Blinkenberg, Christian: The thunderweapon in religion and folklore: a study in comparative archaeology (London , Edinburgh: Cambridge University Press, 1911)

ι6

THE THUNDERWEAPON

a stone ? That the inhabitants of classical Greece really re-
garded the stone axes as thunderstones is quite evident from
the tradition of “ceraunia,” which Pliny has quoted from a
Greek author, Sotacus [ii5«]· From Pliny this quotation
passed into the books written on the subject of stones in the
later days of the ancient world and in the Middle Ages. It
reappears, moreover, as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, when polymathic authors produced a pseudo-scientific

Fig· 5 a.


Fig. 5 B.


theory of the origin of lightning phenomena, of the formation
of thunderstones, and so forth. This literary tradition, which
has but slight connection with the popular belief examined here,
and which has seldom got further than the four walls of a study,
need not be discussed in detail, especially as it has recently been
fully treated elsewhere [i 15a]. Traced to its source in Greek
literature, however, it may show that popular belief in ancient
Greece associated the stone axe with the idea of the descent
of a stone from the sky accompanied by lightning.
But it is not only from Pliny that we have evidence of