in these works of Jussieu and Lafitau, the science of Ethnology. It was more than 100 years later, after the French Revolution of 1830, that the political climate in Europe was free enough of religious sentiment for archaeological discoveries to be dispassionately investigated and the conclusion reached that human existence spanned a much greater period of time than any theologian had dreamt of.