Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/90

 § 2.

[Greek: Ek Dios archômestha.]

To Zeus, the ancient father of gods and men, belongs precedence; but there is in truth little room for him in the modern scheme of popular religion. His functions have been transferred to the Christian God, and his personality merged in that of the Father whom the Church acknowledges. But though he is no longer a deity, the ancient conception of him has imposed narrow limitations upon the character of his successor. We have noted already that the God now recognised exercises the same general control, as did formerly Zeus, over all the changes and chances of this mortal life, but has, again resembling Zeus, for his special province only the regulation of the more monotonous phases of nature and the weather. The more unusual phenomena, and among them sometimes even the thunder, to which S. Elias has pretensions, are delegated to saints or to non-Christian deities; but for the most part the thunder remains the possession of God, as it was always that of Zeus; and its more important concomitant, the lightning, is never, I think, attributed to S. Elias, but is wielded by God alone.

The very name of this weapon which the Christian God has inherited is suggestive of the Olympian régime. Much has been heard lately of the double-headed axe as a religious symbol which seems to have been constantly associated, especially in Crete, with the worship of Zeus. The modern Greek word for what we call the thunderbolt is [Greek: astropeleki] (a syncopated form of [Greek: astrapopeleki] by loss of one of two concurrent syllables beginning with the same consonant), and means literally a 'lightning-axe.' The weapon therefore which the supreme God wields is conceived as an axe-shaped missile; and, though in the ancient literature which has come down to us we may nowhere find the word [Greek: pelekys] used of the thunderbolt, there is no reason why the modern word should not be the expression of a conception inherited from antiquity and so furnish a clue to what in itself seems a simple and suitable explanation of the much-canvassed symbol.

Again the divine associations of the thunderbolt now as in the