identical with the reason for curing a snake-bitten man by the snake that bit him, i.e. that the patient by entering, so to speak, into ‘blood-brotherhood’ with the offending weapon, obtained relief. For we must remember that to them the weapon, like other inert objects, would yet be animate, as I shall hereafter show.
For classical times Mr. A. B. Cook may be relied upon,[1] but Sir J. Evans quotes a remarkable passage referring to celts in Suetonius, who mentions, as an augury of Galba’s accession to the throne, that lightning fell into a lake in Cantabria and 12 axes were found, “a by no means ambiguous omen of empire,” (Galba, viii. c. 4).
With regard to the rest of Europe, those who wish may refer to Montelius,[2] who traces the axe cult back to Perun, the god of thunder in Slavonia, and to Stone-Age examples in Ancient Gaul, Greece, and Scandinavia, where the thunder-god’s hammer was developed among natives who were familiar, or had been very recently familiar, with the use of stone implements. We should hardly have expected, therefore, to find it in either North or South America, though according to Evans[3] it does occur in Brazil, which is a country that can hardly be considered free from European influence. The examples given by Tylor are not examples of flint implements being so regarded, but of natural stones (of flint etc.). He states, for instance, that
“the lightning entering that ground scatters in all directions thunder-bolt stones, which are flints, etc., their reason for this notion being the very natural one, that these siliceous stones actually produce a flash when struck.”[4]
After giving several examples which have no direct
- ↑ See “The Cretan Axe-cult outside Crete,” The Transactions of the Third International Congress for the History of Religions, vol. ii., pp. 184-94; cf. also Blinkenberg, The Thunder-weapon in Religion and Folklore.
- ↑ Folk-Lore, vol. xxi., pp. 60-78.
- ↑ Op. cit., p. 52.
- ↑ Primitive Culture, vol. ii., p. 238 (2nd ed.).
