Everyone will be familiar with the image of Zeus hurling thunderbolts at mortals and deities alike for overstepping their boundaries or meddling in divine affairs. But while Zeus may be the most well known he is but one such example and far from the oldest. Usually the deity of a specific pantheon that has control over thunder and wields the lightning bolt as a weapon is also the head of that pantheon; Zeus as ruler of Olympus being case in point, although he did have to overthrow the Titans first but that is where the thunderbolt came in handy. They are also invariably male deities. While for instance solar deities can be male or female in various cultures, the thunder deity is always a god and never a goddess.
The Greek Zeus was the same as the Roman Jupiter, also head of the pantheon, and this applies to the Etruscan Tinia as well, both a result of syncretism. Syncretism in mythology is a form of assimilation, occuring when different cultures adapt one anothers' deities or and equate them to their own.
Zeus likely originated in the Hurrian deity Teshub. The Hurrians in turn probably borrowed him from Hattians who called him Taru and the Hittites used the name Tarhun. The Hurrian, Hattian and Hittite peoples inhabited northern Mesopotamia, (present day Anatolia , Turkey). Teshub’s origin myth is closely resembled by that of Zeus. Teshub was often depicted with a triple thunderbolt and a mace or axe. And it is the axe that also stands in relation to various other thunder deities. Of particular interest here is the double-headed axe, which is also called a labrys. The African thunder deity Shango from the Yoruba religion is associated with a labrys. The Minoans of Crete in particular often made use of symbolic axes of this type. Though the word labrys is not Greek but possibly Lydian in origin. There is no surviving mythology from Lydia (also present-day Anatolia, Turkey) save for various characters of Lydian origin that appear in Greek mythology, such as Omphale who is given a labrys by Hercules, a son of Zeus.
To name some other examples: In Gaul and Britain there was Taranis, here too the name can be traced to Tarhun/Taru. But also Thor and his hammer (which is also called an axe at times) Mjöllnir, in Germanic/Nordic mythology. Thor, known also as Donar, from which are derived 'Donner' meaning thunder in German and the English word thunder itself. From India we have the god Indra* and in Japan there is Susanoo as the god of storms. It is not solely by the attributes that these deities are connected, many of their respective myths have close resemblances with their counterparts. Teshub/Tarhun fights and kills Illuyanka, a great serpent-dragon. Zeus at one points wages a hardfought battle against Typhon a Titan whose upperbody is that of a man and his lower halve that of a serpent. While Indra has to do battle with Vritra, another evil serpent deity and Thor clashes with Jörmungand the giant sea serpent. Even Susanoo fights and kills a serpent-dragon, Yamata no Orochi, the Eightforked Serpent.
In both Tarhuns and Zeus' battle they lose the first encounter. Zeus' sinews are cut and taken by Typhon into his mountain and Tarhun loses his eyes and heart. Also their lost bodyparts are retrieved by intermediaries, after the return of which they again face the serpents and finally defeat them. (The giant serpents are another ubiquitous mythological element which likely will be featured seperately here at another time.)
A further commonality lies in the meaning of Vritra, ‘the enveloper’ and Jörmungand is so large that he encircles Midgard with his body. If we look further into these stories some other related details appear. The number 3, and its multiples, being one such detail. For instance Indra has a three-headed elephant as a mount and Vritra himself has three heads. In one of the stories Vritra has 99 castles that Indra destroys while fighting the serpent to release the primordial waters that he had stolen.
Thor, when fighting Jormungand at Ragnarok, will kill the serpent but will be poisoned by the serpent and then die himself after having taken 9 steps. While Thor is not the head of the Nordic pantheon, the deity that most resembles him is. The god Perun from Slavic mythology is the chief god and wields thunder and lightning.
Perun rides a goat-drawn chariot and carries an axe or hammer that when thrown returns to his hand, all of which goes for Thor as well. Further their respective mythologies include the oak as being important to them and their ability to level mountains. Also like Thor/Donar the word ‘perun’ today still means thunder/lightning in the slavic languages. Both these deities are traced to have originated from Perkunas a Baltic thunder deity. Here too we find the goat-drawn chariot, the axe, the oak-tree and mountains connected to the deity. Similarly the name survives in common usage in Lithuania and Latvia as a word for thunder. Yet Perkunos is not the proverbial ‘pater familias’ of all these deities, for that we need to go even further back in time to the Proto-Indo-Europeans.
The Proto-Indo-Europeans (PIE) date to the Bronze Age or the late Neolithic. This an area of history that is fairly foggy. The currently accepted ideas are mainly arrived at through a combination of comparative linguistics and archaeological data from the Indo-Europeans as well as tracing genetic groups and distribution. What does seem certain is that the PIE had a sky deity called Dyeus Phater, meaning Sky Father. It also becomes clear that Dyeus gets turned into Zeus by the Greeks and Dyeus Phater into Jupiter by the Romans. The concept of Sky Father is wide spread and occurs in many mythologies, the Egyptians being a notable exception. And while the term is of considerable antiquity it continues to find contempary use in the Vedic religion as Dyaus Pita.
Since we are now on the Eastern side, here are some more words on Indra.
Indra’s weapon is called a vajra in Sanskrit and dorje in Tibetan which means thunderbolt and diamond and is symbolic for spiritual power and indestructibility.
It’s name is also lend to the Diamond Cutter Sutra, a 9th century copy of the Sutra is the oldest known printed book in existence, which at the end reads:
Thus shall you think of this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.
There are other sky/thunder deities in just as many cultures and they all have different inflections where they occur but I think the above should be sufficient to illustrate the commonalities between them and their likely origin in Dyeus Phater.
Chaiten volcanic eruption May 2008 -click picture to enlarge
A very good article. Thank you very much
ReplyDelete