Each city has a citizenship ceremony where children, who reach intellectual majority, swear an oath of allegiance to their city while touching or kissing the Home Stone. This ceremony may also require vouching by existing citizens. Another requirement may also be a questioning by a committee of citizens to determine your worthiness to the city. Nonperformance of this ceremony can be cause for expulsion from the city. You can renounce your Home Stone and change your citizenship to another city but this is rarely done. The Home Stone is more important than caste prejudices or other forms of prejudice. It inspires intense loyalty, great enough that everyone would die to protect it.
Stealing a Home Stone is a heinous sacrilege and punishable by the most painful of deaths. Conversely it is also the greatest of glories to steal one from another city. As long as the Home Stone survives, so does the city. Matthew Cabot retained the Home Stone, when Koroba was destroyed by the Priest-Kings, therefore still keeping the city alive. It was later rebuilt around its Home Stone.
The origin of the Home Stone, according to legend, came out of the past when Hesius, the mythical first man of Gor, performed great labors for the Priest-Kings and was promised a reward greater than gold. He was given a flat piece of rock with the single character representing his native village. When he questioned them, he was told the reward was indeed worth more than gold, and they called it a 'Home Stone'.
Long ago, in peasant villages, each hut was built around a flat stone placed in the center of a circular dwelling. The stone was carved with the family sign and called the Home Stone. Each peasant within his hut was a sovereign. Later, Home Stones were used for villages, then towns and cities. In the villages, it was placed in the market area. In most cities, it is usually placed freely in the top of the highest tower, though it is well guarded.
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"The Home Stone of Ar, like most Home Stones in the cylinder cities, was kept free on the tallest tower, as if in open defiance of the tarnsmen of rival cities. It was, of course, kept well-guarded and at the first sign of serious danger would undoubtedly be carried to safety. Any attempt on the Home Stone was regarded by the citizens of the city as sacrilege of the most heinous variety and punishable by the most painful of deaths, but paradoxically, it was regarded as the greatest of glories to purloin the Home Stone of another city, and the warrior who managed this was acclaimed, accorded the highest honors of the city, and was believed to be favored by the Priest-Kings themselves."
---book #1 Tarnsman of Gor, page 67-68
"One of the latter was the power source of the Priest-Kings, the great plant wherein the basic energy is generated for their many works and machines.
'Sometimes this is spoken of as the Home Stone of all Gor,' said Sarm, as we walked the long, winding, iron spiral that clung to the side of a vast, transparent blue dome. Within that dome, burning and glowing, emitting a bluish, combustive refulgence, was a huge, crystalline reticulated hemisphere. --- At last we had reached the very apex of the great blue dome and I could see the glowing, bluish, refulgent, reticulated hemisphere far below me.
Surrounding the bluish dome, in a greater concentric dome of stone I saw walkway upon walkway of paneling and instrumentation. Here and there Priest-Kings moved lightly about, occasionally noting the movements of scent-needles, sometimes delicately adjusting a dial with the nimble, hooklike appendages at the tips of their forelegs.
I supposed the dome to be a reactor of some sort.
I looked down through the dome beneath us. 'So this is the source of the Priest-Kings' power,' I said.
'No,' said Sarm.
I looked up at him.
He moved his forelegs in a strange parallel pattern, touching himself with each leg at three places on the thorax and one behind the eyes. 'Here,' he said, 'is the true source of our power.'
I then realised that he had touched himself at the points of entry taken by the wires which had been infixed in the young Priest-King's body on the stone table in the secret compartment below Misk's chamber. Sarm had pointed to his eight brains."
---Book #3 Priest-Kings of Gor, page 143-145
"This love of their city tends to become invested in a stone which is known as the Home Stone, and which is normally kept in the highest cylinder in the city. In the Home Stone - sometimes little more than a crude piece of carved rock, dating back perhaps several hundred generations to when the city was only a cluster of huts by the bank of a river, sometimes a magnificent and impressively wrought, jewel- encrusted cube of marble or granite - the city finds its symbol. Yet to speak of a symbol is to fall short of the mark. It is almost as if the city itself were identified with the Home Stone, as if it were to the city what life is to man. The myths of these matters have it that while the Home Stone survives, so, too, must the city.
But not only is it the case that each city has its Home Stone. The simplest and humblest village, and even the most primitive hut in that village, perhaps only a cone of straw, will contain its own Home Stone, as will the fantastically appointed chambers of the Administrator of so great a city as Ar."
---Book #2 Outlaw of Gor, page 22-23
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