Spring is the season of young vulnerable life as nature renews herself after the dormant months of winter, and ceremonies celebrating this rebirth of fertility (the Floralia) were recorded during Roman times as surpassing all others for their licentiousness and revelry.* Mass jubilation, dancing, and promiscuous sexual activity continued down the centuries and, in Britain, became so rowdy that in 1517 the army had to be called in to quell disturbances – several ringleaders were publicly hanged.* During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I these boisterous festivities naturally attracted the wrath of Puritans, one of whom, Philip Stubbes, wrote that,

Stubbes went on: “I have heard it credibly reported, and that viva voce by menne of greate gravitie and reputation, that of fourtie, three fcore, or a hundred maides goyng to the woode over night, there have fcarcely the third part returned home again undefiled.”*

By 1644 the Puritans managed to get Parliament to ban May Day festivities and all of the many permanent May Poles were ordered to be destroyed: sixteen years later the Monarchy was restored together with the ancient festival.*

May fertility rituals have gradually died out through industrialisation and mass urbanisation of the population which has led to a divorce from the land and recognition of the importance of seasonal cycles in the availability of food; nevertheless, rituals have survived or been re-introduced in a few places, albeit as ‘very staid affairs’ when compared to the past.*  It is more than probable that the May Pole is a direct descendant of the stone Jupiter column and early Celtic ‘totem pole’ which were, in their turn, the ‘children’ of at least some of the megalithic standing stones superseding even more ancient Neolithic sacred wooden pillars. Time has gone a full circle.

While many people, even clergy, might openly profess a belief in Christianity they also secretly continued using the ancient stones of their ancestors as objects of pagan veneration and superstition. Where it proved impossible to prevent unauthorised forms of worship the full rigour of an intolerant Church hierarchy was brought to bear. From the middle of the 5th century onwards councils of bishops issued numerous edicts.

Sacred stones were to be dug up and destroyed or hidden away in inaccessible places; the worship of “Trees Fountains or Stones” was an act of sacrilege leading to possible excommunication, so proving that many Christians carried on pagan practices (pagans could hardly be excommunicated). In AD 601 English kings were ordered by the Pope to suppress the worship of ‘idols’: Earconbert, King of Kent, was the first to personally command idols throughout his whole kingdom “to be forsaken and destroyed”.* As late as the reign of King Canute a royal statute of AD1014 forbade “the barbarous adoration of the Sun and Moon, Fire, Fountains, Stones, and all kinds of Trees and Wood”.*

For centuries Christian and pagan beliefs continued side by side in ever increasing antagonism.*  In remote rural areas* paganism almost always gained the upper hand; a situation which continued well into recent times despite efforts by the Church to suppress it, particularly after the 16th century Reformation and the arrival of Methodism in the late 18th century – both movements having strong resentment of any kind of imagery as being reminiscent of ‘popery’.*

With the advent of Christianity and its position as the only permitted religion within the Roman Empire, ancient beliefs associated with certain pagan deities were transferred, often with official endorsement, or at least tacit approval, to various Christian phallic ‘saints’. Childless women in France made pilgrimages to a whole host of these obscure men and women.  These included Saints Anne d’Auray, Nicodème, Gobrien, Armel Berroux, Julienn de Vouvantes and Ronan; also the Virgin of St.Jouan-des-Guérèts and Our Lady of La Clarté* as well as to St.Eustache in the commune of St.Étienne-en-Coglès (Ille-et-Vilaine).*  On a mountaintop convent at Minimes barren women invoked a Saint Lucie for her help – the wife of King Louis XIII, Anne of Austria, went there on a pilgrimage.*

A book on the traditions and superstitions of Brittany published in 1882 tells how barren women ‘rubbed’ themselves on the statues of certain saints:* in other cases it is specified that they ‘rubbed their abdomen’ on statues of monks* and at Pacy-sur-Eure (Normandy) women rubbed their abdomen on a statue of St.Ildefonse.*

During the Middle Ages women in ‘Christian’ Europe frequently sought a remedy for their infertility by kissing the end of the saint’s phallus or by placing “a part of their body naked against the image of the saint”, or simply just sitting upon it.* Sometimes ancient statues, pagan fertility deities perhaps, were given saintly status and invoked for fertility. A Gallo-Roman* statue at Gamaye (Côte d’Or) was known as St.Greluchot (or St.Freluchot):* another Gallo-Roman statue at the same location called St.Ploto was scrapped – the dust mixed with spring water and drunk by infertile women.*

But not only did childless women make pilgrimages to wells, fountains, abbeys, churches, chapels and other Christian places of healing but they also made full use of pagan sites having long-standing traditions of healing and fertility. Links with the May Day pagan feast of Beltane extended to other antique pagan practices involving use of standing stones as fertility objects – the shape and presumed fertility associations of certain ancient stones and natural rocks led to them being visited by barren women as ‘saints’.

In the Auvergne, close to Clermont and near an ancient track to Limoges, is a mountain called Tracros on the eastern side of which was a rock which appeared to be detached from it: it looked like a statue and was known locally as Foutin from its phallic appearance* – a similar rock was located at Puy-de-Dôme.*  At Nohant-Vicq (Indre) barren women swallowed scrapings from a prehistoric dolmen known as St.Greluchon* and were accustomed to rub themselves on a Bronze Age menhir near St.Renan (Finistère)* as well as on a rock in the Aspe Valley (Basses-Pyrénées).* They rubbed their bellies on the Peyre-Longue near Dax (Landes)*  and against a stone near St.Laurent-les-Mâcon.* Rocks and stones were used for a similar purpose at Sarrance (Basses-Pyrénées),*  at Campiglio (Piedmont),* and at St.Étienne en Coglès.*  A 1908 publication on contemporary paganism recalls that girls desirous of getting married were in the habit of rubbing themselves on a “phalloid projection” on a stone called Pierre de Chantecoq.*

Infertile women visited a stone near Cervon (Nièvre) called Belle Pierre (Handsome Peter or Handsome Rock)*  but merely ‘sat’ on a monolith in the commune of Déclines near Lyons.* They spent three nights on a rock called Jument de Pierre (Stone Mare) near Locronan in Brittany*  and stones at Simandre and Selignat were also believed to promote fertility – the latter even after it had been removed.*  Prehistoric stones known as the Venus of Quinipily (Brittany) and the menhir at Kerloas served the same purpose.* Fecundity giving stones could be found at Vallée d’Aspe (Basses-Pyrénées), Ker-Rohan (Côte-du-Nord) and St.Renan (Finistère).* One of the few specific references to men desirous of fertility relates to the menhir of St.Renan ou de Kerloaz (Finistère) where bridegrooms rubbed against it to ensure male offspring* – at Carnac husbands chased their childless wives around a menhir during the full moon!*

Some ancient pagan ‘fertility’ stones close to, or within Christian places of worship, were sanctioned by the clergy as objects of fecundity for use by infertile parishioners. Barren women visited a chapel at Bouillé-Loret (Deux-Sèvres) where there was a small menhir* and habitually rubbed a natural stone in a chapel near Ciney (Namur).*  They also performed a naked ritual of rubbing themselves on a church pillar at Orcival (Puy-de-Dôme) which one author called a phalloid stone:* another recalled that the stone was kissed by these women* and Dulaure wrote that the church was dedicated to the Virgin of Orcival and that the pillar was ‘embraced’ by sterile women.*  Powder from a holy stone at Rofray in a chapel near St.Georges-de-Reneins (Rhône) was used as a cure for sterility*  and a possible phallic survival continued in the latter part of the 19th century at Huez (Isère) where young girls customarily prayed on a pointed stone in the chapel of St.Nicholas to obtain husbands.*

Phallic stones were venerated in Haute-Garonne and young men are known to have danced around a stone near the church at Poubeau while grasping their penis.* At the Kempock Stane in Strathclyde (Scotland) newly married couples walked hand-in-hand around the stone while asking for a fruitful union.* At the White Lady of Ballafrear on the Isle of Man, a quartz pillar close to a holy well, girls soon to be wed would fill their mouths with the water and walk ‘sunwise’ three times around the stone before dawn – showing the important link between sun and water – to ensure their own fertility. Later, when pregnant, the same ritual was performed to achieve a painless delivery.*

Accounts of fertility rituals usually tell of women ‘rubbing’ themselves on the stone, often using the belly or abdomen, but this is, at least in most cases, a euphemism for sexually stimulating themselves in imitation of intercourse. All types of ancient stone in Western Europe, too many to mention, were used as objects of fertility as well as of healing. It is clear that well known traditional functions of protection and fertility attributed in antiquity to Greek hermae and Roman termini stuck to a great number of erect prehistoric stones and natural rocks, and that these rituals were carried out well into the 19th century despite specific prohibitions issued by royal and ecclesiastical authority a thousand years before.

The folklore of stones in various countries tells us that they were believed to go to drink and to wash; turn around at specific times of the day; warn of impending danger and prophesy the future; that, once a year, they became maidens who would visit and bathe in a nearby stream; that they could proclaim and sanctify monarchs who might sit upon them.*  Stones, at least some of them, were looked upon by ancient inhabitants as living beings having supernatural powers. They were offered food and drink or smeared with fatty or liquid ‘foods’ – cupmarks and holed stones were certainly used in recent centuries for libations of milk or beer;* they were used throughout Celtic lands to produce rain by rolling – probably the noise was thought to be imitating the thunder which so often precedes a rain storm.* Stones could be responsible for producing both life and the necessities for continuation of life; stones had a life-spirit in common with all other living, moving nature – human beings, animals, birds, the wind, springs, rivers, the moon, the sun, the stars.