Crooke informs me that the Hindus call the symbol of the thunderbolt vajra (a sort of forked trident), but adds, — "It cannot be said whether in early times they connected it with the celts." Frazer gives three examples of celts regarded as thunderbolts, but all these are from southern and central India. In the former region they are said to be the thunderbolts of Vishnu.[1] Sir J. Evans[2] says they are renovated and placed against the Mahadeos, or painted red and treated as Mahadeo. In northern India such things are practically unknown in the great plains, being found only on the hills fringing the valley of the Ganges. The people regard them as uncanny, and pile them up at village shrines. As to their being called thunderbolts, it is difficult to speak generally, but in the Nāga Hills at all events they are considered to have fallen from heaven,[3] and in Burma the belief is as definite as anywhere else in the world, as we learn from Capt. C. J. F. S. Forbes[4]:—
"Their oaths are generally taken by drinking the water out of a jar in which a musket, spear, sword, a tiger's and a crocodiles tooth, and a stone hatchet or 'celt' (which they deem a thunderbolt), have been immersed, calling on the spirit of each of these means of death to punish the committal of perjury."
There still remains one form of the keraunic belief which is diametrically opposed to everything we have yet met, — the belief that thunderbolts, or batu halintar, as the Malays call them, are not hurled from the sky, but rise out of the ground, and strike upwards, the lightning also originating, not from the clouds, but from the agitated movements of large wild animals. This belief was recorded by Mr. J. B. Scrivenor,[5] but I have also myself heard suggestions of this kind from the Malays, and a definite account of the lightning part of it was included in the
