Cook, Arthur B.: Zeus: a study in ancient religion (Band 1): Zeus god of the bright sky (Cambridge, 1914)

The Transition from Sky to Sky-god 9

(b) The Transition from Sky to Sky-god.

The precise steps by which men advanced from a belief in
Zeus the Sky to a belief in Zeus the Sky-god are hidden from
us in the penumbra of a prehistoric past. The utmost that we
can hope is to detect here and there survivals in language or
custom or myth, which may enable us to divine as through gaps
in a mist the track once travelled by early thought1. In such
circumstances to attempt anything like a detailed survey or recon-
struction of the route would be manifestly impossible. Nevertheless
the shift from Sky to Sky-god was a momentous fact, a fact which
modified the whole course of Greek religion, and its ultimate
consequence was nothing less than the rise of faith in a personal
God, the Ruler and Father of all. In view of this great issue we
may well strain our backward gaze beyond the point of clear vision
and even acquiesce in sundry tentative hypotheses, if they help
us to retrace in imagination the initial stages of the journey. I
shall make bold, therefore, to surmise that in Greece, as elsewhere,
religion effected its upward progress along the following lines.

When those who first used the word Zeus went out into the
world and looked abroad, they found themselves over-arched by
the blue and brilliant sky, a luminous Something fraught with
incalculable possibilities of weal or woe. It cheered them with
its steady sunshine. It scared them with its nickering fires. It
fanned their cheeks with cool breezes, or set all knees a-tremble
with reverberating thunder. It mystified them with its birds
winging their way in ominous silence or talking secrets in an un-
known tongue. It paraded before men's eyes a splendid succession
of celestial phenomena, and underwent for all to see the daily
miracle of darkness and dawn. Inevitably, perhaps instinctively,
they would regard it with awe—that primitive blend of religious
feelings2—and would go on to conciliate it by any means in their
power. This is the stage of mental and moral development
attributed by Herodotos to the ancient Persians. ' I am aware/
he says3, ' that the Persians practise the following customs. They

1 The only writer, so far as I know, who has recognised and done justice to this
blank stretch in our knowledge of Zeus is Gruppe in his masterly handbook [Gr. Myth.
Rel. p. 753 'die Entstehung der Vorstellung von den einzelnen Gottern das dunkelste
Gebiet der gesamten griechischen Religionsgeschichte ist,'p. 1102 'Zwischen dem Urzeus
und dem historischen Zeus liegen tiefe Kliifte, die wir in Gedanken zwar leicht iiber-
springen konnen, aber nicht uberspringen diirfen').

2 R. R. Marett The Threshold of Religion London 1909 p. 13 ( = ' Pre-Animistic
Religion' in Folk-Lore 1900 xi. 168), W. Wundt Volkerpsychologie Leipzig 1906 ii. 1.
171 ff. 'Die praanimistische Hypothese.'

3 Hdt. 1. 131. The passage is paraphrased also in Strab. 732.