Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/75

 Rh have the intimate connection which exists between the thunder and the sun.

Amongst the Aryan peoples of India we find a god whose favourite weapon in his fight against the demons is the thunderbolt. This god, glorified above all others in the Rigveda hymns, was Indra, that fabulously strong deity who corresponds to the Thor of the Scandinavians. His original weapon was the "heavenly stone" which the primeval smiths had sharpened for him; it was thus a kind of stone axe. Then a bolt was prepared for him which, according to some hymns, was made out of the skull of a horse, while others describe it as being made of bronze. Strictly speaking, it was made of "ayas," the same word as the Latin "aes," which word in the earlier Indian language signifies copper or bronze, but which in later times, after iron became known, means this new metal.

From the fact that one of the Rigveda hymns gives to the lightning the name of the axe of heaven, we may rightly infer that Indra's axe is really the lightning.

The Indian myths relate how a cunning being forfeited his head to the artist who forged the bolt for Indra, but saved it by stratagem. The northern myths tell the same legend about Loke and the gnome who forged the hammer for Thor. The earth is the mother of Thor as well as of Indra. Indra drives about, just as Thor does, in a chariot, the wheels of which roll through the air. We have good reason to believe that, according to the earliest notions, Indra's chariot, like that of Thor, was drawn by bucks. A later belief was that it was drawn by horses, but these horses could come to life again, exactly as Thor's bucks did, after having been killed and eaten.

We also come across gods carrying axes in their hands in several parts of Western Asia.

One of the bas-reliefs dug up from the ruins of the Assyrian Nimrud represents a procession in which several images of gods are carried in exactly the same manner