Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 16, 1905.djvu/323

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The European Sky -God. 275

a purple cloak: he is armed with a thunderbolt and a trident in his left hand and a two-pronged fork in his right, while a dolphin appears at his side. The title Tutor and certain black strokes, which have been taken to denote an architectural cornice,^ show that we have here to do with an actual cult. It is obviously that of the triple Jupiter : the thunderbolt belongs to him as a sky-god ; the trident and dolphin as a sea-god ; the fork as an earth- god. Lastly, it is significant that Vediovis, the chthonian Jupiter, is represented on coins of the Roman gentes with a thunderbolt - or a trident : ^ in other words, the earth-god has the attributes of the sky-god and the sea-god. We might almost say with the author of the Asclepms : * "Jupiter Plutonius is lord alike of land and sea."

In dealing with the Greeks I ^ showed that superhuman power was at first expressed by various grotesque or monstrous forms with a plurality of heads, arms, legs, etc. ; that a convenient substitute for this plurality, and one strictly in accordance with primitive thought, was found in a three-bodied or three-headed or three-eyed shape ; and that another such suggestion of manifold activity was conveyed by double or Janiform figures. For example, Argus, the Argive Zeus, had a hundred eyes, or else had three eyes, or else had a Janiform head.° We have next to see whether the multiple, the triple, and the dual types of divinity are equally applicable to Jupiter.

It may be at once admitted that they are not. On the contrary, there are very few traces indeed of abnormal

^ Annali deW Institiito Arch. Hi. 63.

-E. Babelon Monnaies de la R^publiquc ro?naine i. 2S1, 506 ff., 532, ii. 8, 133, 266.

3 lb. ii. 6, 8.

^{X^vX-l Ascl. 27 terrae vero et mari dominatur lupiter Plutonius, et hie nutritor est animantium mortalium et fructiferarum.

5 folk-lore xv. 282 ff. « lb. 287 ff.