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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
The idea that divine beings, holy people and magical creatures leave behind permanent marks of their immortality on the surface of the earth is common to many cultures and spiritual systems. Throughout history curious hollows, cavities, and coloured stains on stone and rock have been explained as tangible evidence of the presence and intervention of deities, saints, prophets, angels and demons. The folk motif of the miraculous impression of a foot, hand or limb finds frequent expression within Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Footprint shrines and cults abound in the Middle East, India, south-east Asia and China, from the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and Qadam Sharif in Delhi to Phra Sat in Thailand. Variously revered as the footmark of Buddha, Siva, Adam and St Thomas the Aposde, Sri Pada in Sri Lanka is perhaps the most compelling emblem of the polyvalency of this intriguing phenomenon and its capacity to range across the full spectrum of religious traditions.
1 Thompson, Stith, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, 5 vols (Copenhagen, 1955-58), 1, entries A972-A972.6; Janet Bord, Footprints in Stone (Loughborough, 2004) is a useful popular survey of this phenomenon, only some features of which are discussed in the current essay.Google Scholar
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22 Dublin, Trinity College, MS 830, Depositions concerning murder and robberies committed in the counties of Roscommon and Galway, fol. 28r. The page is fragmented at the edge, and it is unclear which part of the anatomy is under discussion.
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25 Schama, Landscape and Memory, 436—37.
26 See Bord, Footprints, 38, for a reproduction of one such pilgrimage token, and Antony Wootton, A Defence of M. Perkins Booke, Called A Reformed Catholike (London, 1606), 390, for the Spanish image of the Virgin’s foot.
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