Page:Origin and Growth of Religion (Rhys).djvu/199

Rh summit of Olympus in Thessaly, that land which was the home of the Greeks before they spread further southwards. The choice of the god's seat of superiority, overlooking the landscape below, would certainly seem to have been dictated, at least in part, by his solar origin and connection with the sky. There on the mountain-top he was supposed to rule the weather: there the clouds gathered themselves together before making their descent on the plains below; thence the Hashes of the god's lightning burst forth at one time, and thither the mists might be seen at another lazily creeping. Such were the phenomena which the ancient Greeks associated with Zeus, and a richly mythical poem in the Welsh language refers to the Celtic Zeus as the blazer of the mountain-top.

Further, the views of the Greeks and the Celts as to the method of procuring rain from the god, when the earth suffered from excessive drought, will be seen from the following instances to have coincided to a remarkable extent: I allude to the Lycæan mountain in Arcadia, the top of which was sacred to Zeus and stood so high that the greater part of the Peloponnese was to be seen from it. Now there was a story current to the effect that it was on that Peloponnesian height that the god had spent his childhood, and that once in times in the distant past an Arcadian king had there sacrificed his child on his altar. Within the sacred enclosure the god's presence was always believed to shine so that nothing there could cast a shadow, and on the same mountain there bubbled