Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 16, 1905.djvu/317

Rh of Jupiter, was taken by the priests in procession up the Capitoline Hill, and solemnly drenched with water as a magical or quasi-magical cure for drought. The stone normally stood outside the Porta Capena, near the temple of Mars; but, for reasons which will subsequently appear, this circumstance does not militate against its connexion with Jupiter.

It has been plausibly maintained that the Jupiter worshipped when the rain was charmed forth (elicitur) was Jupiter Elicius, who had an altar on the Aventine. If so, it may have been thought that Jupiter himself came down in the form of a shower—a conception voiced by Virgil in a passage already quoted. But Jupiter Elicius was a thunder-god as well as a rain-god; for it was he who, when the people was panic-stricken by continual lightnings and rain, showed King Numa how the storms might be stayed, and at a later date slew with a thunderbolt Numa's successor, Tullus Hostilius. We have, therefore, also to reckon with the belief that Jupiter might fall as a lightning-flash or a thunderbolt, appropriate manifestations