Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/83

 Rh In one of these Mycenæan tombs an engraved stone was lying, representing several persons grouped round an erect double axe with a handle, in such a way that the scene evidently has a religious significance (Fig. 10).

A double axe, furnished with a handle, is also met with as a symbol or an ornament on Greek pottery, from the latter part of the second millennium B.C. (Fig. 11). A similar, sometimes T-shaped, figure is also seen on coins from Asia Minor by the side of the standing or sitting Zeus-Baal, and on several Greek coins. Many Greek coins have this sign tripled, as is shown in Fig. 12, and it has been supposed that when thus arranged it signifies the Trinity that the Greeks, possibly through influences from the Orient, imagined in connection with Zeus.

Some coins from Elis have the head of Zeus on the obverse, and on the reverse side the tripled T-shaped hammer or axe. Other coins from the same place have the head of Zeus on the obverse, and three thunderbolts on the reverse side. This remarkable fact is a further proof that the hammer and the thunderbolt denote the very same thing. It also shows how the Greeks, in the course of time, passed from the older to the younger symbol, from the axe or the hammer to the lightning.

In Greece, as in other countries, the sun god came gradually to be worshipped under many different names.

Though it is believed that Apollo in olden times was figured with a double axe in his hand, yet Zeus carries, in all now existent images from Greece, the lightning, shaped in the well-known manner. Other Greek gods have retained the double axe, or the hammer, of which the outlines correspond to those of the axe. The best known amongst them is Hephaistos, which god, according to the myth, soon after his birth fell down from heaven. There is therefore no doubt about his signifying the lightning. We know that Hephaistos is often depicted with a double axe or a hammer (Fig. 13). An author who has fully treated