will see to this,—and then the priests arrive and find the stone, and exact the usual heavy penalty. Again, a form of ordeal consists in drinking from a bowl of water in which either a thunder-stone or the skull of a person who has been killed by lightning has been dipped.
It may be concluded from the numerous accounts which refer to the keraunic belief either in Nigeria or other parts of West Africa that it is chiefly localized in that part of the continent, and indeed there does seem to be some good ground for thinking so. Mr. Henry Balfour, for instance,[1] remarks that:—
"Western Africa is no exception to this general rule (of the keraunic belief). Sir R. Burton, the Rev. T. T. Bowen, Major A. B. Ellis, and others, all refer to this belief in this region. Burton and Winwood Reade have told us that on the Gold Coast stone axes were called "thunderstones" (sráman-bo) and "god-axes," and were carefully preserved for their supposed universal virtues. A specimen was found by Mr. Kühne on an altar or shrine at Ashanti. In that region, too, they were called "god-axes.""
Ellis gives a similar account of flint arrowheads and axes on the Slave Coast, among the Ewe-speaking people,[2] who believe them to be "thunderbolts" associated with their god of lightning. In Benin, according to Mr. Balfour,
"the superstitious reverence with which stone axes were regarded ... is abundantly manifest from the frequent representations of these objects upon the elaborate bronze castings, especially upon some of the larger human heads and the state maces. Upon the latter the surmounting human figure is frequently represented as holding a neolithic axe blade in the left hand. By analogy we may assume that in Benin the stone axes were "thunderbolts," and became objects of veneration as symbols of the thunder-god."[3]
