Cook, Arthur B.: Zeus: a study in ancient religion (Band 2,1): Zeus god of the dark sky (thunder and lightning): Text and notes (Cambridge, 1925)

Superstitious practices with axes

propriateness in this oddly assorted couple; for the solar sign of the
Lycians was sometimes equipped with the heads of swans or ducks1
(fig. 632)*, and the swan (or duck3) was, according to J. Dechelette4,
'le principal symbole ou compagnon du soleil pendant la seconde
moitie de l'age du bronze et au premier age du fer dans l'Europe du

sud, du centre et du nord.' Nevertheless it cannot be too strongly
insisted that, to the Greeks of the classical period, Odysseus and
Penelope—whatever they may have been in the prehistoric past—
were simply hero and heroine, and uncommonly human at that.
After all, this is the secret of their immortality.

(-v/f) Superstitious practices with axes.

Those who have weighed the evidence adduced in the course of
this section (from page 505 onwards) will not hesitate to admit that
the axe, whether double or single, was over a large part of the
ancient world recognised as a visible token of the sky-god. Accord-
ingly it is reasonable to expect that round it would spring up the
usual crop of rites and ceremonies, which in process of time, obscured
or misunderstood, would dwindle into a variety of superstitious
practices.

Of such we have already noticed some; for instance, the habit
of wearing axes or axe-shaped pendants, which ran through a
whole series of evolutionary forms5. In this connexion I would
recall a lively little passage in Theophrastos' description of 'The
Complaisant Man':

'Then when he is asked to dinner he will request the host to send for the
children; and will say of them, when they come in, that they are as like their
father as figs ; and will draw them towards him, and kiss them, and establish
them at his side,—playing with some of them, and himself saying "Wineskin,;'
"Hatchet," and permitting others to go to sleep upon him, to his anguish6.'

1 Supra i. 300 f. fig. 232.

2 Fig. 632 represents a unique stater of Lykia, which came to me from the Pozzi
collection {Pozzi Sale Catalogue Geneve 1920 p. 151 (wrongly described) no. 2751 pi. 80).
The three branches of the Lycian symbol are here terminated by the heads of a cock, a
swan (or duck), and a griffin respectively. Weight: 9^62 grammes.

3 Supra p. 648 f.

4 J. Dechelette Manuel d'arche'ologie pre'historique Paris 1910 ii. r. 421.
3 Supra p. 647 ft".

6 Theophr. char. 5 (= 2 Jebb) trans. Sir R. C. Jebb. The new edition, revised by