Hail!
Building upon my last post [here], we should now have some understanding of what Walter Keating Kelly well names the “plants of the lightning tribe” in his Curiosities of Indo-European Tradition and Folk-lore (1863). Whereby the might of a tree or wort in folklore may well be seen to stem from it being thought of, rightly or wrongly, as belonging to that tribe. And that at the heart of this lore, there was a myth wherein these trees or worts were understood as growing from a feather, or a claw, of a mythic eagle, or god in eagle-shape. These, sundered from their owner, fell to earth when he first brought some mythical drink that bestows immortality (such as the Eastern Somaḥ (सोमः)), and belike also the first fire as well, to mankind.
Again looking to my last post, I ask the reader to call to mind that the Quickbeam, or rowan, is the first and foremost tree in the “lightning tribe”. In this post however, we are going to look at three trees, the Oak, the Ash and the Thorn, which are still worth thinking about under the heading “plants of the lightning tribe”. In what follows I write of them in the order Ash, Thorn and Oak, as the Ash and Thorn have the greater likenesses to the Quickbeam, whilst the Oak has the least.
The Ash-tree's "pinnate" (=feather-like) leaves bear a marked likeness to the Quickbeam’s, And seeing this likeness, some call the Quickbeam the "mountain Ash", as if it was only a kind of "ash-tree" (fraxinus excelsior). But the true "mountain Ash" is not the Quickbeam at all, but another tree again, the blossoming "Manna-Ash" (fraxinus ornus) of southern Europe known in Latin as ornus. The "Manna-Ash" indeed, may be thought of as something of a "halfway house" between our own ash-tree (fraxinus excelsior) and the Quickbeam.
Stroke
is thunder-stroke and flash is lightning-flash. Before saying anything further, I must ask the reader to heed well the fellowship that the ash-tree keeps here with the oak and the thorn. For this is not the only time these three trees are to be found together in Old England. Thus Olof S.
Anderson well writes here in his English Hundred Names volume 3 (1939), ch. 10. Names Denoting Various
Objects, Trees, Stones, etc. lf.184:
But first things first. Some might well think here that our “plants of the lightning tribe” should ward off, not draw down lightning. But if we look into the lore of such things we will see that the trees and worts of this tribe will often be found to do both. Thus Kelly marks that the mandrake (chap. Vii, lvs. 203 to 204) has the thunder-weapon’s might, in folk belief at least, to kill by making a deafening din when it is pulled up. Whilst the mistletoe (chap. Vii, lf. 204), that is mightiest of all when it grows on oak trees, is not only widely understood to have all-healing properties (see Pliny the Elder. Natural History Bk. 16, ch. 95, §§249 - 251), but I mark here T. F. Thistleton-Dyer's words in his The Folklore of Plants (1889):
Now if this seems all hard to swallow at first, the reader need only call to mind here that in the North Thor’s hammer mostly kills ettins, but it can also raise the dead (goats) back to life. Whilst the Irishmen know of the Dagda's club which fells folk with one end, but then brings them back to life with the other. Both are thunder-weapons, and it is the thunder-weapon which is the one and only true magic staff, or at least the archetype above, of all such things below.
As a tree of the “lightning tribe” then, we will find nothing much to wonder at in Pliny's words about ash trees and their witherwardness to snakes in his Natural History Bk.16, chap.24, §§62 and 64 :
Building upon my last post [here], we should now have some understanding of what Walter Keating Kelly well names the “plants of the lightning tribe” in his Curiosities of Indo-European Tradition and Folk-lore (1863). Whereby the might of a tree or wort in folklore may well be seen to stem from it being thought of, rightly or wrongly, as belonging to that tribe. And that at the heart of this lore, there was a myth wherein these trees or worts were understood as growing from a feather, or a claw, of a mythic eagle, or god in eagle-shape. These, sundered from their owner, fell to earth when he first brought some mythical drink that bestows immortality (such as the Eastern Somaḥ (सोमः)), and belike also the first fire as well, to mankind.
Again looking to my last post, I ask the reader to call to mind that the Quickbeam, or rowan, is the first and foremost tree in the “lightning tribe”. In this post however, we are going to look at three trees, the Oak, the Ash and the Thorn, which are still worth thinking about under the heading “plants of the lightning tribe”. In what follows I write of them in the order Ash, Thorn and Oak, as the Ash and Thorn have the greater likenesses to the Quickbeam, whilst the Oak has the least.
Ash
The Ash-tree's "pinnate" (=feather-like) leaves bear a marked likeness to the Quickbeam’s, And seeing this likeness, some call the Quickbeam the "mountain Ash", as if it was only a kind of "ash-tree" (fraxinus excelsior). But the true "mountain Ash" is not the Quickbeam at all, but another tree again, the blossoming "Manna-Ash" (fraxinus ornus) of southern Europe known in Latin as ornus. The "Manna-Ash" indeed, may be thought of as something of a "halfway house" between our own ash-tree (fraxinus excelsior) and the Quickbeam.
It is this "Manna-Ash", the ornus, that is truly meant when the olden Greeks spoke of melia (μελία), the wood of which was also brooked for spears (“vibrabilis ornus Achilli,” Aus. Ep. 24, 108), whilst meli (μέλι), means both the honey that bee's make and the
so-called "manna" of the "Manna-ash". From some left over belief about the food or drink of the gods that bestows immortality being linked to this tree, we find that Greeks have the nymphs of the "Manna-ash" (the Meliai (Μελίαι) or
Meliades (Μελιάδες)) feeding Zeus (see Callimachus, Hymn to Zeus lines 46 to 50), albeit it is goat’s milk and honey, rather than somaḥ, that they are said to be feeding him.
Now the "Manna-ash", the ornus, looks much like our northern ash-tree when not in bloom, and it would seem it is this near likeness, that is behind the mistaken wont of the Scottish Highlanders whereby they give the sap of the northern ash-tree to their children. Thus Kelly:"Amazing toughness of popular tradition! Some thousands of years ago the ancestors of this Highland nurse had known the Fraxinus ornus in Arya, or on their long journey thence through Persia, Asia Minor, and the South of Europe, and they had given its honey-like juice, as divine food, to their children; and now their descendant, imitating their practice in the cold North, but totally ignorant of its true meaning, puts the nauseous sap of her native ash into the mouth of her hapless charge, because her mother and her grandmother, and her grandmother's grandmother had done the same thing before her."But be this as it may be, we can nevertheless still see the northern ash-tree (fraxinus excelsior) in our own folk belief taking upon itself a good deal of the lore of a tree of the “lightning tribe”. Thus the well known (I hope) rhyme in England that runs something like:
Beware the oak, it draws the stroke;
avoid the ash, it courts the flash;
To which is sometimes
added, to the tears of the muses:
creep
under the thorn, it can save you from harm
“Of special kinds of
trees, those most often referred to in hundred-names, and chosen as
meeting-places, are the oak, the ash and the thorn. We are reminded of
Glasgerion's oath 'by oak and ash and thorn',[Child, English and Scottish
Popular Ballads, p. 137.] the sacred trees of the North (Mawer, PNs and History
23). The oak was an object of worship among the ancient Teutons (cf. (on) ða
halgan æc 949 BCS 883 and Holy Oakes Le, DB Haliach), and the ash-tree and the
thorn also have heathen religious associations.”
And so it is likely that we have hit upon something well worth the knowing, if only we can put everything together aright that may help our understanding.
But first things first. Some might well think here that our “plants of the lightning tribe” should ward off, not draw down lightning. But if we look into the lore of such things we will see that the trees and worts of this tribe will often be found to do both. Thus Kelly marks that the mandrake (chap. Vii, lvs. 203 to 204) has the thunder-weapon’s might, in folk belief at least, to kill by making a deafening din when it is pulled up. Whilst the mistletoe (chap. Vii, lf. 204), that is mightiest of all when it grows on oak trees, is not only widely understood to have all-healing properties (see Pliny the Elder. Natural History Bk. 16, ch. 95, §§249 - 251), but I mark here T. F. Thistleton-Dyer's words in his The Folklore of Plants (1889):
"The Swiss name for mistletoe, donnerbesen, “thunder besom,” illustrates its divine origin, on account of which it was supposed to protect the homestead from fire, and hence in Sweden it has long been suspended in farm-houses, like the mountain-ash in Scotland."For "fire" read "fire from heaven" or lightning.
Now if this seems all hard to swallow at first, the reader need only call to mind here that in the North Thor’s hammer mostly kills ettins, but it can also raise the dead (goats) back to life. Whilst the Irishmen know of the Dagda's club which fells folk with one end, but then brings them back to life with the other. Both are thunder-weapons, and it is the thunder-weapon which is the one and only true magic staff, or at least the archetype above, of all such things below.
As a tree of the “lightning tribe” then, we will find nothing much to wonder at in Pliny's words about ash trees and their witherwardness to snakes in his Natural History Bk.16, chap.24, §§62 and 64 :
“ Materiae enim causa reliquas arbores natura genuit copiosissimamque fraxinum. procera haec ac teres, pinnata et ipsa folio, multumque Homeri praeconio et Achillis hasta nobilitata. materies est ad plurima utilis; ...
folia earum iumentis mortifera, ceteris ruminantium innocua Graeci prodidere; in Italia nec iumentis nocent. contra serpentes vero suco expresso ad potum et inposita ulceri opifera, ut nihil aeque, reperiuntur, tantaque est vis, ut ne matutinas quidem occidentesve umbras, cum sunt longissimae, serpens arboris eius adtingat, adeo ipsam procul fugiat. experti prodimus, si fronde ea circumcludantur ignis et serpens, in ignes potius quam in fraxinum fugere serpentem. mira naturae benignitas, prius quam hae prodeant, florere fraxinum nec ante conditas folia demittere.
“ It is for the sake of their timber that Nature has created the other trees, and more particularly the ash, which yields it in greater abundance. This is a tall, tapering tree, with a feather-like leaf: it has been greatly ennobled by the encomiums of Homer, and the fact that it formed the spear of Achilles: the wood of it is employed for numerous purposes. …
folia earum iumentis mortifera, ceteris ruminantium innocua Graeci prodidere; in Italia nec iumentis nocent. contra serpentes vero suco expresso ad potum et inposita ulceri opifera, ut nihil aeque, reperiuntur, tantaque est vis, ut ne matutinas quidem occidentesve umbras, cum sunt longissimae, serpens arboris eius adtingat, adeo ipsam procul fugiat. experti prodimus, si fronde ea circumcludantur ignis et serpens, in ignes potius quam in fraxinum fugere serpentem. mira naturae benignitas, prius quam hae prodeant, florere fraxinum nec ante conditas folia demittere.
“ It is for the sake of their timber that Nature has created the other trees, and more particularly the ash, which yields it in greater abundance. This is a tall, tapering tree, with a feather-like leaf: it has been greatly ennobled by the encomiums of Homer, and the fact that it formed the spear of Achilles: the wood of it is employed for numerous purposes. …
Some
Greek writers have stated that the leaf of the ash is poisonous to beasts of
burden, but harmless to all the animals that ruminate. The leaves of this tree
in Italy, however, are not injurious to beasts of burden even; so far from it,
in fact, that nothing has been found to act as so good a specific for the bites
of serpents as to drink the juice extracted from the leaves, and to apply them
to the wounds. So great, too, are the virtues of this tree, that no serpent
will ever lie in the shadow thrown by it, either in the morning or the evening,
be it ever so long; indeed, they will always keep at the greatest possible
distance from it. We state the fact from ocular demonstration, that if a
serpent and a lighted fire are placed within a circle formed of the leaves of
the ash, the reptile will rather throw itself into the fire than encounter the
leaves of the tree. By a wonderful provision of Nature, the ash has been made
to blossom before the serpents leave their holes, and the fall of its leaf does
not take place till after they have retired for the winter.”
[The Natural History.
Pliny the Elder. John Bostock, M.D., F.R.S. H.T. Riley, Esq., B.A. London.
Taylor and Francis, Red Lion Court, Fleet Street. 1855.]
And in northern myth we have the deathless ("stendr hann æ yfir grænn" "stands he ever green" - Völuspá 19) ash-tree, Yggdrasill, and for all that it is a token for the axis mundi, yet we find a link to the drink/food of the gods that is still being nodded toward with Gylfaginning 16:
But again, if we were not now on otherworldly ground where anything may be, this last would more truly be said of the southern "Manna-ash" and not of our northern kind.
stiþ on staþule, stede rihte hylt,
ðeah him feohtan on firas moniȝe.
The ash is over-high, dear to men.
Strong in staddle (=foundation), a stead rightly held,
though against him fight many men.
"Sú dögg, er þaðan af fellr á jörðina, þat kalla menn hunangfall, ok þar af fæðast býflugur."
" That dew which falls from thence upon the earth, men call "honey-fall", and therefrom are bees (býflugur = "bee-flies") fed."
I have written at some length about the token of the "world-tree" elsewhere [here], but it is worth saying again at this time, that something of the "world-tree" may well underlie the words of the verse for the ash-rune in the "Old English Rune Rhyme":
ᚫ
(Æsc) biþ oferheah, eldum dyrestiþ on staþule, stede rihte hylt,
ðeah him feohtan on firas moniȝe.
The ash is over-high, dear to men.
Strong in staddle (=foundation), a stead rightly held,
though against him fight many men.
To say the ash-tree is “eldum dyre” “dear to men”, is no little thing to say of a tree. It cannot mean this for its wood, for those who seek its wood are more likely to be the foemen marked in the later line “ðeah him feohtan on firas moniȝe” (and see Grímnismál 35). A clue is maybe found in the form of words. The only other verse in the "Old English Rune Rhyme" to have a matching wording to this is that about the rune called dæȝ "day", and which dæȝ is there called “deore mannum” “dear to men”. (That dæȝ is a token of the sun see here). So of all the things that runes are named for in Old English only the "ash-tree" and "day" are "dear to men"! That day is so thought of is maybe no great wonder, but an ash-tree?
A further interesting thing here to mark is what is said of Bishopstrow in Wiltshire by William of Malmesbury in the fifth book of his Gesta Pontificum Anglorum (and which book is wholly a life of Aldhelm that has been etched on to the main work) §230:
So an ash-tree (trow=tree) grew up from where bishop Aldhelm thrust his staff into the ground! Now Aldhelm moreover in Wiltshire folklore is not at all your run-of-the-mill saint. John Aubrey gathered the following tale for us long ago (Hypomnemata Antiquaria, Bodleian MS. Aubrey, p. 251):"Quae res ammonuit, ut quod fama de Biscepes truue iactitat, non tacerem. Villa est in valle, ad quam praedicationis solicitudinem expleturus venisse dicitur. Dum sermonem sereret in plebem, forte baculum fraxineum, quo nitebatur, terrae fixisse. Illum interim per Dei virtutem miram in magnitudinem excrevisse, suco animatum, cortice indutum foliorum pubem et frondium decorem emisisse. Pontificem, qui verbo intenderet, clamore populi ammonitum respexisse; adoratoque miraculo Dei, munus ibidem reliquisse. Ex primae arboris pulla mulatas pullulassse fraxinus; adeo ut, sicut dixi, villa illa vulgo ad episcopi arbores nuncupatur.""Which thing reminds me, I might not leave unsaid that fame of which Bishopstrow boasts. The throop is in a dale, to which it is said Aldhelm would come to fulfil the work of preaching. While he would sow the word in the folk, he was wont to rest on a strong ashen staff driven into the ground. The which, at one time, by the might of God, spread out to a wonderful greatness, made alive by sap, and put on youth with bark and leaves, having sent forth fair limbs. The bishop, who was turned only to the word, looked backward, [when] warned by the shouts of the folk; and worshipped God’s wonder. The [which] spectacle he left in that same stead. And from the first ash tree were seeded many young trees, so many that, as I have said, that throop is named for the bishop’s trees by the folk."
"The Pope, hearing of his fame sent for him to preach at Rome; he had not above 2 daies warning to goe. Wherefore he conjured for a fleet spirit. Up comes a spirit he askes how fleet. resp: as fleet as a bird in the air. yt was not enough. Another as fleet as an arrow out of a bow. not enough either. a 3rd. as swift as thought. This would doe. He commands it to take the shape of a horse, and presently it was so; a black horse on which his great saddle and footecloth was putt.
The first thing he thought on was St Pauls steeple lead: he did kick it with his foot and asked where he was, and the spirit told him, etc. When he came to Rome the groom asked what he should give his horse. quoth he a peck of live coales. This from an old man at Malmesbury."
Katharine Briggs in her Folk-Tales of England says: "Aubrey heard the tradition in 1645, from old Ambrose Brown at Malmesbury." But I mark this from the end-notes of the Folk-Lore Society's 1881 outsetting of Aubrey's Remaines of Gentilisme... the following which also infolds another folk tale:
" S. Adelm.—" Old Bartlemew, &c. old people of Malmesbury, had by tradition severall stories of miracles donn by St. Adelm, some whereof I wrote down heretofore; now with Mr. Anth. Wood at Oxford. I remember the tradition in our parts was, that St. Adelme, abbot of Malmesbury, travelling by Haselbery, threw down his glove, and said, if they digged there they should find great treasure; they digged and found a quarrie of excellent freestone, whereof our churches and monasteries were built. He had travelled abroad, and by the surface of the ground could easily guess that freestone was underneath that crust."—Royal Soc. MS. fol. 207."
So Aldhelm was a bit of a far-faring "wiseman", and William of Malmesbury elsewhere also marks him out as a bit scop (Gest. Pontif. bk.V, §190 "quasi artem canitandi professum"); and as helper of kings
in fightlocks (above all England's greatest king King Athelstan Gest. Regum bk.2, ch.6, §131 "inclamato Deo et sancto Aldelmo, reductaque ad vaginam manu, invenit ensem ..."). Do I have to spell out whose old
cloak, or hackle, he seems to have had bestowed upon him? Well, snaking its way right through the middle of Northern Wiltshire where Aldhelm might well be said to be at home is Wōdnesdīc, Wōden's Ditch or Wansdyke as many now call it ... William Camden in his Britannia (1586) wrote:
".... Wansdike accolae appellitant, quam pervulgato errore a Cacodaemone die Mercurii ductam fabulantur. ..."
"The people dwelling thereabout call it Wandsdike, which upon an errour generall received, they talke and tell to have been made by the Divill upon a Wednesday." (awend. Philemon Holland).
Aldhelm, or Ealdhelm means "Old Helm", but "Helm" in Bēowulf sometimes has the meaning of "lord or king" thus Hrōðgār is "helm Scyldinga" (lines 371, 456, "helm Scildinga" 1320): a synonym with "þēoden Scyldinga" (1675). And we also find: "helm Scylfinga" (2381) and "Wedra helm" (2452, 2705). Whilst God the Father himself is "heofena helm" (182). Who might the "old Helm", that is, the "Old Lord" then be? In the Hystoria Brutonum of Laȝamon Leouenaðes sone we may read:
Woden hehde þa hæhste laȝe; an ure ælderne dæȝen.Wōden had the highest law in our elders' days
he heom wes leof; æfne al-swa heore lif.
he wes heore walden; and heom wurð-scipe duden. 6950
þene feorðe dæi i þere wike; heo ȝifuen him to wurð-scipe.
He to them was dear, even as their lives.
He was their Wielder, and they to Him did worship.
The fourth day in the week they gave to Him to worship.
Þa andswerede Hængest; cnihtene alre feirest.Then answered Hengest, the fairest of all knights.
Ȝif hit wulle Saturnus; al hit scal i-wurðe þus.
& Woden ure lauerd; þe we on bi-liueð. 6970
"If it will Saturnus; it shall befall thus.
And Wōden our lord, that we believe on.
So, we have wandered among the ash-trees and seemingly found there are our old god Wōden. The ash-tree must be his tree. It is a wonder then to me therefore, that the scop who wrote the above rune verse could forbear saying something about spears, as ash wood was so often the wood chosen for spear-shafts that "ash" could be brooked for "spear" in Old English. And in the North the spear would seem to have been Óðin's weapon above all others. Wōden and Óðin being acknowledged to be one and the same of old by Snorri Sturluson and by our own Ealdorman Æthelweard as we marked in an earlier post [here]. Egill Skallagrímsson thus calls Óðin the "spear's lord" "geirs dróttinn" (Sonatorrek 22), Sturla Þórðarson "spear-god" "geir-Týr" (Hákonarkviða 21), and we find "geirvaldr" in Dagfinns drápa 7 from Stjǫrnu-Odda draumr. Óðin's spear itself is called by the Northmen "gungnir" (see Skáldskaparmál 43 "... ok geirinn, er Óðinn átti, er Gungnir heitir" - also Kormák's line: "Fór Hroftr með Gungni" and Bragi's name for Óðin: "Gungnis vǫfuðr") seemingly from gunga "to sway" (see Jan de Vries Altnordisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (1977) lf.195) thus "swayer". Was the ash-tree's loathing of snakes also shared by this god?
Wyrm com snican, toslat he man;
ða genam Woden VIIII wuldortanas,
sloh ða þa næddran, þæt heo on VIIII tofleah.
A worm came sneaking, to slay a man;
then took Woden nine "wuldor-tines"
smote then the nadder, that she into nine [bits] flew.
For what it is worth Henry Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim putteth the ash tree under both the sun and Jupiter (see his Three Books of Occult Philosophy Book 1, chap. 23 and 26). Whilst Nicholas Culpeper (1616-1654) would put it under the sun, “it is governed by the sun...” he says.
Now I should say however, that ash wood is a timber that would be dear to wrights from it being so eathe to work and so straight growing, hence the "ðeah him feohtan on firas moniȝe" of our rune rhyme. And this notefulness (=usefulnes) I think would also fit the tree to be under Mercury... Mercury or Mercurius, being the southern god with whom our Wōden was most often evened, and thus the "day of Mercurius" "dies Mercurii" (see French Mercredi, Spanish miércoles earlier mércores) is our old Wōdnesdæȝ, now Wednesday, "Wōden's day"; the Northern Óðinsdagr, now Onsdag "Óðin's day".
Now I should say however, that ash wood is a timber that would be dear to wrights from it being so eathe to work and so straight growing, hence the "ðeah him feohtan on firas moniȝe" of our rune rhyme. And this notefulness (=usefulnes) I think would also fit the tree to be under Mercury... Mercury or Mercurius, being the southern god with whom our Wōden was most often evened, and thus the "day of Mercurius" "dies Mercurii" (see French Mercredi, Spanish miércoles earlier mércores) is our old Wōdnesdæȝ, now Wednesday, "Wōden's day"; the Northern Óðinsdagr, now Onsdag "Óðin's day".
To sum up so far then. We understand Wōden as the god of the ash-tree and the ash-wood spear. That Saint Aldhelm in north Wiltshire seems to have soaked up his worship thereabouts and this saint is linked to ash-trees and is shown in folk-lore as a wonder-working horse rider. In an earlier post [here] I have shown that Wōden was also more than likely thought of as the first finder of all the arts and crafts, and their teacher to mankind. And this in keeping with what is said about Wōden by Snorri Sturluson in the beginning of his Ynglinga saga (see chapitles 5 to 8 and 10), as also of the worship of Mercurius among the Gauls marked by Cæsar (see De Bello Gallico VI, xvii), and more widely of Mercurius, or of Hermes as he is also called, in the southlands. Mercurius, or Hermes being the southern god that our own Wōden is evened with. And from the last post [here] we have seen that Wōden's taking upon himself the shape of an arnr/valr or eagle/falcon ("í arnarham" "in arn-, or eagle-, shape" in Skaldskaparmál 5 and 6, and "í valslíki" "in falcon's likeness" (Saga Heiðreks konúngs ens vitra [H] 11) links him to the Eastern Suparṇaḥ (सुपर्णः) or Garuḍaḥ (गरुडः). It is well to mark here also that "Arnhöfði" "Arn, or eagle, head" is one of Óðin's bynames - see the list of these found in the Arnamagnus handwrit AM 748 I b 4°, folio 18 recto, (that is, the handwrit in which Baldrs draumar is alone found). The which brings us back to where we began this post, for the “plants of the lightning
tribe”, among which we have put our ash tree, all arose from Suparṇaḥ's fetching of Somaḥ and/or the first fire. That this fetching of Somaḥ and/or the first fire may well be a pœtic metaphor for the phenomena of a thunder storm is also worth bearing in mind.
Now Mercurius' or Hermes's wings also show us that he is a Western Suparṇaḥ, and is, in the end, the same as Jupiter or Zeus's eagle (see Hor. Odes bk. 4, 4, l. 1 “ministrum fulminis alitem”; Ver. Æneid bk. 5 l. 255 "Iouis armiger"). Furthermore, Mercurius' mythology shows us that the bringing of the first fire from heaven by this god was no little thing here. Thus in the Homeric hymn (awend. Hugh G. Evelyn-White) :
ἔνθ᾽ ἐπεὶ εὖ βοτάνης ἐπεφόρβει βοῦς ἐριμύκους 105
καὶ τὰς μὲν συνέλασσεν ἐς αὔλιον ἀθρόας οὔσας,
λωτὸν ἐρεπτομένας ἠδ᾽ ἑρσήεντα κύπειρον:
σὺν δ᾽ ἐφόρει ξύλα πολλά, πυρὸς δ᾽ ἐπεμαίετο τέχνην.
δάφνης ἀγλαὸν ὄζον ἑλὼν ἀπέλεψε σιδήρῳ
... ἄρμενον ἐν παλάμῃ: ἄμπνυτο δὲ θερμὸς ἀυτμή: 110
Ἑρμῆς τοι πρώτιστα πυρήια πῦρ τ᾽ ἀνέδωκε.
Then, after he had well-fed the loud-bellowing cattle
with fodder and driven them into the byre,
close-packed and chewing lotus and dewy galingal,
he gathered a pile of wood and began to seek the art of fire.
He chose a stout laurel branch and trimmed it with the knife ...
held firmly in his hand: and the hot smoke rose up.
For it was Hermes who first invented fire-sticks (πυρήια is rightly a fire-drill- "the stationary piece was called ἐσχάρα, the drill τρύπανον") and fire.
But on leaf 246 we see that more or less the same tool was brooked by the Iroquois Indians in North America as a "fire-drill"!
The tale of the bringing of fire to men I believe is also one of the intings why the ash-tree was bestowed upon our Wōden, bearing in mind that Wōden must be the same as Mātariśvan. For anyone who still makes a fire on a hearth and burns wood in England, will know that ashen stocks (=ash logs) are by far and away the best of our home-grown trees to burn. They neither burn too swiftly, nor are they as hard to burn as some other woods are. And they split under your axe (the gods' curse on all chainsaws!) like they were made for that thing alone.
Ash-logs smooth and grey, burn them green or old,
Buy up all that come your way, for they’re worth their weight in gold.
But the old belief was not so much that ashen stocks were a wood good for burning, but rather that they burn well for that they were deemed to have the might of the fire-god still in them Although writing about oaks, I believe that what D. Q. Adams and J. P. Mallory say about that tree was also true to say about ashes at one time (An Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture under 'Thunder God' lf.582) would have been said about ash-trees:
And the belief that men were the offspring of ash-trees (see Hesiod Works and Days 140–155; Theog. 563-4; Hesychius μελίας καρπός· τὸ τῶν ἀνθρώπων γένος "fruit of the ash-tree: the stock of man") bears witness to even this same thing, bearing in mind what Adams and Mallory wrote straight after the above outdraught:
That the myth about Mercurius bringing the first fire to men is maybe not so well known as it should be, is down to the Greeks muddying the waters here with their tales of Prometheus. But Prometheus and Epimetheus are for the star-sign of Gemini and its lore, albeit somewhat formenged with the lore of the neighbouring star-sign of Orion (thus they are said to be Titans). That the "Heavenly Twins" were sometimes understood to be fire-bringers may be seen from what Ṛgvedaḥ 10.184.3, and Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 6.4.22, which has this at least to say of the Aśvinau :
We can now answer better I think why our Wōden is shown with a spear. A. B. Cook in his Zeus (1925) vol. 2 lf.574 marks some old coins of Mylasa in Caria:
.
Now Strabo in his Geography
14. 2. 23 tells us that Mylasa in Caria was well known for two temples of Zeus, one of Zeus Osogoa (Ὀσογῶα) who we know from elsewhere is an odd blend of Zeus and Poseidon, and one of Zeus Labrandeus (Ζεύς Λαβρανδέως), or Stratios (Στράτιος)
"of armies", the old shrine of Labranda being nearby. Now from from Plutarch's Greek
Questions 45 we know Zeus Labrandeus is well-known for his axe, while from Ælian's On Animals 12. 30 we know he is also well-known for the sword by his side ("τὸ δὲ ἄγαλμα ξίφος παρήρτηται"), maybe linking him
to the neighbouring cult of Zeus Chrysaoreus "of the golden sword" at Stratonice. But no old writer thought to mark his spear! But a spear nevertheless he has got as the above coins shows. Bearing in mind how Ælian On Animals 12. 30 understands the title of Labrandeus (awend. A. F. Schofield):
But some of you will say here, but why then was not our Wōden evened with the southern Jupiter or Zeus, instead of Mercurius? Well it seems it was no little point of the old belief with our forefathers that Wōden was an helper of the thunder-god, sharing in that god's nature in almost every way, yet not himself seen to be that god. Thus Mercurius is shown to be the helper of Jupiter in southern myth, and the eagle is Jupiter's winged minister; and thus was Suparṇaḥ to Indra and later to Vishnu, when Vishnu took over Indra's seat (but Vishnu earlier was one with Suparṇaḥ, for that he was the Eastern Mercury and Indra's "Socius" see RV 8.89.12 "sakhe viṣṇo"!). That Indra is a match for the thundering Jupiter and our Þunor "Thunder", may be seen from the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad (Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣat) "Upanishad of the great forests" 3.9.6:
[Awending Patrick
Olivelle].
And might we not have no little clue to this end in so much as the runestave ᚫ æsc "ash", is twinned with ᚪ ac "oak" in the ᚠᚢᚦᚩᚱᚳ runestave-row? Few of us I think would have any worries in seeing the oak as the thunder-god's tree, so why not understand the ash-tree as the lightning-god's tree? And in the same way as the oak and ash are matched in the runestave-row, might we not have in Wōden and Þunor a matching pair of storm gods, with Wōden maybe more a lightning/storm wind god and Þunor more a thunder god? þáttr Hálfdanar svarta from the Flateyjarbók:
But the followers of Dionysus were a far reaching lot. That Wōden and Dionysus are one can be seen from those old writers who say Dionysus is the divine Mind or Intellect (ὁ νοῦς) of the material universe “the material mind (νοῦν ὑλικόν)” (see Macrob. Commentarius ex Cicerone in Somnium Scipionis Bk.1, ch. 12). Johannes Lydus On the Months, March 51 (awend. Mischa Hooker):
But Wōden, the "lord of wōd", (the name is made in the same way as dryhten is from dryht, þēoden from þēod, (and scabinus, Dutch schepen from scheppen?)), is not needfuly wōd himself, and must be a god who can give madness, but also take it away -
And we even see this with his "Wooing of Rinda" in Saxo's Gesta Danorum. For he therein makes Rinda "like unto one in frenzy" (3.4.4 "lymphanti similem") through magic and then "heals" her again (see 3.4.6 to 7). In the end moreover, as a wise god, it may well be that his might to take wōd-nes away is more to be thought of and wished for. But howsoever thought of, Wōden himself must abide on a higher step than all those who are themselves wōd.
We have overlooked Hyndluljóð 3 to our loss for far too long:
And in Gautreks saga 7 king Víkarr is becalmed (fekk andviðri mikit) whilst sailing north to Hörðaland, and we are told that Víkar's fleet will only get a good sailing wind if a man is hanged to Óðin. The lot falls to king Víkarr himself.
It is Víkar's hanging moreover that is, in the old Northern lore, the archetypal hanging to Óðin, and Óðin's foster-son it is, the well-known Starkaðr inn gamli, who oversees things as a kind of priest, who speaks the words "Nú gef ek þik Óðni" "Now give I thee to Wōden" as he sticks the king with a spear. Starkaðr is moreover the first pœt or Skáld, thus he is found first in the Skáldatal in the Codex Uppsaliensis under the heading: 'Skáldatal Danakonunga ok Svía':
With the Northmen later we find Wōden and Þunor were always the first gods they thought of. Thus Paulus Diaconus writes to Charlemagne of the Danish king Sigifridus that he `adveniat manibus post terga revinctis, / Nec illi auxilio Thonar et Waten erunt' `should come with his hands tied up behind his back, nor will help him Þonar and Wōden '(In Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Poetarum Latinorum Medii Aevi, i, Poetae Latini Aevi Carolini, ed. by Ernest Duemmler, (Berlin: Weidmann, 1881) lvs. 5I-52.). Olaf Ball (“Onalafball”) in the Historia de sancto Cuthberto swears "per deos mes potentes, Thor et Othan" "by my mighty gods, Thor and Othan" at Chester-le-Street ("Cunceceastre").
De Temporibus Anticristo (set out by Arthur Napier 1883, Napier Homily 42):
“Þor eac and Owðen, þe hæðene men heriað swiðe.”
Fornmanna sögur: eptir gömlum handritum útgefnar að tilhlutun hins Norræna fornfræða felags vol.2 (1826) Saga Ólafs konúngs Tryggvasonar ch.201 lvs. 156 to 7:
“Biskup spurði, hvat manna hann væri.
Hann sagðist vera Norðmaðr.
Biskup mælti: á hvern trúir þú?
Finn svarar: á Þór ok Óðin, sem aðrir Norðmenn.”
“The bishop asked, what of men he was?
He said he was a Northman.
The Bishop said: in what dost thou believe?
Finn answered: in Thor and Odin as other Northmen.”
Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta or The Greatest Saga of Óláfr Tryggvason, þáttr sveins ok Finns (Flateyjarbók 1, lvs. 430-6):
jaghāna vṛtraṃ svadhitirvaneva ruroja puro aradan nasindhūn |
bibheda ghiriṃ navamin na kumbhamā ghā indroakṛṇuta svayughbhiḥ ||
As an axe fells the tree so he slew Vrtra, brake down the strongholds and dug out the rivers.
He cleft the mountain like a new−made pitcher. Indra brought forth the kine with his Companions.
Viðbœtir við Ólafs sögu hins Helga links lands with gods and thinks that Thor is the Englishman's god and Odin the Saxons' (here the Old Saxons or Germans are meant) god:
Bearing
witness at a later date to the matching up of the the gods of thunder and wind, I mark
that the prophets/saints Enoch and Elijah are often found together in art, being the two men that God allowed to outleap death and go straight to Paradise. The Arabs have long linked Enoch with Hermes Trismegistus and some of the Jews have been so bold as to make him God's chosen one (Metatron - μετὰ θρóνος) wielding over the cosmos on his behalf. Albiruni’s
The Chronology of Ancient Nations (Athâr-ul-bâkiya), Edward Sachau's
1879 awending, ch. viii, lf.188:
Whilst Elijah as Helias, Ilya and so on has can be shown to have taken over from Zeus in Greece and Perun in Russia. Wycliff-ite Bible (Bodley 959) has:
Further East we see some odd things where Buddhist monks took their culture, the culture of the Āryāḥ of Old India, with them on their farings to China and Japan. In Japan therefore we will find the wind-god, Fūjin, and the thunder god, Raijin, albeit in somewhat ugly and devilish shapes, one green, the other red, often met with as a pair in art. As doorwards they are to be seen in the high gate of Sensō-ji, the Kannon temple in Asakusa, Tōkyō, which is therefore also called Kaminari-mon, "Thunder Gate". [see here] These are in the stead of the older kind of doorwards or niō, who are themselves only a doubling up of the bodhisattva Vajrapāṇi "the thunderbolt bearer" and who is noneother than Indra shifted into a bodhisattva! But here the sharp reader will begin to see I think how the thunder and wind gods might become formenged with the "Heavenly Twins", who themselves have a long history of being doorwards, so that it is hard to see where the one ends and the other begins.
Now in China we will also find that the "thunder-god", léishén, or "thunder-lord", léigōng, has come to be shown as a bird-like being with an hammer and chisel, or hammer and drum, who sometimes seems to owe a little something to Garuḍaḥ (गरुडः), which is odd enough in itself. But back in 1542 this bird-like being it seems was only shown as a helper of the "thunder-god", the god himself having wholly another shape which I don't think it would be too far adrift to call "mikill ok rauðskeggjaður"...
From the Works of Sanchuniathon /Philo of Biblus outdrawn by Eusebius in Preparation.... book. 1 ch. 10, (awend. Gifford):
So the first “Pillars of Hercules”, for this is what they are, were hallowed to "πυρὶ καὶ πνεύματι" “wind and fire”, that is, Vāyuḥ and Agni or Wōden and Þunor, and once again we can see how they might be formenged with the "Heavenly Twins" with eathe.
That Joshua and his folk do the same kind of wholesale slaughter upon the folk of Jericho (see Joshua 6:21) that befell the Chatti at the hands of the Hermunduri is markworth here, as Joshua and Caleb ("hound") are a kind of twins leading a flock of outcasts to settle in some new land. Underpinning this are the following: That Jericho is found drawn in medieval handwrits as a maze or labyrinth, like Troy is often shown to be, the same kind of prison from which the twins in an old myth once freed the sun-maiden (thus Agamemnon and Menelaus free Helen from Troy, Joshua and Caleb free Rahab from Jericho); and that Joshua was long thought of as an antetype of Jesus who was indeed a twin (his twin brother being (Judas) Thomas). That Joshua and Caleb are mythic rather than historic is beckoned to by the belief that they are buried at Timnath-heres (Judges 2:9) "the lot of the sun" ("heres" meaning sun, see Job 9:7; the "Timnath-serah" of Josh. 19.50/24.30 hides "heres" with an anagram - for in the Hebrew (which doesn't write the vowels) "heres" is spelt "HRS" and "serah" "SRH").
And notwithstanding that the "Heavenly Twins", as "Twins", should match eachother,
And although it is Castor and Polydeuces (Κάστωρ καὶ Πολυδεύκης) that came to be thought of as the foremost showing forth of the Heavenly Twins among the Greeks (and then among the Romans who called them "Castor et Pollux"), they were not the only ones who could claim this name. The Greeks knew many names for these old gods stemming from the selfsame roots as the Eastern Aśvinau. Ṛgvedaḥ 1.117.9:
So there is nothing truly "small" about the might of the Heavenly Twins at all and may thus infold in their own worship that of Mitra and Varuna or Wōden and Tīw or Wōden and Þunor, or the "Pole-lords" best known to us as the archangels Michael and Gabriel, and so on. Any pairing of gods. If they sometimes stoop to help men it should not be looked upon as making them lesser gods in any way, but rather as a token of their almightiness so that there is nothing that they leave undone. And I would also warn my readers here not to think that the "Heavenly Twins" are themselves day and night, or the hemispheres and so on. Rather they should believe that they are the wielders of all markedly twyfold things from outside of space and time.
[awend Wilmer C. Wright]
Hermes is Mercurius, Ares is Mars. So Wōden and Tīw, our old one eyed and one handed pair, would then be matched together as "Ἡλίου πάρεδροι" "helpmates of the sun". The sun here being understood as the king of the gods. And having bestowed the names of Wōden and Tīw upon the helpers, the only name we can then put to that of the king is Þunor, and we call to mind here that he it is, who is given Jupiter's day, the fifth day of the week, Jupiter being king of the gods. That Wōden who is, after all, an immaterial and transcendant godhead, is not needfully old, or even a man, can be seen from the shapes he takes upon himself in the "Wooing of Rinda" (see Saxo Grammaticus Gesta Danorum 3.4.1-7). His third shape shift as an unnamed man "professing the completest skill in soldiership" ("perfectissimam rei militaris industriam professus " - 3.4.4), in which shape he "used to ride proudly up and down among the briskest of them" ("inter promptissimos insolentius obequitare solebat" 3.4.4), having much of the "Heavenly Twin" about it. Furthermore, overlooking the bit of whetstone in his forehead, Þunor is the only one of the three who is not missing a limb or an eye, which may, or may not be, telling. But nevertheless, if you made Tīw the king, and then put Þunor in Tīw's stead, would any great harm be done? Do not the Irish do even this by making Núadu Airgetlám, the one-handed sword god with them, the king of the gods? Though the Dagda, their thunder god, is an awkward second fiddle to him. I mark here also - and I am somewhat amazed at all the scholars who seem to have overlooked this - the following from Tacitus' Histories bk. 4, ch.64 where the Tencteri are speaking to the Ubii/Agrippinenses of Cologne in the time of Civilis' uprising:
So that Mercurius (as Germania 9) might well be the god "they greatly worship" ("Deorum maxime Mercurium colunt,..."), but of yore he was not the "foremost of the gods" ("praecipuo deorum" see above). If the Tencteri alone had this belief, I think Tacitus would have marked it in his Germania.
All this is worthwhile setting beside the words of Cæsar in his De Bello Gallico 6.17 where we are told that the Gauls also "greatly worship the god Mercurius" ("Deum maxime Mercurium colunt.") yet it is still Jupiter who "holds the wielding of the heavenly gods" ("Iovem imperium cælestium tenere").
Yet again Jacob Grimm is helpfully before us when he well wrote [in the Vorrede to vol. 1 of his Deutsche Mythologie (1844) lf. xix]:
Now Mercurius' or Hermes's wings also show us that he is a Western Suparṇaḥ, and is, in the end, the same as Jupiter or Zeus's eagle (see Hor. Odes bk. 4, 4, l. 1 “ministrum fulminis alitem”; Ver. Æneid bk. 5 l. 255 "Iouis armiger"). Furthermore, Mercurius' mythology shows us that the bringing of the first fire from heaven by this god was no little thing here. Thus in the Homeric hymn (awend. Hugh G. Evelyn-White) :
ἔνθ᾽ ἐπεὶ εὖ βοτάνης ἐπεφόρβει βοῦς ἐριμύκους 105
καὶ τὰς μὲν συνέλασσεν ἐς αὔλιον ἀθρόας οὔσας,
λωτὸν ἐρεπτομένας ἠδ᾽ ἑρσήεντα κύπειρον:
σὺν δ᾽ ἐφόρει ξύλα πολλά, πυρὸς δ᾽ ἐπεμαίετο τέχνην.
δάφνης ἀγλαὸν ὄζον ἑλὼν ἀπέλεψε σιδήρῳ
... ἄρμενον ἐν παλάμῃ: ἄμπνυτο δὲ θερμὸς ἀυτμή: 110
Ἑρμῆς τοι πρώτιστα πυρήια πῦρ τ᾽ ἀνέδωκε.
Then, after he had well-fed the loud-bellowing cattle
with fodder and driven them into the byre,
close-packed and chewing lotus and dewy galingal,
he gathered a pile of wood and began to seek the art of fire.
He chose a stout laurel branch and trimmed it with the knife ...
held firmly in his hand: and the hot smoke rose up.
For it was Hermes who first invented fire-sticks (πυρήια is rightly a fire-drill- "the stationary piece was called ἐσχάρα, the drill τρύπανον") and fire.
And
I believe this is backed up by what Mercurius' caduceus is truly meant to show. Now you will see that this caduceus was understood as many unlike things, as true knowledge of it waxed and waned. But
it is truly meant to show nothing else than a kind of "fire-drill"! If you look in Edward B. Tylor's
Researches into the Early History of Mankind (1878) ch. 9, lvs. 244
to 245 you will see two old "pump drills" fig.27 being from Switzerland, and figure 28 from Bowditch
Island in the South Pacific.
Tylor quotes L. H. Morgan League
of the Iroquois (1851) lf. 381:—
And the likelihood is that more folk than the Iroquois brooked something like this to make fire of yore, whence the so-called "caduceus". That the snakes would then be mistakes for the drill's ropes can be seen from the snake put instead of the rope in the old tale of the Churning of the Sea from India and which is thought to have the lighting of a fire with a fire-drill in mind, albeit the drill is of another kind to the one shown above. And the making of thunder and lightning, either by the thunder god banging two stones together, or by heaven and earth rubbing together like two fire sticks, is the archetype of all such fire making rituals. So we can also see why Kelly (lf.171, 187) understands Mercurius' caduceus as a thunder-weapon." This is an Indian invention, and of great antiquity. ... It consisted of an upright shaft, about four feet in length, and an inch in diameter, with a small wheel set upon the lower part, to give it momentum. In a notch at the top of the shaft was set a string, attached to a bow about three feet in length. The lower point rested upon a block of dry wood, near which are placed small pieces of punk. When ready to use, the string is first coiled around the shaft, by turning it with the hand. The bow is then pulled downwards, thus uncoiling the string, and revolving the shaft towards the left. By the momentum given to the wheel, the string is again coiled up in a reverse manner, and the bow again drawn up. The bow is again pulled downwards, and the revolution of the shaft reversed, uncoiling the string, and recoiling it as before. This alternate revolution of the shaft is continued, until sparks are emitted from the point where it rests upon the piece of dry wood below. Sparks are produced in a few moments by the intensity of the friction, and ignite the punk, which speedily furnishes a fire."
But the snakes may also betoken the fire made by the fire-drill itself, thus Ṛgvedaḥ 1.79.1
tells us that Agni the fire god, when in the sky, that is, as
lightning, is said to be "a raging serpent", and in the verse that follows this he is
further called suparṇā "well-winged" which we know, when brooked as a proper noun, is only another name for Garuḍaḥ:
hiraṇyakeśo rajaso visāre.ahirdhunirvāta iva dhrajīmān |
śucibhrājā uṣaso navedā yaśasvatīrapasyuvo na satyāḥ ||
ā te suparṇā aminantamevaiḥ kṛṣṇo nonāva vṛṣabho yadīdam |
śivābhirna smayamānābhirāghāt patanti mihaḥ stanayantyabhrā ||
1. HE in mid-air's expanse hath golden tresses; a raging serpent (ahi), like the rushing tempest:
Purely refulgent, knowing well the morning; like honourable dames, true, active workers.
2 Thy well-winged (suparṇā) flashes strengthen in their manner, when the black Bull hath bellowed round about us.
With drops that bless and seem to smile he cometh: the waters fall, the clouds utter their thunder.
(awend. Griffith).
hiraṇyakeśo rajaso visāre.ahirdhunirvāta iva dhrajīmān |
śucibhrājā uṣaso navedā yaśasvatīrapasyuvo na satyāḥ ||
ā te suparṇā aminantamevaiḥ kṛṣṇo nonāva vṛṣabho yadīdam |
śivābhirna smayamānābhirāghāt patanti mihaḥ stanayantyabhrā ||
1. HE in mid-air's expanse hath golden tresses; a raging serpent (ahi), like the rushing tempest:
Purely refulgent, knowing well the morning; like honourable dames, true, active workers.
2 Thy well-winged (suparṇā) flashes strengthen in their manner, when the black Bull hath bellowed round about us.
With drops that bless and seem to smile he cometh: the waters fall, the clouds utter their thunder.
(awend. Griffith).
Working backward from all this then, we can see that not only must Suparṇaḥ have brought the first fire, but that Suparṇaḥ must also be the same as, or another name for, the Mātariśvan
(विकिशब्दकोशः) who we find widely in the Ṛgvedaḥ as the first fire bringer. And when Yāska calls Mātariśvan "messenger of the gods" (dūto.devānām) in his Nirukta,
Ch. 7, 27, we know we are on the right lines. RV 6.8.4:
“ā dūto aghnimabharad vivasvato vaiśvānaraṃ mātariśvā parāvataḥ || ”“As envoy (dūto) of Vivasvān Mātariśvān brought Agni Vaiśvānara hither from far away”.(Griffith)
The tale of the bringing of fire to men I believe is also one of the intings why the ash-tree was bestowed upon our Wōden, bearing in mind that Wōden must be the same as Mātariśvan. For anyone who still makes a fire on a hearth and burns wood in England, will know that ashen stocks (=ash logs) are by far and away the best of our home-grown trees to burn. They neither burn too swiftly, nor are they as hard to burn as some other woods are. And they split under your axe (the gods' curse on all chainsaws!) like they were made for that thing alone.
Ash-logs smooth and grey, burn them green or old,
Buy up all that come your way, for they’re worth their weight in gold.
But the old belief was not so much that ashen stocks were a wood good for burning, but rather that they burn well for that they were deemed to have the might of the fire-god still in them Although writing about oaks, I believe that what D. Q. Adams and J. P. Mallory say about that tree was also true to say about ashes at one time (An Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture under 'Thunder God' lf.582) would have been said about ash-trees:
"For example, in addition to the observation that lightning (cf. ON Mjǫlnir (name of Þórr's hammer), Latv milna (name of Pērkōns's hammer) and the words for 'lightning', e.g. OPrus mealde, Rus molnja) frequently strikes oaks, there is also the widely held belief that fire is residual within the oak, i.e., the Thunder-god strikes oaks and releases the fire from within them, or, alternatively, a lightning strike stores up fire within the tree which can then account for how one may release fire from wood through friction."Yāska Nirukta, Ch. 7, 23 (awend. Lakshman Sarup):
"ayam.eva.agnir.vaiśvānara.iti.śākapūnir/viśvānarāv.ity.apy.ete.uttare.jyotiṣī/ vaiśvānaro.ayam.yat.tābhyām.jāyate/ katham.tv.ayam.etābhyām.jāyata.iti/yatra. vaidyutaḥ.śaranam.abhihanti,.yāvad.anupāttas.havati.madhyama.dharma.eva.tāvad. bhavaty. udaka.indhanaḥ.śarīra.upaśamanah/ upādīyamāna.eva.ayam. sampadyata. udaka.upaśamanaḥ.śarīra.dīptih/”
“‘This very (i. e. terrestrial) fire is Vaiśvānara,' says Śākapūṇi. These two upper lights are called Vaiśvānara also. This (terrestrial) fire is called Vaiśvānara, because it is engendered from them (i.e. the upper lights). But how is it engendered from them? Where the lightning fire strikes a place of shelter, it retains the characteristics of the atmospheric fire, i. e. flashing in waters and becoming extinguished in solid bodies, as long as (that object) is not seized upon. But as soon as it is seized upon, this very (terrestrial) fire is produced, which becomes extinguished in water, and blazes in solid bodies.”
"Another complex of associations is between fire and stones and these can be linked by the observation that one can kindle fire by striking stones against each other, e.g., Indra brings forth fire between two stones (RV 2.12.3). In both cases, the act of producing fire through a 'strike' indicates the creative potential of lightning and the two receptacles for fire are brought together again in Greek tradition where it was said that humans were created either from oaks or from rocks."And "By Thunder and Lightning", I can now see here that these three things, ashes, oaks and (thunder-)stones (petra genetrix), were most wisely picked out by the old pœts to be all our forefathers and foremothers!
That the myth about Mercurius bringing the first fire to men is maybe not so well known as it should be, is down to the Greeks muddying the waters here with their tales of Prometheus. But Prometheus and Epimetheus are for the star-sign of Gemini and its lore, albeit somewhat formenged with the lore of the neighbouring star-sign of Orion (thus they are said to be Titans). That the "Heavenly Twins" were sometimes understood to be fire-bringers may be seen from what Ṛgvedaḥ 10.184.3, and Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 6.4.22, which has this at least to say of the Aśvinau :
Hiranmayi
arani yâbhyâm nirmanthatâm asvinau,
The golden
fire-drills with which
the Aśvins
churned the fire; …
[awend. Patrick
Olivelle lf.91 1996 Oxford World’s Classics]. See also RV
10.24.4-5.
But the star-sign of Gemini is reckoned by the astrologers nevertheless to be wielded by
Mercury.
We can now answer better I think why our Wōden is shown with a spear. A. B. Cook in his Zeus (1925) vol. 2 lf.574 marks some old coins of Mylasa in Caria:
"Imperial coins of Mylasa in silver (fig. 476) and bronze (figs. 477, 478) show Zeus facing us with a kálathos on his head, a double axe in his right hand, and a spear in his left— clearly a cult-statue, for the silver piece places him on a pedestal, and other bronze pieces represent him erect in his temple, wearing a pectoral and agrenón or sacred net-work and linked to the ground by means of fillets."
Must we not then see that Wōden's spear, like Zeus Labrandeus', is a token of the lightning? Pindar in his fourth Pythian Ode line 194 has the skipper of the Argo call on "πατέρ᾽ Οὐρανιδᾶν ἐγχεικέραυνον Ζῆνα" "the father of the Sons of Heaven, Zeus with the lightning-spear" (ἐγχεῖ dative of ἔγχος "spear"+κέραυνον acc. of κεραυνός "lightning/thunder"). And Kelly (lf. 7) will allow it:"... ὕσας λάβρῳ καὶ πολλῷ ... τήνδε ἠνέγκατο""... because he sent down furious (λάβρος - labros) and heavy rainstorms."
And Ṛgvedaḥ 1.168.5 has the Marutas (मरुतस् ), who are a trome (=group) of storm/wind gods, with "ṛṣṭi vidyuto" "lightning-spears" (awend. R.T.H. Griffith) :“The lightning was ... a spear shot straight athwart the sky, ...”.
ko vo.antarmaruta ṛṣṭividyuto rejati tmanā hanveva jihvayā |
dhanvacyuta iṣāṃ na yāmani purupraiṣā ahanyo naitaśaḥ ||
Who among you, O Maruts armed with lightning−spears, moveth you by himself, as with the tongue his jaws?And indeed Zeus Labrandeus with his axe, (golden) sword and spear is fairly overladen with tokens of the lightning or thunder-weapon.
Ye rush from heaven's floor as though ye sought for food, on many errands like the Sun's diurnal Steed.
But some of you will say here, but why then was not our Wōden evened with the southern Jupiter or Zeus, instead of Mercurius? Well it seems it was no little point of the old belief with our forefathers that Wōden was an helper of the thunder-god, sharing in that god's nature in almost every way, yet not himself seen to be that god. Thus Mercurius is shown to be the helper of Jupiter in southern myth, and the eagle is Jupiter's winged minister; and thus was Suparṇaḥ to Indra and later to Vishnu, when Vishnu took over Indra's seat (but Vishnu earlier was one with Suparṇaḥ, for that he was the Eastern Mercury and Indra's "Socius" see RV 8.89.12 "sakhe viṣṇo"!). That Indra is a match for the thundering Jupiter and our Þunor "Thunder", may be seen from the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad (Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣat) "Upanishad of the great forests" 3.9.6:
katama indraḥ ...
iti |
stanayitnur evendro
... iti |
katamaḥ
stanayitnur iti |
aśanir iti |
...
Who is Indra ... ?
Indra is just the
thunder (stanayitnuḥ ) ...
what is thunder?
The thunderbolt
(aśaniḥ from aśan “stone”).
...
And might we not have no little clue to this end in so much as the runestave ᚫ æsc "ash", is twinned with ᚪ ac "oak" in the ᚠᚢᚦᚩᚱᚳ runestave-row? Few of us I think would have any worries in seeing the oak as the thunder-god's tree, so why not understand the ash-tree as the lightning-god's tree? And in the same way as the oak and ash are matched in the runestave-row, might we not have in Wōden and Þunor a matching pair of storm gods, with Wōden maybe more a lightning/storm wind god and Þunor more a thunder god? þáttr Hálfdanar svarta from the Flateyjarbók:
"... en Odinn heitir morgum nofnnum. ... þui er hann kalladr Uidrir at þeir sogdu hann uedrum rada. ... "
Long ago W. H. Roscher in his Hermes der Windgott (Leipzig 1878), had the thought that Mercurius, the Greeks' Hermes, was rightly understood as a ... wind god! And as a raw wind god I acknowledge that this takes a bit of swallowing at first, but Yāska in his Nirukta Ch. 7, 27 has this to say of our Mātariśvan "messenger of the gods" (awend. Lakshman Sarup):
"... But Óðin is called by many names. ... He was called Viðrir for that they said he wielded the weather. ... ".
“āharad.yam.dūto.devānām.vivasvata.ādityād,.vivasvān.vivāsanavān,
.preritavataḥ.parāgatād.vā.asya.agner.vaiśvānarasya.mātariśvānam.āhartāram.āha/ mātariśvan.vāyur.mātṛ.antarikṣe.śvasiti.mātṛ.āśvaniti.iti.vā/ ”
Vāyuḥ (वायुः) or Vā́ta (वात), both words from the same root, being the name of the wind god in the East. Aitareya-Brāhmaṇa 2.34.9 (awend. A. B. Keith)“Whom the messenger of the gods brought from the shining one (vivasvata), the sun who drives away darkness, who impels all things and who is very far. [Or else] the seer called Matarisvan, the bringer of this Vaisvanara fire. Matarisvan is air (the Sanskrit says Vāyuḥ): it breathes in the atmosphere, or moves quickly in the atmosphere.”
“Vāyur vai tūrṇir havyavāḍ, Vāyur hīdaṃ sarvam sadyas tarati yad idaṃ kiṃca, Vāyur devebʰyo havyaṃ vahati.”“… the crosser, the bearer of the oblation is Vayu, for Vayu at once crosses all that whatever there is here, Vayu carries the oblation to the gods; … ”
And as with the Western Mercurius/Hermes, and our Wōden, Vāyuḥ is both a lesser and a higher god at the same time, even the highest, th'ilk 2.34.12 (awend. A. B. Keith):
"brahman" here is the highest godhead. That Mercurius is truly a wind-god, is maybe the worst kept durnhood (=secret) ever. For what else is the Mercurius Ærius, "airy Mercury", the Greek Hermes Ἀέριος, who is met with in the abridging of Cassius Dio's Roman history that has come down to us, book 71, ch. 8?
[Dio Cassius. Roman History, Volume IX: Books 71-80. Awent by Earnest Cary, Herbert B. Foster. Loeb Classical Library 177. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927. lvs.26 to 29 ]
By the way I mark here that what the old Greeks called an Hermaîon (Ἑρμαῖον), an unlooked for gift of Hermes or Mercurius, we call a "Windfall" in English. And is not the eagle or falcon, the king of the birds so to speak, a most fitting token for this "Mercury the god of the air"? And our Wōden?
This is Arthur Rackham's well known (I hope) book-painting, showing forth Richard Wagner's “Die Walküre” Act Three, Scene One:
Waltraute
Furchtbar fährt dort Wotan zum Fels!
Sechs Walküren
Brünnhilde,
hör' seines Nahens Gebraus!
Waltraute
Awesomely, fareth Wōden to the High-Fell!
Six Walkyries
Brünnhilde,
Hear his uproar (as of a storm/wind) drawing near!
Taittirīya Upaniṣad has:“Vāyur vai jātavedā, Vāyur hīdaṃ sārvaṃ karoti yad idaṃ kiṃca.”“… the All-knower is Vāyu, for Vāyu makes all that whatever there is here ; ...”
namaste vāyo /
tvameva pratyakṣaṃ brahmāsi /
Homage to you, Wind (Vāyu)!
You alone are the visible brahman! (awend. Olivelle)
"brahman" here is the highest godhead. That Mercurius is truly a wind-god, is maybe the worst kept durnhood (=secret) ever. For what else is the Mercurius Ærius, "airy Mercury", the Greek Hermes Ἀέριος, who is met with in the abridging of Cassius Dio's Roman history that has come down to us, book 71, ch. 8?
“Μαρκομάνους μὲν οὖν καὶ Ἰάζυγας πολλοῖς καὶ μεγάλοις ἀγῶσι καὶ κινδύνοις Μᾶρκος ὑπέταξεν· ἐπὶ δὲ τοὺς καλουμένους Κουάδους καὶ πόλεμος αὐτῷ συνέστη μέγας καὶ νίκη παράδοξος εὐτυχήθη, μᾶλλον δὲ παρὰ θεοῦ ἐδωρήθη. κινδυνεύσαντας γὰρ ἐν τῇ μάχῃ τοὺς Ῥωμαίους παραδοξότατα τὸ θεῖον ἐξέσωσε. κυκλωσάντων γὰρ αὐτοὺς τῶν Κουάδων ἐν τόποις ἐπιτηδείοις συνασπίσαντες οἱ Ρωμαῖοι προθύμως ἠγωνίζοντο, καὶ οἱ βάρβαροι τὴν μὲν μάχην ἐπέσχον, προσδοκήσαντές σφας ῥᾳδίως ὑπό τε τοῦ καύματος καὶ ὑπὸ τοῦ δίψους αἱρήσειν, πάντα δὲ τὰ πέριξ διαλαβόντες ἀπέφραξαν, ὅπως μηδαμόθεν ὕδωρ λάβωσι· πολὺ γὰρ καὶ τῷ πλήθει περιῆσαν. τῶν οὖν Ῥωμαίων ἐν παντὶ κακοῦ καὶ ἐκ τοῦ καμάτου καὶ ἐκ τῶν τραυμάτων τοῦ τε ἡλίου καὶ τοῦ δίψους γενομένων, καὶ μήτε μάχεσθαι διὰ ταῦτα μήτε χωρῆσαί πῃ δυναμένων, ἀλλ᾿ ἔν τε τῇ τάξει καὶ τοῖς τόποις ἑστηκότων καὶ κατακαιομένων, νέφη πολλὰ ἐξαίφνης συνέδραμε καὶ ὑετὸς πολὺς οὐκ ἀθεεὶ κατερράγη· καὶ γάρ τοι λόγος ἔχει Ἀρνοῦφίν τινα μάγον Αἰγύπτιον συνόντα τῷ Μάρκῳ ἄλλους τέ τινας δαίμονας καὶ τὸν Ἑρμῆν τὸν ἀέριον ὅτι μάλιστα μαγγανείαις τισὶν ἐπικαλέσασθαι καὶ δι᾿ αὐτῶν τὸν ὄμβρον ἐπισπάσασθαι.”
“8 So Marcus subdued the Marcomani and the Iazyges after many hard struggles and dangers. A great war against the people called the Quadi also fell to his lot and it was his good fortune to win an unexpected victory, or rather it was vouchsafed him by Heaven. For when the Romans were in peril in the course of the battle, the divine power saved them in a most unexpected manner. The Quadi had surrounded them at a spot favourable for their purpose and the Romans were fighting valiantly with their shields locked together; then the barbarians ceased fighting, expecting to capture them easily as the result of the heat and their thirst. So they posted guards all about and hemmed them in to prevent their getting water anywhere; for the barbarians were far superior in numbers. The Romans, accordingly, were in a terrible plight from fatigue, wounds, the heat of the sun, and thirst, and so could neither fight nor retreat, but were standing and the line and at their several posts, scorched by the heat, when suddenly many clouds gathered and a mighty rain, not without divine interposition, burst upon them. Indeed, there is a story to the effect that Arnuphis, an Egyptian magician, who was a companion of Marcus, had invoked by means of enchantments various deities and in particular Mercury, the god of the air, and by this means attracted the rain.”
[Dio Cassius. Roman History, Volume IX: Books 71-80. Awent by Earnest Cary, Herbert B. Foster. Loeb Classical Library 177. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927. lvs.26 to 29 ]
By the way I mark here that what the old Greeks called an Hermaîon (Ἑρμαῖον), an unlooked for gift of Hermes or Mercurius, we call a "Windfall" in English. And is not the eagle or falcon, the king of the birds so to speak, a most fitting token for this "Mercury the god of the air"? And our Wōden?
This is Arthur Rackham's well known (I hope) book-painting, showing forth Richard Wagner's “Die Walküre” Act Three, Scene One:
Waltraute
Furchtbar fährt dort Wotan zum Fels!
Sechs Walküren
Brünnhilde,
hör' seines Nahens Gebraus!
Waltraute
Awesomely, fareth Wōden to the High-Fell!
Six Walkyries
Brünnhilde,
Hear his uproar (as of a storm/wind) drawing near!
That Wōden himself is Vāyuḥ can be seen from one of Monier-Williams' meanings of Vāyuḥ in his Sanskrit Dictionary:
Pausanias Guide to Greece 3.19.6 (awend. Jones) marks a winged Dionysus although his outfolding of why this is more likely to be the exoteric not the esoteric one:
" the wind as a kind of demon producing madness "And Dionysus, the Greeks' own mad god, is likewise understood by Johannes Lydus thus in his On the Months 4.160:
" Διόνυσός ἐστι τὸ ... πνεῦμα, ..."
"Dionysus is the ... wind/spirit ..."
Pausanias Guide to Greece 3.19.6 (awend. Jones) marks a winged Dionysus although his outfolding of why this is more likely to be the exoteric not the esoteric one:
“θεῶν δὲ σέβουσιν οἱ ταύτῃ τόν τε Ἀμυκλαῖον καὶ Διόνυσον, ὀρθότατα ἐμοὶ δοκεῖν Ψίλακα ἐπονομάζοντες: ψίλα γὰρ καλοῦσιν οἱ Δωριεῖς τὰ πτερά, ἀνθρώπους δὲ οἶνος ἐπαίρει τε καὶ ἀνακουφίζει γνώμην οὐδέν τι ἧσσον ἢ ὄρνιθας πτερά.”Here I think its fair to say that Grímnismál 19 shows that the southern worship of Dionysus can be seen to have more than swayed Wōden's worship for a time. No little thing here also is the so often missed Corpus Gloss: “ba[c]chantes: uuoedende”. And also this in King Alfred’s awending of Orosius:
“The natives worship the Amyclaean god and Dionysus, surnaming the latter, quite correctly I think, Psilax. For psila is Doric for wings, and wine uplifts men and lightens their spirit no less than wings do birds.”
“Eac, on þæm dagum, wæs þæt Liber Pater oferwan þa underigendan Indea ðeode, ... þeah hi hine eft æfter hys dæge heom for God hæfdon; and hy sædon þæt he wære ealles gewinnes waldend.”
Orosius’ Latin hath nothing of Liber being worshipped as a god, let alone a god of fighting! And although this thought is from Arnobius' Against the Heathen (Adversus Gentes) the question abides as to why Alfred saw fit to slot it in here. But we have already marked that it is for siȝe that Wōden was mainly worshipped in the North.
“It was also, in those days, that Liber Pater overwon the unharmful folk of India, ..nevertheless, after his days, they had him for a god; and they said that he was lord of all fighting.”
But the followers of Dionysus were a far reaching lot. That Wōden and Dionysus are one can be seen from those old writers who say Dionysus is the divine Mind or Intellect (ὁ νοῦς) of the material universe “the material mind (νοῦν ὑλικόν)” (see Macrob. Commentarius ex Cicerone in Somnium Scipionis Bk.1, ch. 12). Johannes Lydus On the Months, March 51 (awend. Mischa Hooker):
“Διόνυσον δὲ ὡσανεὶ τὸν τοῦ Διὸς νοῦν οἱονεὶ τὴν τοῦ κόσμου ψυχήν·”And the body of this "Mind or Intellect of the material universe" is what we would now call "space". But of old this was only weakly thought of as being sundered from what we would now call "sky", that is, the atmosphere about our Earth made up of the air or "wind". And so the word for air or "wind" was allowed to stand for all. It is even for this inting that the body of Vishnu is shown as blue or black in India, and among our own folk we find that children have the odd belief that a "wizard" should wear a blue robe with stars on it!
“… And [they describe] Dionysus as the "mind of Zeus," as [representing] the soul of the cosmos;...”.
But Wōden, the "lord of wōd", (the name is made in the same way as dryhten is from dryht, þēoden from þēod, (and scabinus, Dutch schepen from scheppen?)), is not needfuly wōd himself, and must be a god who can give madness, but also take it away -
hu fela wode he
ȝebrohte on ȝewitte,
how many mad had he
brought to their wits, ... .
And we even see this with his "Wooing of Rinda" in Saxo's Gesta Danorum. For he therein makes Rinda "like unto one in frenzy" (3.4.4 "lymphanti similem") through magic and then "heals" her again (see 3.4.6 to 7). In the end moreover, as a wise god, it may well be that his might to take wōd-nes away is more to be thought of and wished for. But howsoever thought of, Wōden himself must abide on a higher step than all those who are themselves wōd.
We have overlooked Hyndluljóð 3 to our loss for far too long:
byri gefr hann brögnum,And in Ynglinga saga 7:
a good sailing wind (birr) he gives to men
"... ok snúa vindum hverja leið er hann vildi"
"... and turn the wind any way that he wished"
And in Gautreks saga 7 king Víkarr is becalmed (fekk andviðri mikit) whilst sailing north to Hörðaland, and we are told that Víkar's fleet will only get a good sailing wind if a man is hanged to Óðin. The lot falls to king Víkarr himself.
"Þeir felldu spán til byrjar, ok fell svá, at Óðinn vildi þiggja mann at hlutfalli at hanga ór hernum. Þá var skipt liðinu til hlutfalla, ok kom upp hlutr Víkars konungs."
"They carved bits of wood [as lots] for a good sailing wind, and it fell out so, that Óðin would take a man from the heere (=army) to hang that the lot fell to. Then the fleet shaped them to cast lots, and king Víkar's lot came up."
And the hanging on a tree, which is what then befalls Víkarr on the island Víkarshólmr, has all the hallmarks to me of being the most obvious way to give an
offering to the "prince of the power of air" if the offering is left
swaying in the wind. And eaten by the "birds of the air". His titles of hangatýr, hangaguð, hangadróttinn, hangi (Hákonardrápa) should be understood in this way. To say Wōden was himself hanged however, is through him being formenged with one of a kind of "Heavenly Twins" which have given us much of the lore we now link to Jesus and his twin brother (Judas) Thomas and the "twinned" Saints Peter and Paul. Yggdrasill is named from a blending of the lore of the world-tree that is often linked to these twins, for they ward it (Gen. 3:24 - "... and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life" - for "Cherubims" read "Twins"!), and an old tale about Agni beckoned to in the half line of the Ṛgvedaḥ
1.27.14:
The world-tree is "shade-less" and "leaf-less" here as Murray Fowler well outfolds from it being in the middle of the universe, but I would also say for that it is an axis, an axle-tree or pole as much as it is a tree. And horse?"bṛhann achāyo apalāśo arvā"“the high, shade-less and leaf-less horse”
Tāittirīya
Brāḥmaṇa (1.1.3.9):
“agnir devebhyo nīlāyata/ aśvo rūpaṃ kṛtvā so ’śvatthe samvatsaram atiṣṭhat”.
“Agni conceled himself from the gods; having transformed himself into a horse, he remained in the aśvattha tree for a year.” (awend. Murray Fowler).
"Starkaðr inn gamli var skáld. Hans kvæði eru fornust þeira, er menn kunnu nú. Hann orti um Danakonunga."
"Starkaðr the old was a skáld. His are the oldest songs that men now know. He dighted words for the kings of the Danes."
The wealth that made the Romans give Mercurius a purse was the wealth that was the outcome of the greater kinds of chapmanhood, and this of old was the outgrowth of sailing, and sailing needed ... . Thus Wōden has the byname in the North of "Farmaguð, Farmatýr".
We should all know by now the words “önd gaf Óðinn” “ghost gave Wōden” of Völuspá 18. But this is no more than another way of saying what we find later in Ypotys (Vernon handwrit fol. 296):
“And of þe holygost his sowle anon”.
But the wording of Völuspá is more nearly matched by the so-called Sidrak and Bokkus (Lansdowne handwrit 793):
Adames soule so was wrought
Of Goddes onde...
And Cursor Mundi (Bodley handwrit Fairfax 14):
Of erþ al-ane made was he noȝt,
bot of þe foure elementes wroȝt:
Of water his blode his flesshe of laire
his hete of fire, his ande of ayre. 520
laire is clay, earth.
ande, or onde is another word here for breath.
But this same word is also a word for the wind:
þis ande þat he drawes oft,
be-takenes winde þat ys on loft. 532
The god gives to men what is his to bestow, for that he is himself “önd”. In short, much the same as the Christians' ideas about the "holy ghost" or "holy spirit". But our Northern forefathers have not copied the Christians in any of this, although a knowledge of Christian belief might have helped to bring some things to the fore that were maybe less strongly thought of hithertofore. Thus long before there were any of the Christian name at all, Vāyuḥ under his byname of Vā́ta, was said to be the breath of Varuna (ātmā te vāto raja RV 7, 87. 2), and of all gods/everything RV 10, 92. 13:
Eusebius of Caesarea in his Preparation for the Gospel Book 3, ch.2, looking to the writings of Manetho says of the beliefs of the Egypt-folk (awend. E. H. Gifford):
Although we have seen that wisdom and gifts of speech were set down to a drink of somaḥ or such like, the word "inspiration" nevertheless truly comes from "īnspīrāre", which means, stavely, "to breathe into", and stems from something even more heavenly than somaḥ if it be lawful so to say. Ṛgvedaḥ 10.136.2 (awend. Griffith):
And the words of the Acts of the Apostles chap. 2 are worth bearing in mind:
What is more far faring than the wind the true "viator indefessus" "indefatigabe journeyer" (Saxo GD 3.4.5). And it is even this far-faring that means the god is not going to have one name but many, as many are the kinds of men he overgoes. Thus Grímnismál 48:
einu nafni| hétumk aldregi,
síz ek með folkum fór.
A single name | have I never had
Since first among men I fared.
[awend. Bellows].
And fighting? Well, we mark here that Wōden is not so much a fighter himself as an overseer of those that do fight. In Örvar-Odds saga 20 we read:
Rauðgrani "Red-beard", or rather "Red-whiskers", is here Wōden/Óðin. So that Wōden's help towards siȝe was mostly through rede, ráð, - whence ráðugr and its superlative ráðugasti. In Saxo's Gesta Danorum book 7 we have a good forebisening of such rede (7.10.6):
And what follows in Saxo's book is however, no more than a practical application of geometry and arithmetic. Two of the old free-crafts (artes liberales), in Old English called Rímcræft (arithmetic) and Eorþȝemet-cræft (geometry), that Wōden's southern evenling, namely Mercurius "Mercury" or Hermes ( Ἑρμῆς), was the first finder of (see Plato Phædrus 274c-d).
If Wōden builds up some one of mankind so that they become an hæleþ, an hero, it is to some hidden end of his own, thus in Saxo's Gesta Danorum Book 6 we read (6.5.6):
The lore about the Einherjar was once belike more nearer akin to that about our English Herlethingi, about which Walter Map says in his De Nugis Curialium that they were:
Heidelberg is markworthy here as on the Heiligenberg by Heidelberg is the temple-stead of Mercurius Cimbrianus dating from Roman times.
But we've gone a little out of our way here, and must go back. What has all this to do with Vāyuḥ? Well, Vāyuḥ is the father of the "Maruts", for in an hymn to the god in the Ṛgvedaḥ we will find 1.134.4:
Only later is Vayuš said to have been made by Ahura Mazda.
In the Warharan Yasht, the first shape of Warharan, earlier Vərəθraγna, the Parsees' Mars/Hercules, is as a "vâtahe kehrpa darshyôish" "fair strong wind (vâta) "; the seventh a falcon (vārəγna-).
We should all know by now the words “önd gaf Óðinn” “ghost gave Wōden” of Völuspá 18. But this is no more than another way of saying what we find later in Ypotys (Vernon handwrit fol. 296):
“And of þe holygost his sowle anon”.
But the wording of Völuspá is more nearly matched by the so-called Sidrak and Bokkus (Lansdowne handwrit 793):
Adames soule so was wrought
Of Goddes onde...
And Cursor Mundi (Bodley handwrit Fairfax 14):
Of erþ al-ane made was he noȝt,
bot of þe foure elementes wroȝt:
Of water his blode his flesshe of laire
his hete of fire, his ande of ayre. 520
laire is clay, earth.
ande, or onde is another word here for breath.
But this same word is also a word for the wind:
þis ande þat he drawes oft,
be-takenes winde þat ys on loft. 532
The god gives to men what is his to bestow, for that he is himself “önd”. In short, much the same as the Christians' ideas about the "holy ghost" or "holy spirit". But our Northern forefathers have not copied the Christians in any of this, although a knowledge of Christian belief might have helped to bring some things to the fore that were maybe less strongly thought of hithertofore. Thus long before there were any of the Christian name at all, Vāyuḥ under his byname of Vā́ta, was said to be the breath of Varuna (ātmā te vāto raja RV 7, 87. 2), and of all gods/everything RV 10, 92. 13:
pra naḥ pūṣā carathaṃ viśvadevyo.apāṃ napādavatuvāyuriṣṭaye |
ātmānaṃ vasyo abhi vātamarcata tadaśvinā suhavā yāmani śrutam ||
Dear to all Gods, may Pūṣan guard the ways we go, the Waters’ child and Vāyu help us to success.The word for breath here ātmán (आत्मन्), is one with Old English ǣþm (“breath”), and as well as breath, ātmán also means "soul" and "the god in man since man was".
Sing lauds for your great bliss to Wind (vāta), the breath of all (ātmānaṃ vasyo): ye Aśvins prompt to hear, hear this upon your way.
Eusebius of Caesarea in his Preparation for the Gospel Book 3, ch.2, looking to the writings of Manetho says of the beliefs of the Egypt-folk (awend. E. H. Gifford):
"... καὶ Δία μὲν τὸ διὰ πάντων χωροῦν πνεῦμα, ..."
"... and that they called the breath that pervades all things Zeus, ...".
But the word πνεῦμα which Gifford has awent as "breath" truly means wind/spirit.
It is but a short way from being a lord of the wind, of the breath of life if you will, to being a lord of words, speech, pœtry and song which all hang on the breath. Thus Wōden was a god of skáldskapr, thus Hyndluljóð 3 :
mælsku mörgum | ok mannvit firum;
To many skill in speech | and wit to men,
And:
en brag skaldum,
to the singer his song (brag).
The wind was often understood to sing of old, we nowadays say "whistle" or "howl", thus in Ṛgvedaḥ 5.41.6 the "god and singer (vipra)" is Vāyu:
pra vo vāyuṃ rathayujaṃ kṛṇudhvam pra devaṃ vipram panitāram arkaiḥ |
iṣudhyava ṛtasāpaḥ puraṃdhīr vasvīr no atra patnīr ā dhiye dhuḥ ||
Bring hither him who yokes the car, your Vāyu, who praises with his songs, the God and Singer;
And, praying and devout, noble and prudent, may the Gods’ Spouses in their thoughts retain us. (Griffith)
And there was maybe once a whole load of lost songs (vāyu gītāḥ) of which he was meant to be the father, thus Laws of Manu (awend. George Bühler), chap. 9.42:
It is but a short way from being a lord of the wind, of the breath of life if you will, to being a lord of words, speech, pœtry and song which all hang on the breath. Thus Wōden was a god of skáldskapr, thus Hyndluljóð 3 :
mælsku mörgum | ok mannvit firum;
To many skill in speech | and wit to men,
And:
en brag skaldum,
to the singer his song (brag).
The wind was often understood to sing of old, we nowadays say "whistle" or "howl", thus in Ṛgvedaḥ 5.41.6 the "god and singer (vipra)" is Vāyu:
pra vo vāyuṃ rathayujaṃ kṛṇudhvam pra devaṃ vipram panitāram arkaiḥ |
iṣudhyava ṛtasāpaḥ puraṃdhīr vasvīr no atra patnīr ā dhiye dhuḥ ||
Bring hither him who yokes the car, your Vāyu, who praises with his songs, the God and Singer;
And, praying and devout, noble and prudent, may the Gods’ Spouses in their thoughts retain us. (Griffith)
And there was maybe once a whole load of lost songs (vāyu gītāḥ) of which he was meant to be the father, thus Laws of Manu (awend. George Bühler), chap. 9.42:
atra gāthā vāyugītāḥ kīrtayanti purāvidaḥ /
yathā bījaṃ na vaptavyaṃ puṃsā paraparigrahe //
With respect to this (matter), those acquainted
with the past recite some stanzas, sung by Vayu
(the Wind, to show) that seed must not be sown
by (any) man on that which belongs to another.
Roscher rightly I think understands Hermes as being the first finder of wood-wind musical instruments, rather than those of the stringed kind, but as stringed instruments were the more well-to-do instruments with the Greeks, pipes were then left to Hermes' son Pan. The Pied Piper of Hamelin wants thinking about here, and I wouldn't be the first to link him to Wōden. H.A. Guerber Myths of the Norsemen (1909):
And above all:
Mi broþer & ich vor we beþ • of dukes kunne ycome • 2422
Vor þoru ure godes in to þe se • we wende ich vnderstonde•
& mercurius us [h]aþ • ylad in to þin londe •
My brother and I for that we be of dukes' kin come
It may be that this can be seen better if we withmete the above to the following bits of old Greek lore.
Pausanias, Guide to Greece 10. 17. 5 (awending Jones) :
"In this myth Odin is the piper, the shrill tones of the flute are emblematic of the whistling wind, the rats represent the souls of the dead, which cheerfully follow him, and the hollow mountain into which he leads the children is typical of the grave."My thoughts on this would be more along the lines that made Richard Verstegan when he first put it before an English readership, that it was reckoned by some to speak of the wandering off of folk from the towns of the Netherlands and northern Germany and their settling in a new home in the East in the early Middle Ages. The lame child who couldn't keep up and didn't follow the others makes me think of the tale of how the Gepids began in Jordanes' History of the Goths 17.94, as the Goths in the slowest ship. Or, as I've read somewhere the Goths who didn't get over a bridge before it fell down (see Jordanes' Hist. 4.25). Wōden, as a wind god, is indeed the kind of god who was:
"... responsible for so many quiet lads and lasses going off into the Blue for mad adventures..."
And above all:
"... sailing in ships, sailing to other shores!"Thus our old kings said they were sprung from Wōden, for that Wōden was deemed to be their ghostly leader in settling in Britain, in a kind of a Germanic ver sacrum, thus Robert of Gloucester writing of Hengest and Horsa:
Mi broþer & ich vor we beþ • of dukes kunne ycome • 2422
Vor þoru ure godes in to þe se • we wende ich vnderstonde•
& mercurius us [h]aþ • ylad in to þin londe •
My brother and I for that we be of dukes' kin come
Fared through our gods, into the sea we went I understand,
and Mercurius [that is, Wōden] us has led into your [Vortigern's] landIt may be that this can be seen better if we withmete the above to the following bits of old Greek lore.
Pausanias, Guide to Greece 10. 17. 5 (awending Jones) :
“ ... Ἴβηρες ἐς τὴν Σαρδὼ διαβαίνουσιν ὑπὸ ἡγεμόνι τοῦ στόλου Νώρακι, καὶ ᾠκίσθη Νώρα πόλις ὑπὸ αὐτῶν: ταύτην πρώτην γενέσθαι πόλιν μνημονεύουσιν ἐν τῇ νήσῳ, παῖδα δὲ Ἐρυθείας τε τῆς Γηρυόνου καὶ Ἑρμοῦ λέγουσιν εἶναι τὸν Νώρακα.”
“ ... the Iberians crossed to Sardinia, under Norax as leader of the expedition, and they founded the city of Nora. The tradition is that this was the first city in the island, and they say that Norax was a son of Erytheia, the daughter of Geryones, with Hermes for his father.”And from th'ilk 8. 43. 2 :
“φασὶ δὴ γενέσθαι καὶ γνώμην καὶ τὰ ἐς πόλεμον ἄριστον τῶν Ἀρκάδων ὄνομα Εὔανδρον, παῖδα δὲ αὐτὸν νύμφης τε εἶναι, θυγατρὸς τοῦ Λάδωνος, καὶ Ἑρμοῦ. σταλέντα δὲ ἐς ἀποικίαν καὶ ἄγοντα Ἀρκάδων τῶν ἐκ Παλλαντίου στρατιάν, παρὰ τῷ ποταμῷ πόλιν τῷ Θύβριδι οἰκίσαι: ...”
“Well, the story is that the wisest man and the best soldier among the Arcadians was one Evander, whose mother was a nymph, a daughter of the Ladon, while his father was Hermes. Sent out to establish a colony at the head of a company of Arcadians from Pallantium, he founded a city on the banks of the river Tiber.”Elsewhere, the Greeks have Apollo as κτίστης, ἀρχηγέτης, for that it was under his oracles that they settled in colonies, although it was an old wont to have those going to set up new colonies being led by twins or at least brothers (Romulus and Remus, Hengest and Horsa, Ybor and Agio of the Lombards, maybe "Ambri et Assi... duces Wandalorum", Segovesus and Bellovesus, Leonarius and Lotharius of the Galatae in Asia Minor, Moses and Aaron and so on). And again we see how the lore of the "Heavenly Twins" is blending with that of our god here. This can get formenged with the faring forth of the souls of the dead at death in so much as the youths to whom the lot fell in the ver sacrum were once upon a time (it was believed) offered up to the gods rather than driven beyound the meares of the folk, never to come back. And these driven out youths, these outcasts, these "socially dead" ones, like those truly dead, and also like those mad or "out of their minds" driven out of themselves for good or ill, are all Wōden's.
"All the poets were beggars; all alchemists and all philosophers are beggars."
Although we have seen that wisdom and gifts of speech were set down to a drink of somaḥ or such like, the word "inspiration" nevertheless truly comes from "īnspīrāre", which means, stavely, "to breathe into", and stems from something even more heavenly than somaḥ if it be lawful so to say. Ṛgvedaḥ 10.136.2 (awend. Griffith):
munayo vātaraśanāḥ piśaṅghā vasate malā |
vātasyānudhrājiṃ yanti yad devāso avikṣata ||
The Munis, girdled with the wind, wear garments soiled of yellow hue.
They, following the wind's swift course go where the Gods have gone before.
And the words of the Acts of the Apostles chap. 2 are worth bearing in mind:
2 And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.Mark that the wind was not only wind ("a rushing mighty wind"), but also, fiery so that "there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire".
3 And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.
4 And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.
What is more far faring than the wind the true "viator indefessus" "indefatigabe journeyer" (Saxo GD 3.4.5). And it is even this far-faring that means the god is not going to have one name but many, as many are the kinds of men he overgoes. Thus Grímnismál 48:
einu nafni| hétumk aldregi,
síz ek með folkum fór.
A single name | have I never had
Since first among men I fared.
[awend. Bellows].
And fighting? Well, we mark here that Wōden is not so much a fighter himself as an overseer of those that do fight. In Örvar-Odds saga 20 we read:
“ok sjaldan var Rauðgrani þá við staddr, er nokkurar mannraunir váru í, en inn ráðugasti var hann, þá er þess þurfti við, ok latti sjaldan stórvirkja.”[awend Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards].
“Red-beard was seldom around when there was any danger, but he was a great man for advice [ráðugasti] whenever it was needed, and rarely dissuaded them for performing great deeds.”
Rauðgrani "Red-beard", or rather "Red-whiskers", is here Wōden/Óðin. So that Wōden's help towards siȝe was mostly through rede, ráð, - whence ráðugr and its superlative ráðugasti. In Saxo's Gesta Danorum book 7 we have a good forebisening of such rede (7.10.6):
" [2] Cuius eventum Haraldo oraculis explorare cupienti senex praecipuae magnitudinis, sed orbus oculo, obvius exstitit, qui, hispido etiam amiculo circumactus, Othynum se dici bellorumque usu callere testatus utilissimum ei centuriandi in acie exercitus documentum porrexit."[awend. Oliver Elton].
" And when Harald wished to inquire of oracles how this war would end, an old man of great height, but lacking one eye, and clad also in a hairy mantle, appeared before him, and declared that he was called Odin, and was versed in the practice of warfare; and he gave him the most useful instruction how to divide up his army in the field. "
And what follows in Saxo's book is however, no more than a practical application of geometry and arithmetic. Two of the old free-crafts (artes liberales), in Old English called Rímcræft (arithmetic) and Eorþȝemet-cræft (geometry), that Wōden's southern evenling, namely Mercurius "Mercury" or Hermes ( Ἑρμῆς), was the first finder of (see Plato Phædrus 274c-d).
If Wōden builds up some one of mankind so that they become an hæleþ, an hero, it is to some hidden end of his own, thus in Saxo's Gesta Danorum Book 6 we read (6.5.6):
"Volens quondam Othinus Wicarum funesto interire supplicio, cum id aperte exsequi nollet, Starcatherum, inusitata prius granditate conspicuum, non solum animi fortitudine, sed etiam condendorum carminum peritia illustravit, quo promptiore eius opera ad peragendum regis exitium uteretur."
"Odin once wished to slay Wikar by a grievous death; but, loth to do the deed openly, he graced Starkad, who was already remarkable for his extraordinary size, not only with bravery, but also with skill in the composing of spells, that he might the more readily use his services to accomplish the destruction of the king."
[awend. Oliver Elton].
But the belief took shape that the god gathered heroes to himself as their foster-father. The Einherjar are
"his wish-sons" "hans óskasynir" (Gylfag. 20 "Hann heitir ok Valföðr,
því at hans óskasynir eru allir þeir, er í val
falla. Þeim skipar hann Valhöll ok Vingólf, ok heita þeir þá
Einherjar.") And again this blends with the lore of the twins, for those twins who are like Castor and Pollux, are at heart
not other than Óðin's "óskasynir". We will bring in the Maruts shortly, making them the Eastern answer to the Einherjar, but here it is well to mark that the Maruts are often araught as maryāḥ (rudrasya maryāḥ (RV1.64.2; 7.56.1) divo maryāḥ (5.59.6)) which word can be understood as "sons", but also has a meaning like "knights" that makes it a match for the Greek οἱ κόροι or κοῦροι whence the "Heavenly Twins" at Thebes and Sparta are Διόσ-κουροι. And maybe the Κουρῆτες with whom these were sometimes blent.
The lore about the Einherjar was once belike more nearer akin to that about our English Herlethingi, about which Walter Map says in his De Nugis Curialium that they were:
“... phalanges noctiuage quas Herlethingi dicebant ... in quo viui multi apparuerunt quos decessisse nouerant”
“night-wandering phalanxes which they call Herlethingi ... in which are seen many living who had newly died”.
Which "Herlethingi" is said to be led by "King Herla", as Map puts it:
“Unde fabula dat ilium Herlam regem errore semper infinito circuitus cum excercitu suo tenere vesanos sine quiete uel residencia.”Who is widely understood as Wōden. The best meaning I can wrest from Map’s worn down “Herlethingi” is “Herlan-Þing” “the assembly/meeting of Herla” and may be withmeted to O.N. “trolla-þing”. But "Herlan-here/Herlan-dryht" "Herla's host" or "Herla-cyninges here" "host of king Herla" is what I would like to say. However, Herla would be in Old English Her(e)la whence the Herelingas of Wīdsīð line 111. So in the end Her(e)la is seemingly only another old haleth to be found in the “wütende heer” as the Germans call it, but not needfully the name of its true leader. But the Herelingas are odd. They are twin brothers Emerca and Fridla (the "Emercan sohte ic ond Fridlan" of the next line in Wīdsīð), and they will be found in Biterolf und Dietleib (âventiure von Biterolfe und sînem sune Dietleibe) as "the keen Harlungs" "Fritele and Imbrecke" thus:
“Hence the story hath it that King Herla, in endless wandering, maketh mad marches with his army without stay or rest.”
den küenen
Harlunge,
Fritele und Imbrecke
Von den Harlungen
Fritelen dem jungen
unde ouch Imbrecken
den küenen
Harlunge,
die zwene degene junge,
Fritele und Imbrecke
den küenen
Harlungen:
der alten and der jungen
This last wording being at odds with the above "die zwene degene junge" "the twain young thanes"! Their ending was to be hanged (see Þiðreks saga af Bern 282 where they are called "Egarð ok Áki" "Fritila" becoming the name of their foster-father) by their father's brother Ermenrich having fallen foul of Sibeche's lies. Their foster-father is Eckehart the son of Hâche (whence the "Egarð ok Áki" of Þiðreks saga), who in German folk-lore goes before the “wütende heer” and is door-ward to the Venusberg! Jakob und Wilhelm Grimm Deutsche Sage vol. 1, 314. Der getreue Eckhart:
"Man sagt von dem treuen Eckhart, daß er vor dem Venusberg oder Hörselberg sitze und alle Leute warne, die hineingehen wollen. Johann Kennerer, Pfarrherr zu Mansfeld, seines Alters über achtzig Jahr, erzählte, daß zu Eisleben und im ganzen Lande Mansfeld das wütende Heer vorübergezogen sei, alle Jahr auf den Fastnacht Dornstag, und die Leute sind zugelaufen und haben darauf gewartet; nicht anders, als sollte ein großer mächtiger Kaiser oder König vorüberziehen. Vor dem Haufen ist ein alter Mann hergegangen mit einem weißen Stab, hat sich selbst den treuen Eckhart geheißen. Dieser Mann hat die Leute heißen aus dem Wege weichen, auch etliche Leute gar heimgehen, sie würden sonst Schaden nehmen. Nach diesem Mann haben etliche geritten, etliche gegangen, und es sind Leute gesehen worden, die neulich an den Orten gestorben waren, auch der eins Teils noch lebten. Einer hat geritten auf einem Pferd mit zweien Füßen. Der ander ist auf einem Rade gebunden gelegen, und das Rad ist von selbst umgelaufen. Der dritte hat einen Schenkel über die Achsel genommen und hat gleich sehr gelaufen. Ein anderer hat keinen Kopf gehabt und der Stück ohn Maßen. In Franken ist's noch neulich geschehen, und zu Heidelberg am Neckar hat man's oft im Jahr gesehen. Das wütende Heer erscheint in Einöden, in der Luft und im Finstern, mit Hundegebell, Blasen auf Waldhörnern und Brüllen wilder Tiere, auch siehet man dabei Hasen laufen und höret Schweine grunzen."
"It is said of the truefast Eckhart that he sits before the Venusberg or Hörselberg and warns all folk who want to enter. Johann Kennerer, vicar of Mansfeld, his Elders being over eighty years of his old, told that the “wütende Heer” had gone through Eisleben and the whole of Mansfeld-land, every year on Shrove Tuesday, and the folk were running to it and abiding for it; not unlike a great mighty emperor or king going by. An old man with a white staff went before the trome, calling himself the truefast Eckhart. This man has to kindly get the folk out of the way, a lot of folk go home, they would otherwise take some harm. Many have ridden after him, quite a few have gone, and folk have been seen those who had newly died there, and also in another part the living. One rode on a horse with two feet. Another lies bound on a wheel, and the wheel turns by itself. A third with a thigh above the shoulder as though he ran mightily hard. Another man had no head and was a thing like nothing else. It has been newly seen in Franconia, and it has often been seen each year in Heidelberg on the Neckar. The “wütende Heer” is seen in lonely steads, in the air and in the dark, with the barking of dogs, blowing on hunting-horns, and roaring of wild animals, also a man sees hares running and hears swine grunt."
Now the Einherjar and the “wütende Heer” and our "Herlethingi" are all the Western answer to the Eastern Maruts. They were
thought of at times as an "heere" (RV 2.33.11
“te... senāḥ” “thy hosts” is likely to mean
the Marutas). Who are the Maruts? Ṛgvedaḥ 1.64.3:
yuvāno rudrā ajarā abhoghghano vavakṣuradhrighāvaḥ parvatā iva |
dṛḷhā cid viśvā bhuvanāni pārthivā pra cyāvayantidivyāni majmanā ||
Young Rudras, demon-slayers, never growing old, they have waxed, even as mountains, irresistible.
They make all beings tremble with their mighty strength, even the very strongest, both of earth and heaven.
Now some have misgivings about evening the Maruts with the Einherjar and so on, in so much as that in the East they seem to be a trome of gods who ride out with gods and goddesses in their midst, whilst in the West they are mostly understood as dead folk of one kind or another. But in the West we hear of Holda riding out with the “wütende Heer” who is the same as the Eastern Rodasī thus Ṛgvedaḥ 5.56.8:
rathaṃ nu mārutaṃ vayaṃ śravasyum ā huvāmahe |
ā yasmin tasthau suraṇāni bibhratī sacā marutsu rodasī ||The Maruts' chariot, ever fain to gather glory, we invoke,
Which Rodasi hath mounted, bringing pleasant gifts, with Maruts in her company.
1.167. 4-5:
parā śubhrā ayāso yavyā sādhāraṇyeva maruto mimikṣuḥ |
na rodasī apa nudanta ghorā juṣanta vṛdhaṃ sakhyāya devāḥ ||
joṣad yadīmasuryā sacadhyai viṣitastukā rodasī nṛmaṇāḥ |
ā sūryeva vidhato rathaṃ ghāt tveṣapratīkā nabhaso netyā ||
Far off the brilliant, never-weary Maruts cling to the young Maid as a joint possession.
The fierce Gods drave not Rodasī before them, but wished for her to grow their friend and fellow. When chose immortal Rodasī to follow—she with loose tresses and heroic spirit (nṛmaṇāḥ)—She climbed her servant's chariot, she like Sūrya with cloud-like motion and refulgent aspect.
Rodasī with her heroic spirit (nṛmaṇāḥ) is one with all the valkyrjur and óskmeyjar, Gylfaginning 36:
" Þessar heita valkyrjur. Þær sendir Óðinn til hverrar orrustu. Þær kjósa feigð á menn ok ráða sigri."
"These are hight valkyrjur. These Óðin sends to each fightlock. These choose the fey among men and bestow siȝe (= victory)."
But Þunor is not likely to be far off and indeed in the East his "other I" Indra is the leader and lord of the Maruts (they are indrajyeṣṭhāḥ (RV 1.23.8),
indravantaḥ (RV 5.57.1), and he is in the epics marutpatiḥ). And I mark in Lokasenna 60 that Loki calls Þórr "þú einheri" which is a seldom met with brooking of the singular shape of the word that, in the plural, is Einherjar.
As to the souls of the dead becoming Maruts in the East we will find whispers that this was once thought of. In the The Vishnu Purana
1.6 we may read (awend. H. H. Wilson):
"… Prājāpatyam brāhmaṇānāṁ smṛitaṁ sthānaṁ kriyāvatām |sthānam aindraṁ kshattriyānāṁ sangrāmeshv anivarttinām | Vaiśyānām mārutam sthānaṁ sva-dharmam anuvarttinām | gāndharvaṁ śudra-jātīnām paricharyāsu varttinām| ... "." The world of Prajapati is declared to be the (future) abode of those Brahmans who are assiduous in religious rites; the realm of Indra the abode of those Kshatriyas who turn not back in battle; that of the Maruts the abode of those Vaisyas who fulfil their duties; and that of the Gandharvas the abode of the men of Śudra race who abide in their vocation of service."
So good Vaisyas after death become Maruts. The sheading between Kshatriyas and Vaisyas here will not hold up. For as the Maruts are Indra's trome, to go to Indra's abode is to become a Marut. That this was the oldest belief about the dead among all the Āryāḥ can be seen from the
Christburg treaty of 1249 between the Teutonic Knights and the still heathen
Prussians. This gives us one of the best witnesses (contemporary, first hand,
detailed) in Europe, albeit an unfriendly one, outside of olden Greece
and Rome, to a heathen's hope at death. In that treaty the knights and
the Pope's legate forbid the Prussians a number of their old ways,
among which is this:
"Promiserunt eciam, quod inter se non habebunt de cetero Tulissones vel Ligaschones, homines videlicet mendacissimos histriones, qui quasi gentilium sacerdotes in exequiis defunctorum v[a]e tormentorum infemalium promerentur, dicentes malum bonum et laudantes mortuos de suis furtis et spoliis, immundiciis et rapinis ac aliis viciis et peccatis, que, dum viverent, perpetrarunt: ac erectis in celum luminibus exclamantes, mendaciter asserunt, se videre presentem defunctum per medium celi volantem in equo, armis fulgentibus decoratum, nisum in manu ferentem et cum comitatu magno in aliud seculum procedentem; talibus et consimilibus mendaciis populum se-ducentes et ad ritus gentilium revocantes. Hos, inquam, promiserunt se nunquam de cetero habituros."
"They also promise henceforth not to have among themselves Tulissones or Ligaschones, men, evidently the most fraudulent actors who deserve the woe of hell’s torments, as pagan priests at the funeral-rites of the dead, for calling evil good and praising deadmen for their thefts and booty-taking, for unclean things and reavings and other vices and sins, that, while living they did: and standing upright in the light of heaven and calling out, they falsely assert, to see for themselves the dead man present flying on a horse through the midst of the air, decked with flashing arms, bearing a hawk in hand, and with a great fellowship (comitatus) going forth into another world/life-time (aliud seculum); and by such like and similar lies leading and calling back the people themselves to the rites of the pagans. These, I say, they promise henceforth never to have."
ajanayo maruto vakṣaṇābhyodiva ā vakṣaṇābhyaḥ
The Marut host hast thou engendered from the womb, the Maruts from the womb of heaven. (Griffith)
That Rudra and Dyaus are also said to be the father of the Maruts, shows us that these three gods at least shared something between them.
Among the Parsees however, Vāyuḥ, is Vayuš. In their Ram Yasht, which is the hymn to Vayuš, his often met with epithet is uparō.kairya- “having superior skill.” He is there shown to be a greater god than even Ahura Mazda, who is otherwhere the highest god with them, for 1.2-3 (awend James Darmesteter):
Among the Parsees however, Vāyuḥ, is Vayuš. In their Ram Yasht, which is the hymn to Vayuš, his often met with epithet is uparō.kairya- “having superior skill.” He is there shown to be a greater god than even Ahura Mazda, who is otherwhere the highest god with them, for 1.2-3 (awend James Darmesteter):
2.tem ýazata ýô dadhvå ahurô mazdå airyene vaêjahi vanghuyå dâityayå zaranaêne paiti gâtvô zaranaêne paiti fraspâiti zaranaêne paiti upasterene frasteretât paiti baresmen perenêbyô paiti khzhârayatbyô.And here Airyana Vaejah can barely be understood as any kingdom of this earth.
3. aom jaidhyat,
avat âyaptem dazdi-mê
vayush ýô uparô-kairyô
ýatha azem nijanâni
angrahe mainyêush dâmanãm
naêcish avat ýô speñtahe.
2. To him did the Maker, Ahura Mazda, offer up a sacrifice in the Airyana Vaejah, on a golden throne, under golden beams and a golden canopy, with bundles of baresma and offerings of full-boiling [milk].
3. He begged of him a boon, saying: 'Grant me this, O Vayu! who dost work highly, that I may smite the creation of Angra Mainyu, and that nobody may smite this creation of the Good Spirit!'
Only later is Vayuš said to have been made by Ahura Mazda.
In the Warharan Yasht, the first shape of Warharan, earlier Vərəθraγna, the Parsees' Mars/Hercules, is as a "vâtahe kehrpa darshyôish" "fair strong wind (vâta) "; the seventh a falcon (vārəγna-).
In the Ram Yasht we find that Vayuš has a golden helmet (zaranyō.xaoδa- literally "golden hood/hat"), and a golden cloak (zaranyô-pusem) and he has, among other golden weapons (zaranyō.zaya-), a sharp spear (tižyaršti-), about which he himself has much to say, thus 10.48:
In the later works of the Parsses moreover such as the Bundahišn we learn that this god was linked to fighters above all; that he was understood to have an ambiguous character hence "the good Vayu" is set beside "the evil Vayu" (or "evil wind" as the following outdraught will awend it); and how he has something of the rôle of a psychopomp ... Thus Bundahišn ch.26. §§28 - 30 (awend. B. T. Anklesaria):
Mercurius' work as a psychopomp (ψυχοπομπός) can also be linked to the wind, and a flat reading of Plutarch's Greek Questions 24 (awend F. C. Babbitt) would understand Hermes as no more than the air:
But we've run ahead of ourselves here, for we have missed out the underlying philosophy to all.
Going upward then, the much missaid Yāska is, in a way, right when he writes in his Nirukta Ch. 7, 5 that there are deemed to be only three gods, thus:
And in the Bṛhaddevatā of Shaunaka (awend. A.A. Macdonell) bk. 1, ch.14, §69:
Now it might not seem obvious how Vāyuḥ can be Agni. Wind is Wind and Fire is Fire you might think, and never the twain shall meet. Well the answer is in the Aitareya-Brāhmaṇa 2.34.3 (awend. Keith) where it is written:
But we would be wrong to leave things here. For Vāyuḥ is not kindling Agni out of nothing, indeed, Vāyuḥ is not so much kindling Agni at all, as changing himself into Agni. He always was Agni, Agni in his latent or hidden form that is. The swiftness and so on of the wind being understood to bewray its inward fiery nature even if outwardly it looked nothing like. Thus it can be said he "kindles himself" and : "Agni the good kindler is Vayu...". Looked at in this way, Þunor (for Agni) could be said to be the father of Wōden! Thus Jacob Grimm [in the Vorrede to vol. 1 of his Deutsche Mythologie (1844) lf. xvii, awend. Stallybrass (in his vol.3)] wisely wrote:
tizhyarshte nãma ahmi tizhyarshtish nãma ahmi
perethvareshte nãma ahmi perethvareshtish nãma ahmi,
vaêzhyarshte nãma ahmi vaêzhyarshtish nãma ahmi,
hvarenå nãma ahmi aiwi-hvarenå nãma ahmi.
My name is Sharpness of spear; my name is He of the sharp spear.
My name is Length of spear; my name is He of the long spear.
My name is Piercingness of spear; my name is He of the piercing spear.
My name is the Glorious; my name is the Over-glorious.
Indeed he seems to have many names ... All this goldenness, is not to show the gods links to the sun so much as to lightning and to fire, and may also be seen in areachings of the Maruts in the Ṛgvedaḥ .
In the later works of the Parsses moreover such as the Bundahišn we learn that this god was linked to fighters above all; that he was understood to have an ambiguous character hence "the good Vayu" is set beside "the evil Vayu" (or "evil wind" as the following outdraught will awend it); and how he has something of the rôle of a psychopomp ... Thus Bundahišn ch.26. §§28 - 30 (awend. B. T. Anklesaria):
"rām ī wāy ī weh ī dagrand-xwadāy gōwēd xwad ast wāy ī dagrand-xwadāy kē andar mēnōgān artēštārān-sālārīh xwēškārīh dārēd. ud ruwān ī ahlawān ka pad cēhwidarag widerēd, wāy ī weh dast gīrēd, ō ān ī xwēš gāh barēd. ē rāy rām gōwēd cē rāmišn-dādār ō hamāg gēhān. ka-z wāy ī wattar gyān az tan be zanēd, ōy wāy ī weh be padīrēd ud hunsandīh be dahēd."
"28 Ram which, one says, is the good Vayu (in Pahlavi "wāy ī weh") lord of long duration, is Vayu lord of long duration itself, whose allotted work is chieftainship among the spiritual warriors (artēštārān-sālārīh). 29. And when the soul of the righteous will pass over the "pass of selection", the good Vayu (wāy ī weh) will hold its hand, and carry it to its own seat. One calls it Ram for this reason, because it is the giver of delight to the entire creation. 30. Even when the evil wind (wāy ī wattar) severs the life from the body, the good Vayu (wāy ī weh) accepts it, and gives it resignation."The earthly artēštārān sālār was a kind of Field Marshal among the Sassanid Parsees. But the knightly or kshatriya class was known as the artēštārān among them.
Mercurius' work as a psychopomp (ψυχοπομπός) can also be linked to the wind, and a flat reading of Plutarch's Greek Questions 24 (awend F. C. Babbitt) would understand Hermes as no more than the air:
“νομίζουσι γάρ, ὥσπερ τὰ σώματα τῶν ἀποθανόντων δέχεσθαι τὴν γῆν, οὕτω τὰς ψυχὰς τὸν Ἑρμῆν:”Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 5.10.1 (awend. P. Olivelle):
“For they believe that, just as the earth receives the bodies of the dead, even so Hermes receives their souls.”
yadā vai puruṣo 'smāl lokāt praiti sa vāyum āgacchati | ...
Now, a person, on departing from this world, arrives first at the wind. ...
But we've run ahead of ourselves here, for we have missed out the underlying philosophy to all.
Going upward then, the much missaid Yāska is, in a way, right when he writes in his Nirukta Ch. 7, 5 that there are deemed to be only three gods, thus:
“tisra.eva.devatā.iti.nairuktāh,.agniḥ.pṛthivī.sthānas.vāyur.vā.indro.vā.antarikṣa.sthānah,.sūryo. dyu.sthānah/[745] ”
“There are three deities only,' say the etymologists : (1) Agni, whose sphere is earth ; (2) Vayu or Indra, whose sphere is atmosphere ; (3) the sun, whose sphere is heaven.” (awend. Lakshman Sarup)
And in the Bṛhaddevatā of Shaunaka (awend. A.A. Macdonell) bk. 1, ch.14, §69:
“ Agni in this (world), Indra and Vayu in the middle, Surya in heaven, are here to be recognized as the three deities.”And you will see that Indra and Vāyuḥ, who are our Þunor and Wōden, are here deemed to be one and the same! And again, in a way they are. And this is why they can borrow each others tokens, thus Bṛhaddevatā bk. 1, ch.18, §87:
“A formula addressed to Indra is distinguished by the characteristic marks of Vayu as well as of Indra, and by denominations of the bolt, by mighty activity, and by might.”
And this why: the tokening of the ash-tree matches that of the oak-tree; why a lightning spear matches a thunder axe; why Indra is lord of a hall of slain heroes and walkyrie-like apsarásaḥ (अप्सरसः ) in the East but Wōden does this in the West. And also why in Grímnismál, 23-24, Wōden's hall (Valhöll) is said to have 540 doors (dyr - "Fimm hundruð dura| ok umb fjórum tögum,") whilst Þunor's hall (Bilskirnir), has the same tale of floors/rooms (gólf -"Fimm hundruð gólfa| ok umb fjórum tögum," ).
Yāska then tells us Nirukta 7, ch. 16 that the other two (three) gods might themselves be called Agni:
Yāska then tells us Nirukta 7, ch. 16 that the other two (three) gods might themselves be called Agni:
And indeed (7, ch. 17-18) that Agni was the god of gods:" sa.na.manyeta.ayam.eva.agnir.ity.apy.ete.uttare.jyotiṣī.agnī.ucyete/""He (the student) should not think that Agni refers to this (terrestrial fire) only. The two higher luminaries (lightning and the sun) are called Agni also." (awend. Lakshman Sarup)
But by the same token we could also say that all the gods are the Sun, or are Indra, or Vāyuḥ! Or, that one of these three is the god of gods."atha.api.brāhmaṇam.bhavati.``agniḥ.sarvā.devatāh''.iti/tasya.uttarā.bhūyase.nirvacanāya/``indram.mitram.varuṇam.agnim.āhur.atho.divyaḥ.sa.suparṇo.garutmān/ekam.sad.viprā.bahudhā.vadanty.agnim.yamam.mātariśvānam.āhuh/''.(RV.1,164,46)...""Moreover, there is a Brāhmaṇa passage : Agni is all the deities. The stanza following the present one explains it more clearly.They call Agni Indra, Mitra, and Varuna ; (they) also (say) that he is thedivine Garutman of beautiful wings. The sages speak of him who is onein various ways ; they call him Agni, Yama, Mātariśvān." ...".(awend. Lakshman Sarup)
Now it might not seem obvious how Vāyuḥ can be Agni. Wind is Wind and Fire is Fire you might think, and never the twain shall meet. Well the answer is in the Aitareya-Brāhmaṇa 2.34.3 (awend. Keith) where it is written:
"Vāyur vā Agniḥ suṣamid, Vāyur hi svayam ātmānaṃ saminddʰe svayam
idaṃ sarvaṃ yad idaṃ kiṃca. ..."
"Agni the good kindler is Vayu, for Vayu himself kindles himself, himself all this whatever there is here ...".Which I think is best to understand by leaping over the first bit to start with. Begin only by thinking that it is as much to say as Vāyuḥ kindles fire, for we all know how wind (air) is indeed a needful thing for fire to burn, so we can see how in a myth, Mātariśvān, the first kindler of fire is said to be Vāyuḥ. And, understanding Wōden for Vāyuḥ we can then see how he is said to be the father of Þunor, as Þunor, like Indra, is himself only Agni in that god's atmospheric form. Thus Wōden is said to be Alföðr. Gylfaginning 9:
"Ok fyrir því má hann heita Alföðr, at hann er faðir allra goðanna ok manna ok alls þess, er af honum ok hans krafti var fullgert. ..."And we can see how Dyaus (Dyáuḥ) challenges Vāyuḥ to this title, and how they are, and are not, the same. Eusebius of Caesarea in his Preparation for the Gospel Book 3,ch. 3, looking to Diodorus Siculus:
" For this reason must he be called Allfather: because he is father of all the gods and of men, and of all that was fulfilled of him and of his might. ..."
[awend. A. G. Brodeur]
"... τὸ μὲν οὖν πνεῦμα Δία προσαγορεῦσαι μεθερμηνευομένης τῆς λέξεως· ὃν αἴτιον ὄντα τοῦ ψυχικοῦ τοῖς ζῴοις ἐνόμισαν ὑπάρχειν πάντων οἱονεί τινα πατέρα. συμφωνεῖν δὲ τούτοις φασὶ καὶ τὸν ἐπιφανέστατον τῶν παρ' Ἕλλησι ποιητῶν ἐπὶ τοῦ θεοῦ τούτου λέγοντα·And thus Vāyuḥ had the first offering of Soma, Ṛgvedaḥ 1.134.6:
«πατὴρ ἀνδρῶν τε θεῶν τε».
"... So they called the wind Zeus, the word being so interpreted, and as he was the author of the soul in living beings they supposed him to be, as it were, a father of all.
'And with this, they say, the most illustrious poet of the Greeks agrees, when he speaks of this god, as
'Father of men and gods.' [ Hom. Il. 544]...".
tvaṃ no vāyaveṣāmapūrvyaḥ somānāṃ prathamaḥ pītimarhasi sutānāṃ pītimarhasi | uto vihutmatīnāṃ viśāṃ vavarjuṣīṇām |Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.5.22 (awend. Olivelle):
viśvā it te dhenavo duhra āśiraṃ ghṛtaṃ duhrata āśiram ||
Thou, Vāyu, who hast none before thee, first of all hast right to drink these offerings of Soma juice, hast right to drink the juice out-poured,
Yea, poured by all invoking tribes who free themselves from taint of sin,
For thee all cows are milked to yield the Soma-milk, to yield the butter and the milk. (Griffith)
sa yathaiṣāṃ prāṇānāṃ madhyamaḥ prāṇa evam etāsāṃ devatānāṃ vāyuḥ |
mlocanti hy anyā devatā na vāyuḥ |
saiṣānastamitā devatā yad vāyuḥ ||
The wind holds the same position among the deities as the central breath does among the vital functions, for the other deities disappear, but not the wind. The wind is the only deity that does not set.
But we would be wrong to leave things here. For Vāyuḥ is not kindling Agni out of nothing, indeed, Vāyuḥ is not so much kindling Agni at all, as changing himself into Agni. He always was Agni, Agni in his latent or hidden form that is. The swiftness and so on of the wind being understood to bewray its inward fiery nature even if outwardly it looked nothing like. Thus it can be said he "kindles himself" and : "Agni the good kindler is Vayu...". Looked at in this way, Þunor (for Agni) could be said to be the father of Wōden! Thus Jacob Grimm [in the Vorrede to vol. 1 of his Deutsche Mythologie (1844) lf. xvii, awend. Stallybrass (in his vol.3)] wisely wrote:
"Obschon Wuotans sohn und ihm an macht oder einfluss weichend erscheint Donar wieder mit ihm zusammenfallend, gewissermassen als ein älterer vor Wuotan verehrter gott."
"Though a son of Wuotan (Wōden) and yielding to him in power or influence, Donar (Thunar, Thor) appears at times identical with him, and to some extent as an older god worshipped before Wuotan. "
Wōden and Þunor will therefore be understood as the heart and soul of the old belief. If I think of Wessex - where Birinus once found "omnes ... paganissimos" "everyone most pagan" (Bede Hist. Eccl. bk. 3, ch 5) - there are almost no stow names naming any other old gods to be found still on the map, or in old charters, other than those to Wōden and Þunor, with some naming Wōden under his byname of Grim. I say almost, but Satterleigh and Wayland's Smithy hardly make much of an inroad into the foregoiing ... Maybe it's best to set it all out...
Hampshire
i) “on þunres lea” a meare-mark of seven hides at Millbrook in Hampshire in two charters dated to 1045 (S 1008 & S 1009);
ii) “on Þunres lea” a meare-mark of twenty hides at Droxford in Hampshire (S276).
iii) Grimsditch on western edge of shire, here and there also called "Devil's Ditch"
iv) "Grymes Grove" a wood in Binsted in 1586 (see Victorian County History (1903) vol. 2, lf.483)
Berkshire
i) Grimsbury Castle in Hampstead Norris
ii) Grimsditch on the downs above the "Vale of the White Horse"
iii) Wayland's Smithy
Wiltshire
i) “to ðunres felda” is listed as a meare-mark for a hide of land at Hardenhuish (S308);
ii ) 'Wodnes dic' (see S449, S424, S368, S647, S777, S694, S711, S735) now Wansdyke, see above and below for some further markworthy things about this
iii) 'Wodnesbeorh' (S272) a meare-mark of 15 hides at Alton Priors and which is said to be the long barrow now called "Adam's Grave" ("Woddes geat" is also found in this charter, and which is often rightledged to "Wodnes geat" but the same is "Titferþes geat" in S449).
iv) 'Wodnes dene' (S449) a meare-mark to 15 hides at East Overton (in West Overton!) seemingly Lockeridge Dene as the "on hyrsleage up to Wodnes dic" listed after is Hursley (Bottom) in the West Woods
v) 'andlang Grimes dic' (see S 612) a meare-mark of 6 hides at Little Langford and runs along the northern edge of Langford Long Coppice. We meet it again in two other charters (see S631 and S1010) as it runs over Grovely Down to the Wylye making a northern meare-mark to four hides at Burcombe and two and an half hides at Ditchampton. This is the oldest bookmarked Grim's Ditch.
Devonshire
i) Dorsley (SX7760) in Devon which was 'Thuresleg(h)' Fees. This from the shortening of
Þunor which we find in Thursday.
ii) Grimspound on Dartmoor and Grim's Tor otherwise Hameldown Tor next to it;
iii) "Grymesgrove" a meare-mark in the "foreste de Dertimore" (Dartmoor Forest);
iv) Satterleigh.
Freefolk in Hampshire I understand as "free-folk", and Froyle in the same shire I acknowledge maybe for Frēohyll, the hill of the lady (O.E. frēo), not "free-hill", yet it would be bold indeed to say this was for a goddess who was the evenling of the Northern Freyja. The hill is "Saintbury Hill" but this seems to be named for a farmer called Simbury who lived there (see [here]) who might stem from the earlier Sunburys who most likely took their name from Sunbury in Middlesex.
The same can be more or less said for Surrey, Sussex, Kent, Essex, Middlesex and Herrtfordshire.
Kent
iii) Tuesnoad in Bethersden, and from which an often met with yeoman kindred in East Kent take their toname (=surname) (toname spelt: Tewyssnothe, Twysnoth, Twysnod, Twisnodde).
iv) Twysden in Goudhurst looks like it was "Tīwes denn" and bequeaths its name to the well-known kindred of Twysden (thus in the Calendar of Patent Rolls for 1339: "William son of John Roger of Twyisdenne, for the death of John de Twyisdenne. " In 1334 Lay Subsidy Roll: "Jn. de Twysdenne" and an Adam in West Barnfield Hundred). Not to be formenged with Twyssenden in the same parish!
Sussex
i) “on þunorsleȝe” a meare-mark of Barnhorne manor (TQ707077) near Bexhill (S 108)
ii) Thundersbarrow Hill in the South Downs behind Shoreham in Sussex is more than likely named for the god, although it is only first marked as “Thunder Borough” in 1801. In Sussex however you have to be wary of those stow-names named for an old Ironmaster whose toname was "Thunder".
iii) The lost Friday's Church & Friday's Well (TQ086099) in Sussex may dimly minn Frīȝ. But "Friday" is a well-known toname, and also an Old English man's name, so that without something else bearing witness (folklore, "ancient monument" and so on) we shouldn't think every stow with Friday in it is named for the goddess.
iv) Monmere Pond (where Angmering Station now is!)
Surrey
i) "æt Þunresfelda" marked by King Alfred in his will and given to "Æðelme mines broðer suna" . This is Thunderfield in Horley and is marked in old charters thus: “Suttone . cum Þunresfelda silvatica .” and “... XXX [mansiones] in Suttone cum cubilibus porcorum que illuc pertinent . scilicet in Þunresfelda.” I mark that Thunderfield was not an open field but "silvatica" “woody” and the kind of mast-rich woodland you could fatten swine in, so oaks (the "Surrey weed") are more than likely. From it is named “Thunderfield Castle” (TQ 300-426) although this is in Horne parish. Æðelstan and his witan made charters at Thunderfield, which is both an odd and out of the way stead to do this in.
ii) Thursley ‘Thureslegh’ in 1332, from The Gentleman’s Magazine 1799, Part II., p. 921.:
“Thursley, or Thirsley, is an extensive parish in the county of Surrey
and hundred of Godalming. The village is mean and straggling,
standing in a dry, healthy situation, pleasant in summer, but, from its
high, unsheltered situation, exposed to the north-east winds, very cold
in winter. On the heaths between Thursley and Frinsham are three
remarkable conic-shaped hills, called the "Devil's Three Jumps," the
eastern hill (or jump) being the largest in circumference and height,
the centre hill the least and lowest. They are composed of a hard
rock, barely covered with a light black mould, which gives a scanty
nourishment to moss and stunted heath. Their bases are nearly
surrounded by a foss, which in some places appears to be artificial.
In the fosses are constant springs of water, which assist in forming
near them a large piece of water called Abbot's Pond, formerly part
of the possessions of the neighbouring abbey of Waverly. The
country people, particularly the aged, relate many tales of these
eminences, and hold them in a kind of awful reverence (the revels of
the fairies yet linger in the tales of the aged rustick). It was formerly
customary for the country-people on Whit-Tuesday to assemble on
the top of the eastern hill to dance and make merry. If I might be
permitted to risk a conjecture on the probable etymology of the name
of the parish, Thursley, or Thirsley, that is, Thir's field, this spot
was formerly dedicated to the Saxon god Thir, and his image was
erected on the eastern eminence. On the introduction of Christianity,
it is reasonable to suppose it acquired its present name from having
been appropriated to the service of an heathen idol. These circumstances
may have given rise to the legendary tales and awe for the
spot, which is now scarcely erased from the memory of the neighbouring
villagers. S.”
iii) Tuesley near Godalming, there are old bookmarkings of an "Old Minster" at Tuesley which might mean that Tuesley was once the main township thereabouts and Godalming therefore something of an upstart.
Essex
i) Thundersley - should be known to the whole wide world - church of St. Peter
ii) Thunderley (Hall) in Wimbish
iii) Thunderslow Half-hundred
iv) Thurstable Hundred
v) Grime's Dyke about Colchester
vi) & vii) W. A. Chaney marks lost field names "Wodnesfeld" (in Widdington in 1303) and "Wedynsfeld" (in Theydon in 1446).
viii) "into Sateres byrig" a meare-mark in the land at Alderton (Ælwartone) in Loughton given to Waltham Abbey (Sawyer number 1036) - as the land marked out stretches between the Roding water (of eacrofte; of ðam pole into Leofsiges mad) and Epping Forest (æt Werdhæcce; into stanweges hacce; into wulfhlype) with "Sateres byrig" on the forest side, "Sateres byrig" might well be Loughton Camp.
Middlesex
i) Grimsditch or Grim's Dyke from Harrow Weald to Bushey Heath
ii ) Sunbury - those that will have this from a man's name Sunna are unlikely to be right as Ælfric’s awending of the Bible gives us:
Hertfordshire
i) Thundridge is likely to be named for Þunor - church of St. Mary on end of a ridge under which runs Ermine Street
ii) Grimsditch
iii) Devil's Dyke at Wheathampstead likely to have once been named for Grim
.Hampshire
i) “on þunres lea” a meare-mark of seven hides at Millbrook in Hampshire in two charters dated to 1045 (S 1008 & S 1009);
ii) “on Þunres lea” a meare-mark of twenty hides at Droxford in Hampshire (S276).
iii) Grimsditch on western edge of shire, here and there also called "Devil's Ditch"
iv) "Grymes Grove" a wood in Binsted in 1586 (see Victorian County History (1903) vol. 2, lf.483)
Berkshire
i) Grimsbury Castle in Hampstead Norris
ii) Grimsditch on the downs above the "Vale of the White Horse"
iii) Wayland's Smithy
Wiltshire
i) “to ðunres felda” is listed as a meare-mark for a hide of land at Hardenhuish (S308);
ii ) 'Wodnes dic' (see S449, S424, S368, S647, S777, S694, S711, S735) now Wansdyke, see above and below for some further markworthy things about this
iii) 'Wodnesbeorh' (S272) a meare-mark of 15 hides at Alton Priors and which is said to be the long barrow now called "Adam's Grave" ("Woddes geat" is also found in this charter, and which is often rightledged to "Wodnes geat" but the same is "Titferþes geat" in S449).
iv) 'Wodnes dene' (S449) a meare-mark to 15 hides at East Overton (in West Overton!) seemingly Lockeridge Dene as the "on hyrsleage up to Wodnes dic" listed after is Hursley (Bottom) in the West Woods
v) 'andlang Grimes dic' (see S 612) a meare-mark of 6 hides at Little Langford and runs along the northern edge of Langford Long Coppice. We meet it again in two other charters (see S631 and S1010) as it runs over Grovely Down to the Wylye making a northern meare-mark to four hides at Burcombe and two and an half hides at Ditchampton. This is the oldest bookmarked Grim's Ditch.
Devonshire
i) Dorsley (SX7760) in Devon which was 'Thuresleg(h)' Fees. This from the shortening of
Þunor which we find in Thursday.
ii) Grimspound on Dartmoor and Grim's Tor otherwise Hameldown Tor next to it;
iii) "Grymesgrove" a meare-mark in the "foreste de Dertimore" (Dartmoor Forest);
iv) Satterleigh.
Freefolk in Hampshire I understand as "free-folk", and Froyle in the same shire I acknowledge maybe for Frēohyll, the hill of the lady (O.E. frēo), not "free-hill", yet it would be bold indeed to say this was for a goddess who was the evenling of the Northern Freyja. The hill is "Saintbury Hill" but this seems to be named for a farmer called Simbury who lived there (see [here]) who might stem from the earlier Sunburys who most likely took their name from Sunbury in Middlesex.
The same can be more or less said for Surrey, Sussex, Kent, Essex, Middlesex and Herrtfordshire.
Kent
i) “to ðære
stowe þe
is nu ȝecwedon
Þunores
hlæwe” a lost a meare-mark of Minster in Thanet where a king's redesman bearing the unlikely name of Thunor (see Cotton
Caligula A. xiv.
“þæs cyninges ȝeferan
se wæs Þunor haten” - “Æðelred
7 Æðelbryht” whom he "martyred" are the "Heavenly Twins" and their sister "Eormenburh" or "Domne Eafe" with her "hind" is the sun goddess or sun's daughter who is often found in the twins' fellowship)
ii ) Woodnesborough named for a ploughed out barrow in a field near the church (of St. Mary)iii) Tuesnoad in Bethersden, and from which an often met with yeoman kindred in East Kent take their toname (=surname) (toname spelt: Tewyssnothe, Twysnoth, Twysnod, Twisnodde).
iv) Twysden in Goudhurst looks like it was "Tīwes denn" and bequeaths its name to the well-known kindred of Twysden (thus in the Calendar of Patent Rolls for 1339: "William son of John Roger of Twyisdenne, for the death of John de Twyisdenne. " In 1334 Lay Subsidy Roll: "Jn. de Twysdenne" and an Adam in West Barnfield Hundred). Not to be formenged with Twyssenden in the same parish!
Sussex
i) “on þunorsleȝe” a meare-mark of Barnhorne manor (TQ707077) near Bexhill (S 108)
ii) Thundersbarrow Hill in the South Downs behind Shoreham in Sussex is more than likely named for the god, although it is only first marked as “Thunder Borough” in 1801. In Sussex however you have to be wary of those stow-names named for an old Ironmaster whose toname was "Thunder".
iii) The lost Friday's Church & Friday's Well (TQ086099) in Sussex may dimly minn Frīȝ. But "Friday" is a well-known toname, and also an Old English man's name, so that without something else bearing witness (folklore, "ancient monument" and so on) we shouldn't think every stow with Friday in it is named for the goddess.
iv) Monmere Pond (where Angmering Station now is!)
Surrey
i) "æt Þunresfelda" marked by King Alfred in his will and given to "Æðelme mines broðer suna" . This is Thunderfield in Horley and is marked in old charters thus: “Suttone . cum Þunresfelda silvatica .” and “... XXX [mansiones] in Suttone cum cubilibus porcorum que illuc pertinent . scilicet in Þunresfelda.” I mark that Thunderfield was not an open field but "silvatica" “woody” and the kind of mast-rich woodland you could fatten swine in, so oaks (the "Surrey weed") are more than likely. From it is named “Thunderfield Castle” (TQ 300-426) although this is in Horne parish. Æðelstan and his witan made charters at Thunderfield, which is both an odd and out of the way stead to do this in.
ii) Thursley ‘Thureslegh’ in 1332, from The Gentleman’s Magazine 1799, Part II., p. 921.:
“Thursley, or Thirsley, is an extensive parish in the county of Surrey
and hundred of Godalming. The village is mean and straggling,
standing in a dry, healthy situation, pleasant in summer, but, from its
high, unsheltered situation, exposed to the north-east winds, very cold
in winter. On the heaths between Thursley and Frinsham are three
remarkable conic-shaped hills, called the "Devil's Three Jumps," the
eastern hill (or jump) being the largest in circumference and height,
the centre hill the least and lowest. They are composed of a hard
rock, barely covered with a light black mould, which gives a scanty
nourishment to moss and stunted heath. Their bases are nearly
surrounded by a foss, which in some places appears to be artificial.
In the fosses are constant springs of water, which assist in forming
near them a large piece of water called Abbot's Pond, formerly part
of the possessions of the neighbouring abbey of Waverly. The
country people, particularly the aged, relate many tales of these
eminences, and hold them in a kind of awful reverence (the revels of
the fairies yet linger in the tales of the aged rustick). It was formerly
customary for the country-people on Whit-Tuesday to assemble on
the top of the eastern hill to dance and make merry. If I might be
permitted to risk a conjecture on the probable etymology of the name
of the parish, Thursley, or Thirsley, that is, Thir's field, this spot
was formerly dedicated to the Saxon god Thir, and his image was
erected on the eastern eminence. On the introduction of Christianity,
it is reasonable to suppose it acquired its present name from having
been appropriated to the service of an heathen idol. These circumstances
may have given rise to the legendary tales and awe for the
spot, which is now scarcely erased from the memory of the neighbouring
villagers. S.”
iii) Tuesley near Godalming, there are old bookmarkings of an "Old Minster" at Tuesley which might mean that Tuesley was once the main township thereabouts and Godalming therefore something of an upstart.
Essex
i) Thundersley - should be known to the whole wide world - church of St. Peter
ii) Thunderley (Hall) in Wimbish
iii) Thunderslow Half-hundred
iv) Thurstable Hundred
v) Grime's Dyke about Colchester
vi) & vii) W. A. Chaney marks lost field names "Wodnesfeld" (in Widdington in 1303) and "Wedynsfeld" (in Theydon in 1446).
viii) "into Sateres byrig" a meare-mark in the land at Alderton (Ælwartone) in Loughton given to Waltham Abbey (Sawyer number 1036) - as the land marked out stretches between the Roding water (of eacrofte; of ðam pole into Leofsiges mad) and Epping Forest (æt Werdhæcce; into stanweges hacce; into wulfhlype) with "Sateres byrig" on the forest side, "Sateres byrig" might well be Loughton Camp.
Middlesex
i) Grimsditch or Grim's Dyke from Harrow Weald to Bushey Heath
ii ) Sunbury - those that will have this from a man's name Sunna are unlikely to be right as Ælfric’s awending of the Bible gives us:
“of þære byriȝ þe is ȝenemned Eliopoleos, þæt is on Englisc, Sunnanburuh."Heliopolis being the well known holy borough (Greek 'polis') of the sun (Greek 'Helios') in Egypt.
"of the bury that is named Heliopolis, that is in English, 'Sunnanburuh' Sunbury".
Hertfordshire
i) Thundridge is likely to be named for Þunor - church of St. Mary on end of a ridge under which runs Ermine Street
ii) Grimsditch
iii) Devil's Dyke at Wheathampstead likely to have once been named for Grim
With the Northmen later we find Wōden and Þunor were always the first gods they thought of. Thus Paulus Diaconus writes to Charlemagne of the Danish king Sigifridus that he `adveniat manibus post terga revinctis, / Nec illi auxilio Thonar et Waten erunt' `should come with his hands tied up behind his back, nor will help him Þonar and Wōden '(In Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Poetarum Latinorum Medii Aevi, i, Poetae Latini Aevi Carolini, ed. by Ernest Duemmler, (Berlin: Weidmann, 1881) lvs. 5I-52.). Olaf Ball (“Onalafball”) in the Historia de sancto Cuthberto swears "per deos mes potentes, Thor et Othan" "by my mighty gods, Thor and Othan" at Chester-le-Street ("Cunceceastre").
De Temporibus Anticristo (set out by Arthur Napier 1883, Napier Homily 42):
“Þor eac and Owðen, þe hæðene men heriað swiðe.”
Fornmanna sögur: eptir gömlum handritum útgefnar að tilhlutun hins Norræna fornfræða felags vol.2 (1826) Saga Ólafs konúngs Tryggvasonar ch.201 lvs. 156 to 7:
“Biskup spurði, hvat manna hann væri.
Hann sagðist vera Norðmaðr.
Biskup mælti: á hvern trúir þú?
Finn svarar: á Þór ok Óðin, sem aðrir Norðmenn.”
“The bishop asked, what of men he was?
He said he was a Northman.
The Bishop said: in what dost thou believe?
Finn answered: in Thor and Odin as other Northmen.”
Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta or The Greatest Saga of Óláfr Tryggvason, þáttr sveins ok Finns (Flateyjarbók 1, lvs. 430-6):
"en faðir hans sagði honum þat fyrir þrifum standa er hann var svá illa við þau. suá mörg ok mikill þrekvirki sem Þór hafði unnit farið í gegnum biörg ok [brotið] hamra en Óðin ræðr sigri manna."What is said here of Thor is akin to what is said of Indra in the Ṛgvedaḥ 10.89.7:
"But his father said to him that it stood in the way of thriving that he was so ill with them [the gods]. So many and great mighty-works as Thor had done - going through mountains and smashing rocks - and Odin wielded over the victory of men."
jaghāna vṛtraṃ svadhitirvaneva ruroja puro aradan nasindhūn |
bibheda ghiriṃ navamin na kumbhamā ghā indroakṛṇuta svayughbhiḥ ||
As an axe fells the tree so he slew Vrtra, brake down the strongholds and dug out the rivers.
He cleft the mountain like a new−made pitcher. Indra brought forth the kine with his Companions.
Viðbœtir við Ólafs sögu hins Helga links lands with gods and thinks that Thor is the Englishman's god and Odin the Saxons' (here the Old Saxons or Germans are meant) god:
“Ólafr konungr kristnaði þetta riki allt, öll blót braut hann niðr ok öll goð, sem Þór Engilsmanna goð, ok Óðin Saxa goð, ok Skiöld Skánunga goð, ok Frey Svía goð, ok Goðorm Dana goð”.
“King Olaf Christened all that kingdom, all offerings he brought low and all gods, as Thor the Englishman’s god, and Óðin the Saxons’ god, and Skiöld the Skáney-folk’s god and Frey god of the Swedes and Goðorm god of the Danes.”
"... Þór Engilsmanna goð, ok Óðin Saxa goð,...". And so mote it ever be.
“Idrîs, who is mentioned in the Thora as Henokh [Enoch], they call Hermes, whilst according to others Hermes is identical with Bûdhasâf.”
Idrîs by the way is from
the verb أَدْرُس
(ʾadrus, “to
teach”).
Whilst Elijah as Helias, Ilya and so on has can be shown to have taken over from Zeus in Greece and Perun in Russia. Wycliff-ite Bible (Bodley 959) has:
"Helias steȝede vp bi þe whirlewynd in to heuene."(2 Kings 2:11)steȝede=styed=went up. It is Elijah being fed by the ravens that is carved on the doorway to the church at Much Canfield in Essex that is widely misunderstood as Wōden (how many eyes has he got?) and the five fylfots nearby might well betoken the "chariot of fire, and horses of fire" and the "whirlwind" by which he styed up.
Further East we see some odd things where Buddhist monks took their culture, the culture of the Āryāḥ of Old India, with them on their farings to China and Japan. In Japan therefore we will find the wind-god, Fūjin, and the thunder god, Raijin, albeit in somewhat ugly and devilish shapes, one green, the other red, often met with as a pair in art. As doorwards they are to be seen in the high gate of Sensō-ji, the Kannon temple in Asakusa, Tōkyō, which is therefore also called Kaminari-mon, "Thunder Gate". [see here] These are in the stead of the older kind of doorwards or niō, who are themselves only a doubling up of the bodhisattva Vajrapāṇi "the thunderbolt bearer" and who is noneother than Indra shifted into a bodhisattva! But here the sharp reader will begin to see I think how the thunder and wind gods might become formenged with the "Heavenly Twins", who themselves have a long history of being doorwards, so that it is hard to see where the one ends and the other begins.
Now in China we will also find that the "thunder-god", léishén, or "thunder-lord", léigōng, has come to be shown as a bird-like being with an hammer and chisel, or hammer and drum, who sometimes seems to owe a little something to Garuḍaḥ (गरुडः), which is odd enough in itself. But back in 1542 this bird-like being it seems was only shown as a helper of the "thunder-god", the god himself having wholly another shape which I don't think it would be too far adrift to call "mikill ok rauðskeggjaður"...
 |
| "According to Daoist scripture, this figure, the Li Star of the Southern
Dipper, was granted the honorific title "Master Thunder" (Lei Gong) by
the Jade Emperor, who also bestowed upon him a gold ball and chain. He
often wears a plaque—seen here hanging across his right shoulder—that
describes his merits: "compassionate, loyal, and virtuous." His official
duties include protecting people, safeguarding the laws, and dispelling
all manner of evil spirits. Accordingly, he is depicted riding on a
flaming wheel and subduing a roiling sea of serpents as other Daoist
deities offer spiritual reinforcement. An inscription written in gold at the upper right states that this image was "painted by order of the imperial concubine née Shen at dawn on the first day of the fourth lunar month in the renyin year of the Jiajing era [May 6, 1542]." Executed by an anonymous court artist attached to the inner palace, the painting may have been commissioned for a ceremony that sought to cure the patron of a disease or other affliction."ᛋ |
 |
| A close up of the bird-like beinng with hammer and chisel to the thunder-god's right, and the onlooker's left. |
 |
| Above: a close up of the fiery-wheel. On fiery wheels as a token of the thunder-god see my earlier post [here] |
From the Works of Sanchuniathon /Philo of Biblus outdrawn by Eusebius in Preparation.... book. 1 ch. 10, (awend. Gifford):
“ Εἶτά φησι· «Τὸν Ὑψουράνιον οἰκῆσαι Τύρον καλύβας τε ἐπινοῆσαι ἀπὸ καλάμων καὶ θρύων καὶ παπύρου, στασιάσαι δὲ πρὸς τὸν ἀδελφὸν Οὔσωον, ὃς σκέπην τῷ σώματι πρῶτος ἐκ δερμάτων ὧν ἴσχυσεν συλλαβεῖν θηρίων εὗρεν. ῥαγδαίων δὲ γενομένων ὄμβρων καὶ πνευμάτων παρατριβέντα τὰ ἐν τῇ Τύρῳ δένδρα πῦρ ἀνάψαι καὶ τὴν αὐτόθι ὕλην καταφλέξαι. δένδρου δὲ λαβόμενον τὸν Οὔσωον καὶ ἀποκλαδεύσαντα πρῶτον τολμῆσαι εἰς θάλατταν ἐμβῆναι· ἀνιερῶσαι δὲ δύο στήλας πυρὶ καὶ πνεύματι καὶ προσκυνῆσαι αἷμά τε σπέν δειν αὐταῖς ἐξ ὧν ἤγρευε θηρίων. τούτων δὲ τελευτησάντων τοὺς ἀπολειφθέντας φησὶ ῥάβδους αὐτοῖς ἀφιερῶσαι καὶ τὰς στήλας προσκυνεῖν καὶ τούτοις ἑορτὰς ἄγειν κατ' ἔτος.”
“Hypsuranius inhabited Tyre, and contrived huts out of reeds and rushes and papyrus: and he quarrelled with his brother Ousous, who first invented a covering for the body from skins of wild beasts which he was strong enough to capture. And when furious rains and winds occurred, the trees in Tyre were rubbed against each other and caught fire, and burnt down the wood that was there. And Ousous took a tree, and, having stripped off the branches, was the first who ventured to embark on the sea; and be consecrated two pillars to fire and wind, and worshipped them, and poured libations of blood upon them from the wild beasts which he took in hunting. But when Hypsuranius and Ousous were dead, those who were left, he says, consecrated staves to them, and year by year worshipped their pillars and kept festivals in their honour. ...”
So the first “Pillars of Hercules”, for this is what they are, were hallowed to "πυρὶ καὶ πνεύματι" “wind and fire”, that is, Vāyuḥ and Agni or Wōden and Þunor, and once again we can see how they might be formenged with the "Heavenly Twins" with eathe.
But where does
this leave the old matching up of Wōden with Tīw/Tīȝ, the Northern
Óðin and Týr? The short answer is Tīw and Þunor are only doubles of eachother, both are the atmospheric Agni, and thus Tacitus named Þunor in his Germania Hercules, not Jupiter, knowing full well that Mars and Hercules among the Romans were understood to be the same god (“... tertium Martis, quod quidam Herculis vocant, ...” see [here]). The longer answer is needed if we will understand the tokening of the one handed and one eyed gods (see [here]) as marking them out as a pair all by themselves, with the overlapping work of bestowing siȝe or sigor, the Northern sigr, that is, victory, as may be seen from withmeteing Hyndluljóð 3 :
"... ok hann ræðr mjök sigri í orrostum...."
"... and he has much authority over victory in battle;...". (awend. A. G. Brodeur)
And I acknowledge that this pairing up is likely to be as old as the fightlock between the Chatti (Hessen) and the Hermunduri (Thuringen) marked by Tacitus in his Annals Bk.13, chap.57, where they are called after the Romans' gods Mercurius and Mars (awend. Church & Brodribb).
"Gefr hann [Wōden] sigr sumum, ...".With what Snorri tells us of Tīw:
"Giveth he victory to some...".
"... ok hann ræðr mjök sigri í orrostum...."
"... and he has much authority over victory in battle;...". (awend. A. G. Brodeur)
And I acknowledge that this pairing up is likely to be as old as the fightlock between the Chatti (Hessen) and the Hermunduri (Thuringen) marked by Tacitus in his Annals Bk.13, chap.57, where they are called after the Romans' gods Mercurius and Mars (awend. Church & Brodribb).
"Eadem aestate inter Hermunduros Chattosque certatum magno proelio, dum flumen gignendo sale fecundum et conterminum vi trahunt, super libidinem cuncta armis agendi religione insita, eos maxime locos propinquare caelo precesque mortalium a deis nusquam propius audiri. inde indulgentia numinum illo in amne illisque silvis [s]alem provenire, non ut alias apud gentes eluvie maris arescente, sed unda super ardentem arborum struem fusa ex contrariis inter se elementis, igne atque aquis, concretum. sed bellum hermunduris prosperum, Chattis exitiosius fuit, quia victores diversam aciem marti ac Mercurio sacravere, quo voto equi viri, cuncta viva occidioni dantur. et minae quidem hostiles in ipsos vertebant. "The Sülze which flows into the Werra or the Solz which flows into the Fulda I think are the best guesses as to the whereabouts of this fight. Bad Salzungen on the Werra lies roughly between these two waterways.
"The same summer a great battle was fought between the Hermunduri and the Chatti, both forcibly claiming a river which produced salt in plenty, and bounded their territories. They had not only a passion for settling every question by arms, but also a deep-rooted superstition that such localities are specially near to heaven, and that mortal prayers are nowhere more attentively heard by the gods. It is, they think, through the bounty of divine power, that in that river and in those forests salt is produced, not, as in other countries, by the drying up of an overflow of the sea, but by the combination of two opposite elements, fire and water, when the latter had been poured over a burning pile of wood. The war was a success for the Hermunduri, and the more disastrous to the Chatti because they had devoted, in the event of victory, the enemy's army to Mars and Mercury, a vow which consigns horses, men, everything indeed on the vanquished side to destruction. And so the hostile threat recoiled on themselves. "
But we should not get swept off our feet by all this, and see that what we truly have here are two gods that have become almost wholly blended, for better or worse, with the "Heavenly Twins" who elsewhere and more widely are found to do even this same work. Theocritus:
οὕτως Τυνδαρίδαις πολεμιζέμεν οὐκ ἐν
ἐλαφρῷ.
αὐτοί τε κρατέοντε καὶ ἐκ κρατέοντος ἔφυσαν.
αὐτοί τε κρατέοντε καὶ ἐκ κρατέοντος ἔφυσαν.
Ah! ‘tis no child’s-play to fight with the sons of Tyndareus;
they prevail even as he that begat them prevaileth.
That Joshua and his folk do the same kind of wholesale slaughter upon the folk of Jericho (see Joshua 6:21) that befell the Chatti at the hands of the Hermunduri is markworth here, as Joshua and Caleb ("hound") are a kind of twins leading a flock of outcasts to settle in some new land. Underpinning this are the following: That Jericho is found drawn in medieval handwrits as a maze or labyrinth, like Troy is often shown to be, the same kind of prison from which the twins in an old myth once freed the sun-maiden (thus Agamemnon and Menelaus free Helen from Troy, Joshua and Caleb free Rahab from Jericho); and that Joshua was long thought of as an antetype of Jesus who was indeed a twin (his twin brother being (Judas) Thomas). That Joshua and Caleb are mythic rather than historic is beckoned to by the belief that they are buried at Timnath-heres (Judges 2:9) "the lot of the sun" ("heres" meaning sun, see Job 9:7; the "Timnath-serah" of Josh. 19.50/24.30 hides "heres" with an anagram - for in the Hebrew (which doesn't write the vowels) "heres" is spelt "HRS" and "serah" "SRH").
And notwithstanding that the "Heavenly Twins", as "Twins", should match eachother,
So like they were, no mortal
Might one from other know:
there was nevertheless a strain of old lore which sought to show them as unalike in some way, even the witherlings (=opposites) of eachother. To say one was mortal, and the other immortal, is a forebisening of this strain of lore. Pausanias in his Guide to Greece 5. 19.2-3 where he is areaching the bedighting of an old chest kept in the temple of Hera at Olympia (awending W.H.S. Jones) also shows us that of old the "Heavenly Twins" didn't even look the same:
"[2]... εἰσὶ δὲ ἐπὶ τῇ λάρνακι Διόσκουροι, ὁ ἕτερος οὐκ ἔχων πωγένεια, μέση δὲ αὐτῶν Ἑλένη: [3] Αἴθρα δὲ ἡ Πιτθέως ὑπὸ τῆς Ἑλένης τοῖς ποσὶν ἐς ἔδαφος καταβεβλημένη μέλαιναν ἔχουσά ἐστιν ἐσθῆτα, ἐπίγραμμα δὲ ἐπ᾽ αὐτοῖς ἔπος τε ἑξάμετρον καὶ ὀνόματός ἐστιν ἑνὸς ἐπὶ τῷ ἑξαμέτρῳ προσθήκη: “Τυνδαρίδα Ἑλέναν φέρετον, Αἴθραν δ᾽ ἕλκετον Ἀθάναθεν.”
.
That is one had a beard, and one didn't."... On the chest are also the Dioscuri, one of them a beardless youth, and between them is Helen. [3] Aethra, the daughter of Pittheus, lies thrown to the ground under the feet at Helen. She is clothed in black, and the inscription upon the group is an hexameter line with the addition of a single word:“The sons of Tyndareus are carrying of Helen, and are dragging Aethra from Athens.” ...".
And although it is Castor and Polydeuces (Κάστωρ καὶ Πολυδεύκης) that came to be thought of as the foremost showing forth of the Heavenly Twins among the Greeks (and then among the Romans who called them "Castor et Pollux"), they were not the only ones who could claim this name. The Greeks knew many names for these old gods stemming from the selfsame roots as the Eastern Aśvinau. Ṛgvedaḥ 1.117.9:
purū varpāṃsy aśvinā dadhānā
O Aśvins, wearing many forms at pleasure,...
Amphion (Ἀμφίων) and Zethus (Ζῆθος) - the "Heavenly Twins" of Thebes are markworthy here for our understanding of how Wōden could be mixed up with the Twin gods. Little old lore about Amphion and Zethus has been handed down to us. But like Castor and Polydeuces, they were called the the Dioscuri (Διόσκουροι) "the knights of Zeus", and Euripides in his more or less lost play Antiope calls them, "λεύκω δὲ πώλω τὼ Διὸς " "white steeds of Zeus" (see also his Phœnissæ line 609) which matches what Pindar in his first Pythian Ode, line 66, calls Castor and Polydeuces:- λευκοπώλων Τυνδαριδᾶν, "to the sons of Tyndareus of the white horses".
Of Amphion Pausanias tells us in his Guide to Greece 9.5.8, (awend. Jones):
And at Olympia in Elis there was mound (χῶμα) by the hippodrome called “ὁ Ταράξιππος” “The Horse-Scarer” (see 6.20.15). Pausanias, in his Guide ... 6.20.18 has this to say of it (awend. Jones):
So Amphion was thought of as a clever magus, a wizard, as well as the foremost harper and worshipper of Hermes! And worship here belike means "assimilation to", for, in some ways, what we worship, we become.
As to Zethus, we are told by Apollonius of Rhodes in his Argonautica book 1, lines 738 to 739, that (awend. R.C. Seaton):
So a bit of a strong man, to say the least. Þunor?
All those who might think that the "Heavenly Twins" are somehow lesser gods must know that they do so from a thorough misunderstanding of their true nature, and indeed of all gods as a whole. Ṛgvedaḥ 8.30.1 will set you straight:
Of Amphion Pausanias tells us in his Guide to Greece 9.5.8, (awend. Jones):
"ὁ δὲ τὰ ἔπη τὰ ἐς Εὐρώπην ποιήσας φησὶν Ἀμφίονα χρήσασθαι λύρᾳ πρῶτον Ἑρμοῦ διδάξαντος: πεποίηκε δὲ καὶ περὶ λίθων καὶ θηρίων, ὅτι καὶ ταῦτα ᾁδων ἦγε. Μυρὼ δὲ Βυζαντία, ποιήσασα ἔπη καὶ ἐλεγεῖα, Ἑρμῇ βωμόν φησιν ἱδρύσασθαι πρῶτον Ἀμφίονα καὶ ἐπὶ τούτῳ λύραν παρ᾽ αὐτοῦ λαβεῖν."
"The writer of the poem on Europa says that Amphion was the first harpist, and that Hermes was his teacher. He also says that Amphion's songs drew even stones and beasts after him. Myro of Byzantium, a poetess who wrote epic and elegiac poetry, states that Amphion was the first to set up an altar to Hermes, and for this reason was presented by him with a harp."
And at Olympia in Elis there was mound (χῶμα) by the hippodrome called “ὁ Ταράξιππος” “The Horse-Scarer” (see 6.20.15). Pausanias, in his Guide ... 6.20.18 has this to say of it (awend. Jones):
“ἀνὴρ δὲ Αἰγύπτιος Πέλοπα ἔφη παρὰ τοῦ Θηβαίου λαβόντα Ἀμφίονος κατορύξαι τι ἐνταῦθα, ἔνθα καλοῦσι τὸν Ταράξιππον, καὶ ὑπὸ τοῦ κατορωρυγμένου ταραχθῆναι μὲν τῷ Οἰνομάῳ τότε, ταράσσεσθαι δὲ καὶ ὕστερον τοῖς πᾶσι τὰς ἵππους: ἠξίου δὲ οὗτος ὁ Αἰγύπτιος εἶναι μὲν Ἀμφίονα, εἶναι δὲ καὶ τὸν Θρᾷκα Ὀρφέα μαγεῦσαι δεινόν, καὶ αὐτοῖς ἐπᾴδουσι θηρία τε ἀφικνεῖσθαι τῷ Ὀρφεῖ καὶ Ἀμφίονι ἐς τὰς τοῦ τείχους οἰκοδομίας τὰς πέτρας. ὁ δὲ πιθανώτατος ἐμοὶ δοκεῖν τῶν λόγων Ποσειδῶνος ἐπίκλησιν εἶναι τοῦ Ἱππίου φησίν.”
"A man of Egypt said that Pelops received something from Amphion the Theban and buried it where is what they call Taraxippus, adding that it was the buried thing which frightened the mares of Oenomaus, as well as those of every charioteer since. This Egyptian thought that Amphion and the Thracian Orpheus were clever magicians (μαγεῦσαι δεινόν), and that it was through their enchantments that the beasts came to Orpheus, and the stones came to Amphion for the building of the wall. The most probable of the stories in my opinion makes Taraxippus a surname of Horse Poseidon."
So Amphion was thought of as a clever magus, a wizard, as well as the foremost harper and worshipper of Hermes! And worship here belike means "assimilation to", for, in some ways, what we worship, we become.
As to Zethus, we are told by Apollonius of Rhodes in his Argonautica book 1, lines 738 to 739, that (awend. R.C. Seaton):
“Ζῆθος μὲν ἐπωμαδὸν ἠέρταζεν
οὔρεος ἠλιβάτοιο κάρη, μογέοντι ἐοικώς:...”
“Zethos [indeed] on his shoulders was lifting
the peak of a steep mountain, like a man toiling hard, ...”.
So a bit of a strong man, to say the least. Þunor?
All those who might think that the "Heavenly Twins" are somehow lesser gods must know that they do so from a thorough misunderstanding of their true nature, and indeed of all gods as a whole. Ṛgvedaḥ 8.30.1 will set you straight:
nahi vo astyarbhako devāso na kumārakaḥ |
viśve satomahānta it ||NOT one of you, ye Gods, is small, none of you is a feeble child:
All of you, verily, are great. (Griffith)
So mote it be.
Asko Parpola in his The Roots of Hinduism (2015) will have even seemingly high and mighty gods like Mitra and Varuna as being, at the outset either a double of the "Heavenly Twins", the Aśvinau (अश्विनौ), or, another outgrowth from the same root. The Aśvinau being "the original deities of dual kingship" and he marks that they are called rājānā kings in RV 3.38.5. He could also have marked 10.39.11. And it is worth setting beside this here that in olden Athens the twins were awkwardly worshipped by them as Ἄνακες "Anacktes" "kings". Awkward as they hated kings and the official mythography had made the twins into the great gods of their foes in Sparta. But Parpola wishes to see these twin gods as arising from a divine charioteer and chariot-fighter, who share the same
chariot as twins do the womb (see Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, 5, 3, 1, 8). Unluckily for this last bit of Professor Parpola's theory the "Heavenly Twins" can be seen to be older than chariots, older even than horses, their might being shown forth from the beginning and understood to be in almost anything markedly twyfold (or even threefold, or x2 or x3). Thus both Dasrā (दस्रा) "wonder-workers" and Nāsatyā (नासत्यास्ना) "not untrue" /"saviours" can be seen to be their their older names. Nevertheless, that he has rightly evened Mitra and Varuna with the Aśvinau may be seen from RV 6.67.4 where Mitra and Varuna are likened to two "aśvā
... vājinā" "swift/strong horses" and in 7.62.5 where the same are
themselves called "yuvānā" "youths". And in 10. 106.5 in a hymn to the Aśvinau we find the wording मित्रेव "mitreva" for "mitre eva" which, if we read "mitre" as a common noun would read “like two friends”, but this is a bit of a weak thing to say in a hymn, so we are driven to think that we must be meant to read it "like two Mitras"! However, as there are not normally two Mitras, but Mitra is widely matched up elsewhere with Varuna, we at length guess that the true understanding should be "like Mitra and Varuna" which is indeed how both H. H. Wilson and R. L. Kashyap awend it (Griffith and Jamison & Brereton won't awend verses 5 to 8 of this hymn at all, and Geldner puts "..."!).
Also if we withmete Aitareya-Brāhmaṇa 4.10:
Also if we withmete Aitareya-Brāhmaṇa 4.10:
ahar vai Mitro, rātrir Varuṇa.
Mitra is the day, Varuna the night;
with Yāska’s Nirukta Ch. 12. 1 (awending Lakshman Sarup) on the Aśvinau:
aśvair.aśvināv.ity.aurṇavābhah/
tat.kāv.aśvinau/
dyāvā.pṛthivī.āv.ity.eke/
ahorātrāv.ity.eke/
sūryā.candramasāv.ity.eke/
rājānau.punya.kṛtāv.ity.aitihāsikāh/
"They are called Aśvins on account of their having horses (aśva),' says Aurṇavābha. Who then are the Aśvins? According to some they are heaven and earth; day and night, according to others. Some take them to be the sun and the moon, (while) the historians regard them as two virtuous kings".
(for Yāska’s full outdraught on the Twins see [here])
And Martianus Capella Wedding of Mercury... I. 82-83:
And Sextus Empiricus Adversus Mathematicos 9.37 (awend. A. B. Cook)
“Dehinc admissi Tonantis ipsius filii. … Post hos duorum una quidem germanaque facies; sed alius lucis sidere, opacae noctis alius refulgebat.“Then the sons of the Thundering One himself were let in …/ And after these came two brothers with the same anseens (=faces)-but one seated himself shining with light; the other darkened by night.”
And Sextus Empiricus Adversus Mathematicos 9.37 (awend. A. B. Cook)
“καὶ τοὺς Τυνδαρίδας δέ φασι τὴν τῶν Διοσκούρων δόξαν ὑπελθεῖν πόλιν νομιζομένων εἶναι θεῶν· τὰ γὰρ δύο ἡμισφαίρια, τό τε ὑπὲρ γῆν καὶ τὸ ὑπὸ γῆν, Διοσκούρους οἱ σοφοὶ τῶν τότε ἀνθρώπων ἔλεγον. διὸ καὶ ὁ ποιητὴς τοῦτο αἰνιττόμενός φησιν ἐπ’ αὐτῶν
ἄλλοτε μὲν ζώουσ’ ἑτερήμεροι, ἄλλοτε δ’ αὖτε
τεθνᾶσιν, τιμὴν δὲ λελόγχασιν ἶσα θεοῖσιν. (Od. 11. 303f.)
πίλους τ’ ἐπιτιθέασιν αὐτοῖς, καὶ ἐπὶ τούτοις ἀστέρας, αἰνισσόμενοι τὴν τῶν ἡμισφαιρίων κατασκευήν."
" Moreover, they say that the Tyndaridai usurped the reputation of the Dioskouroi, who were thought to be gods. For in those days wise folk spoke of the two hemispheres, the one above the earth and the other below it, as Dioskouroi. Wherefore also the poet, hinting at this, says of them :
One day they are alive, the next day dead
In alternation, honoured like to gods.
And men put piloi on their heads with stars atop, hinting at the arrangement of the hemispheres."
So there is nothing truly "small" about the might of the Heavenly Twins at all and may thus infold in their own worship that of Mitra and Varuna or Wōden and Tīw or Wōden and Þunor, or the "Pole-lords" best known to us as the archangels Michael and Gabriel, and so on. Any pairing of gods. If they sometimes stoop to help men it should not be looked upon as making them lesser gods in any way, but rather as a token of their almightiness so that there is nothing that they leave undone. And I would also warn my readers here not to think that the "Heavenly Twins" are themselves day and night, or the hemispheres and so on. Rather they should believe that they are the wielders of all markedly twyfold things from outside of space and time.
But what happens when all three gods are to be understood at the same time as when we have Wōden and Tīw and Þunor, or Mercurius, Mars and Hercules? Well, all these three share one and the same beginning if we look back to what we have said about Agni as the the root of all. But we can also understand it another way. Tīw bears a name that is meant to be from Proto-Indo-European *deywós, and is itself only a word for “god”. That he was at one time the same as the southern Jupiter/Zeus and the Eastern Dyaus (Dyáuḥ) is likely, but these three all have names stemming from another Proto-Indo-European word, namely *dyḗws. Though both do indeed share the same root. There are whispers of Tīw being a "sword-god" (see below under the heading Thorn), which seem right, and if we think back to what we said above of Zeus Labrandeus or Stratios, we can see that a sword would be as much a thunder-weapon as an axe or spear. That a Zeus "of armies" is not much unlike Mars, and lo! We now find that we have sundrily in Tīw, Wōden and Þunor what Zeus Labrandeus is altogether. And we have here therefore, three "Zeus": three thunder, lightning or storm gods. And we begin to see that Tīw, Wōden and Þunor are all truly bynames for this "god" or "god of gods" when rightly understood. Tīw meaning no more than "god", whilst Wōden's name matches in meaning the title of Labrandeus, and Þunor's is a title of Zeus which we find elsewhere, namely that of "Keraunos" (Κεραυνός). Aeschylus’ lost play Ἡλιάδες (Daughters of the Sun) has this to say about Zeus:
But if Pausanias knew the scholion on Plato's Laws bk. 4, 715e which gives us the "old saying" there referred to:
Ζεὺς ἀρχή, Ζεὺς μέσσα, Διὸς δ᾽ ἐκ πάντα τέτυκται
Zeus is the beginning, Zeus is the middle and from Zeus are all things finished
he might have come to another conclusion. Thus Rai Bahadur A.C. Mukerji, Hndu Fasts and Feasts (1916) Lf.37 on Shiva's three eyes:
“These three eyes are supposed to typify the god’s
omniscience – his knowledge of the past, present and future.”
Thus these three gods Tīw-Wōden-Þunor are indeed three and yet still one at the selfsame time in a way that gods can take in their stride, but men are so often freaked out by. A somewhat kindred thing to this may be seen in the East with what is said there by some of Brahma Shiva and Vishnu thus Mahabharat bk. 3 ch.39:
i) here and there, one or other of them was forgotten,
ii) but where the three were still understood, one had to become king, and the other two had then to become his helpers.
From ii) we will see that the "threefold Mithras" we find in a letter said to have been written by Dionysius the Areopagite:
"μάγοι τὰ μνημόσυνα τοῦ τριπλασίου Μίθρου τελοῦσιν"
"Magi celebrate the memorials of the threefold Mithras." [here]
Becomes in the iconography of the cult Mithras and his two helpers Cautes and Cautopates.
Our forefathers' pairings up of Tīw or Wōden at one time, Wōden and Þunor at another arise from i).
From ii) we get the scheme we find in much of the Northern pœtry where Wōden is the king and Tīw and Þunor must be understood as his sons; and thus in Hymiskviða 9 Týr and Þórr, are the "hugfulla tvá" "fearless twain" about their father's business like good "Heavenly Twins" should be. But from the names of the days of the week and the lore behind these we get another scheme, thus Julian writes in his Oration on the Sun:
Ζεύς ἐστιν αἰθήρ, Ζεὺς δὲ γῆ, Ζεὺς δ᾿ οὐρανός,
Ζεύς τοι τά πάντα χὤτι τῶνδ᾿ ὑπέρτερον
Zeus is æther, Zeus is earth, Zeus is heaven,That Zeus is three in one may be seen from Pausanias Guide ... 2.24.3 (awend. Jones):
Zeus, you know, is all [things], and that which is beyond these.
"[3] ἐπ᾽ ἄκρᾳ δέ ἐστι τῇ Λαρίσῃ Διὸς ἐπίκλησιν Λαρισαίου ναός, οὐκ ἔχων ὄροφον: τὸ δὲ ἄγαλμα ξύλου πεποιημένον οὐκέτι ἑστηκὸς ἦν ἐπὶ τῷ βάθρῳ. καὶ Ἀθηνᾶς δὲ ναός ἐστι θέας ἄξιος: ἐνταῦθα ἀναθήματα κεῖται καὶ ἄλλα καὶ Ζεὺς ξόανον, δύο μὲν ᾗ πεφύκαμεν ἔχον ὀφθαλμούς, τρίτον δὲ ἐπὶ τοῦ μετώπου. τοῦτον τὸν Δία Πριάμῳ φασὶν εἶναι τῷ Λαομέδοντος πατρῷον ἐν ὑπαίθρῳ τῆς αὐλῆς ἱδρυμένον, καὶ ὅτε ἡλίσκετο ὑπὸ Ἑλλήνων Ἴλιον, ἐπὶ τούτου κατέφυγεν ὁ Πρίαμος τὸν βωμόν. ἐπεὶ δὲ τὰ λάφυρα ἐνέμοντο, λαμβάνει Σθένελος ὁ Καπανέως αὐτόν, καὶ ἀνάκειται μὲν διὰ τοῦτο ἐνταῦθα: [4] τρεῖς δὲ ὀφθαλμοὺς ἔχειν ἐπὶ τῷδε ἄν τις τεκμαίροιτο αὐτόν. Δία γὰρ ἐν οὐρανῷ βασιλεύειν, οὗτος μὲν λόγος κοινὸς πάντων ἐστὶν ἀνθρώπων. ὃν δὲ ἄρχειν φασὶν ὑπὸ γῆς, ἔστιν ἔπος τῶν Ὁμήρου Δία ὀνομάζον καὶ τοῦτον:
“Ζεύς τε καταχθόνιος καὶ ἐπαινὴ Περσεφόνεια.” [Hom. Il. 9.457]
Αἰσχύλος δὲ ὁ Εὐφορίωνος καλεῖ Δία καὶ τὸν ἐν θαλάσσῃ. τρισὶν οὖν ὁρῶντα ἐποίησεν ὀφθαλμοῖς ὅστις δὴ ἦν ὁ ποιήσας, ἅτε ἐν ταῖς τρισὶ ταῖς λεγομέναις λήξεσιν ἄρχοντα τὸν αὐτὸν τοῦτον θεόν. "
"[3] On the top of Larisa is a temple of Zeus, surnamed Larisaean, which has no roof; the wooden image I found no longer standing upon its pedestal. There is also a temple of Athena worth seeing. Here are placed votive offerings, including a wooden image of Zeus, which has two eyes in the natural place and a third on its forehead. This Zeus, they say, was a paternal god of Priam, the son of Laomedon, set up in the uncovered part of his court, and when Troy was taken by the Greeks Priam took sanctuary at the altar of this god. When the spoils were divided, Sthenelus, the son of Capaneus, received the image, and for this reason it has been dedicated here.
[4] The reason for its three eyes one might infer to be this. That Zeus is king in heaven is a saying common to all men. As for him who is said to rule under the earth, there is a verse of Homer which calls him, too, Zeus:—
“Zeus of the Underworld, and the august Persephonea.”
The god in the sea, also, is called Zeus by Aeschylus, the son of Euphorion. So whoever made the image made it with three eyes, as signifying that this same god rules in all the three “allotments” of the Universe, as they are called."
But if Pausanias knew the scholion on Plato's Laws bk. 4, 715e which gives us the "old saying" there referred to:
Ζεὺς ἀρχή, Ζεὺς μέσσα, Διὸς δ᾽ ἐκ πάντα τέτυκται
Zeus is the beginning, Zeus is the middle and from Zeus are all things finished
he might have come to another conclusion. Thus Rai Bahadur A.C. Mukerji, Hndu Fasts and Feasts (1916) Lf.37 on Shiva's three eyes:
Thus these three gods Tīw-Wōden-Þunor are indeed three and yet still one at the selfsame time in a way that gods can take in their stride, but men are so often freaked out by. A somewhat kindred thing to this may be seen in the East with what is said there by some of Brahma Shiva and Vishnu thus Mahabharat bk. 3 ch.39:
“śivāya viṣṇurūpāya viṣṇave śivarūpiṇe”And th'ilk bk 12, ch. 328:
“Thou art Siva in the form of Vishnu, and Vishnu in the form of Siva.”
“rudro nārāyaṇaś caiva sattvam ekaṃ dvidhākṛtam”And again Bk.12, ch. 328 where Vishnu (as Nārāyaṇaḥ (नारायणः)) says:
“Rudra (=Shiva) and Narayana (=Vishnu) are one being in two forms”.
“yasya prasādajo brahmā rudraś ca krodhasaṃbhavaḥ”
“I have created Brahman from the attribute of Grace, Rudra (=Shiva) from my Wrath,…”This should give us also a trimūrtiḥ (त्रिमूर्तिः), and sometimes it does, but the belief of the "Heavenly Twins" blending with these three gods means that two things can be seen to happen:
i) here and there, one or other of them was forgotten,
ii) but where the three were still understood, one had to become king, and the other two had then to become his helpers.
From ii) we will see that the "threefold Mithras" we find in a letter said to have been written by Dionysius the Areopagite:
"μάγοι τὰ μνημόσυνα τοῦ τριπλασίου Μίθρου τελοῦσιν"
"Magi celebrate the memorials of the threefold Mithras." [here]
Becomes in the iconography of the cult Mithras and his two helpers Cautes and Cautopates.
Our forefathers' pairings up of Tīw or Wōden at one time, Wōden and Þunor at another arise from i).
From ii) we get the scheme we find in much of the Northern pœtry where Wōden is the king and Tīw and Þunor must be understood as his sons; and thus in Hymiskviða 9 Týr and Þórr, are the "hugfulla tvá" "fearless twain" about their father's business like good "Heavenly Twins" should be. But from the names of the days of the week and the lore behind these we get another scheme, thus Julian writes in his Oration on the Sun:
“οἱ τὴν Ἔμεσαν οἰκοῦντες, ἱερὸν ἐξ αἰῶνος Ἡλίου χωρίον, Μόνιμον αὐτῷ καὶ Ἄζιζον συγκαθιδρύουσιν. αἰνίττεσθαί φησιν Ἰάμβλιχος, παρ᾿ οὗ καὶ τἆλλα πάντα ἐκ πολλῶν μικρὰ ἐλάβομεν, ὡς ὁ Μόνιμος μὲν Ἑρμῆς εἴη, Ἄζιζος δὲ Ἄρης, Ἡλίου πάρεδροι, πολλὰ καὶ ἀγαθὰ τῷ περὶ γῆν ἐποχετεύοντες τόπῳ.”
“The inhabitants of Emesa, a place from time immemorial sacred to Helios, associate with Helios in their temples Monimos and Azizos. Iamblichus, from whom I have taken this and all besides, a little from a great store, says that the secret meaning to be interpreted is that Monimos is Hermes and Azizos Ares, the assessors of Helios, who are the channel for many blessings to the region of our earth.”
[awend Wilmer C. Wright]
Hermes is Mercurius, Ares is Mars. So Wōden and Tīw, our old one eyed and one handed pair, would then be matched together as "Ἡλίου πάρεδροι" "helpmates of the sun". The sun here being understood as the king of the gods. And having bestowed the names of Wōden and Tīw upon the helpers, the only name we can then put to that of the king is Þunor, and we call to mind here that he it is, who is given Jupiter's day, the fifth day of the week, Jupiter being king of the gods. That Wōden who is, after all, an immaterial and transcendant godhead, is not needfully old, or even a man, can be seen from the shapes he takes upon himself in the "Wooing of Rinda" (see Saxo Grammaticus Gesta Danorum 3.4.1-7). His third shape shift as an unnamed man "professing the completest skill in soldiership" ("perfectissimam rei militaris industriam professus " - 3.4.4), in which shape he "used to ride proudly up and down among the briskest of them" ("inter promptissimos insolentius obequitare solebat" 3.4.4), having much of the "Heavenly Twin" about it. Furthermore, overlooking the bit of whetstone in his forehead, Þunor is the only one of the three who is not missing a limb or an eye, which may, or may not be, telling. But nevertheless, if you made Tīw the king, and then put Þunor in Tīw's stead, would any great harm be done? Do not the Irish do even this by making Núadu Airgetlám, the one-handed sword god with them, the king of the gods? Though the Dagda, their thunder god, is an awkward second fiddle to him. I mark here also - and I am somewhat amazed at all the scholars who seem to have overlooked this - the following from Tacitus' Histories bk. 4, ch.64 where the Tencteri are speaking to the Ubii/Agrippinenses of Cologne in the time of Civilis' uprising:
"Igitur Tencteri, Rheno discreta gens, missis legatis mandata apud concilium Agrippinensium edi iubent, quae ferocissimus e legatis in hunc modum protulit: 'redisse vos in corpus nomenque Germaniæ communibus deis et praecipuo deorum Marti grates agimus, vobisque gratulamur quod tandem liberi inter liberos eritis; ..." ...".
"Upon this the Tencteri, a tribe separated by the Rhine from the Colony, sent envoys with orders to make known their instructions to the Senate of the Agrippinenses. These orders the boldest spirit among the ambassadors thus expounded: "For your return into the unity of the German nation and name we give thanks to the Gods whom we worship in common and to Mars, the chief of our divinities, and we congratulate you that at length you will live as free men among the free. ..." ...".
So that Mercurius (as Germania 9) might well be the god "they greatly worship" ("Deorum maxime Mercurium colunt,..."), but of yore he was not the "foremost of the gods" ("praecipuo deorum" see above). If the Tencteri alone had this belief, I think Tacitus would have marked it in his Germania.
All this is worthwhile setting beside the words of Cæsar in his De Bello Gallico 6.17 where we are told that the Gauls also "greatly worship the god Mercurius" ("Deum maxime Mercurium colunt.") yet it is still Jupiter who "holds the wielding of the heavenly gods" ("Iovem imperium cælestium tenere").
Yet again Jacob Grimm is helpfully before us when he well wrote [in the Vorrede to vol. 1 of his Deutsche Mythologie (1844) lf. xix]:
"... Wuotan, Donar, Zio theilweise in einander aufgehn..."One further thought here is that although Dyaus is sometimes said to be the father of Indra, this does not stop the writer of a hymn in the Atharva Veda 15.10.6 saying:
"... Wuotan, Donar, and Zio partly run into one another... " (awend. Stallybrass)
iyaṃ vā u pṛthivī bṛhaspatir dyaur evendraḥ
Now this Earth is Brihaspati, and Heaven (=Dyaus) is Indra.
Thorn.
The Thorn-tree is another tree of the "lightning tribe". And I mark on the way that "þe þorn-hog" is an old name for the hedgehog or porcupine, which wight in our last post we saw is meant to have grown from the claw of Suparṇaḥ. Now there are two thorn-trees, the white (or haw) and the black (or sloe), notwithstanding their names, both have white blossom, and both were brooked to make haws or hays (=fenced enclosures). There is little to choose between them, but here I think the whitethorn must have the edge as it alone has red berries, miscalled “haws”, which make it somewhat like the quickbeam to look at, and Kelly marks from the Travels of Sir John de Mandeville:
“.... And therefore
hath the whitethorn many virtues. For he that beareth a braunche on hym
thereof, no thondre, ne no manor of tempest may dere (hurt) hym; ne in the
hows that yt is ynne may non evil ghost entre.”
And earlier Ovid in
his Fasti Book Vi lines 129 to 130
would have Janus give the whitethorn to a goddess Carna against the "striges" who harm young children by night:
“sic fatus spinam, qua tristes
pellere posset
A foribus noxas,--haec erat alba--dedit
“ ... he gave her a
thorn which she could use
To drive dreadful harm from doors (it was
white).”
It bears witness to its former high standing think that there is a rune named thorn in the Old English runestave row at least. And although mistook as a "y" it can be said to be the only rune never to have been forgotten in England whence we have all those "ye olde ...". This might then tell us something about the god who wields it. The verse about the old rūnstæf
is however a bit of a let down. It is too overborne by Christian feelings about thorns as the
outcome, as they believe, of man's first sin and their god's cursing of
the ground, to give us much help. But it goes:
ᚦ
(Þorn) byþ ðearle scearp; ðegna
gehwylcum
anfeng ys yfyl,
ungemetum reþe
manna gehwelcum,
ðe him mid resteð.
The thorn is thurlingly sharp, to each thane,
The gripping of is evil, unmetely ruthless,
To every man, that resteth him amid.
But in the runestave-row, it is matched with ᚩ Ōs. The name of this rune is willfully mistaken as a Latin word meaning "mouth" thus:
ᚩ
(Ōs) byþ ordfruma ælcre spræce, wisdomes wraþu ond witena frofur and eorla ȝehwam eadnys ond tohiht. Mouth is the beginning of each speech, wisdom's prop and the wiseman's comfort and to each earl a blessing and hope.
And we can see from the lack of any meaningful matching-up between a "thorn" and a "mouth" that something has gone badly wrong with this pair. We are not much better off when we know that in Old English the word Ōs meant a god and was the evenling of the Northern Óss, earlier áss, which, in the plural, gives us æsir. "thorn" and "god" don't pair up any better. The Northmen however, name Þ as Þurs, another name for an ettin, and as the pair of runes are now seen to be named for two supernatural beings, we can at last see why these might be paired together. The Old english verse about Þ can then be read as truly areaching ettins under the name of "thorns". Whilst the verse about ᚩ is such that it can be read as though it meant Wōden all along instead of "mouth". And in Iceland where ᚩ
is written ᚬ although by its name of Óss alone, it could in theory beckon to any of the æsir, it was nevertheless minned as meaning Óðin:
ᚬ [Óss] er aldingautr
But we overlook the shape of Þ which is such that whilst the name of thorn can be easily seen as being taken from its shape, why this same shape should ever mean a Þurs is much harder to outfold. It looks then, that thorn must be the older and truer meaning. So why the mismatched pair? If you look at the older runestave-rows you will see that ᚩ Ōs is a wholly new rune shape and the true fourth runestave is not this one, but ᚫ, so not ᚩ Ōs but ᚫ æsc. Now if you put ᚫ æsc back where it should be as the fourth runestave in the runestave-row we have our matching pair: for a thorn tree and an ash tree are two trees are they not! And mark the cleverness of having this rune named for the ash-tree, that is for Wōden's tree, as it then can stand in the stead of the god's other rune, that is, for ᚩ Ōs! But what should now go in the stead of ᚫ æsc at the end of the runestave-row? Well, ᚩ Ōs should, for ᚩ Ōs, as a new shape, should go with the other new shapes at the end, and above all where the ᚫ æsc was, so it is matched with ᚪ ac "oak". Now oak and "god" might not be thought to be much of a match, but I think we need to read these rather as the runestave of Þunor and the runestave of Wōden, and Þunor and Wōden are a match. Or, it was a durnhood (=secret) that only a runemaster might know that to make the runes meaningful here you had to shift the ᚫ æsc in the runestave row backwards and forwards to make your matching pairs; highlighting thereby ᚪ ac "oak", ᚫ æsc "ash" and, you guessed it, Þ Þorn "thorn"!. And your fourth rune ᚩ Ōs, which should not be in the row where it is, is, like the Joker in a pack of playing cards, and The Fool in the Tarot trumps, a kind of rune all on its own. But why put it fourth then, and not at the end or the beginning like The Fool is? Well, whose day is the fourth day of the week? Martianus Capella On the Wedding of Mercurius and Philologia, Book VII De Tetrade §754:
“ Hic numerus quadratus ipsi Cyllenio deputatur, quod quadratus deus solus hebeatur.” [Kopp edition 1836 lf.587]"Cyllenian" or Cyllenius is Mercurius from the well-known hill on the landshear between Arcadia and Achaia (Ægialus) where he once had a shrine at the top.
What about Þ Þorn then? Well, if it is for a god, which seems likely, it is unlikely to be for Wōden, as he already has two runes, namely ᚩ Ōs and ᚫ æsc. Þunor is not beyond all thought here, but the tokening of the prick lends itself maybe to a god who wields a sharper weapon than an axe or hammer. The Bretons have an odd oath "Gurun ha spern" "Tonnerre et épines" "Thunder and thorns" from
Moëlan (L. F. Sauvé Lavaroù kozh a Vreizh Izel (1870) lf.310) which, although it may be worn down from "Ar Gurun Spern" "The Crown of Thorns", still might nevertheless suggest that in the folk-mind thunder is not the same as thorns, though the two things are somehow linked. And that leads us to Tīw. That he is a god of swords is a whisper that is likely to have some truth in it. Sigrdrífumál
6:
Sigrúnar skaltu kunna,| ef þú vilt sigr hafa,
Although this
is indeed slight, the wont of our forefathers to swear by their
swords together with Tīw's links to courts of law (see below)
might well strengthen things for us a bit here. As also that the
Scyths were well known of yore for their worship of a naked sword as
the token of Mars, and that the Irish evenling to Tīw, Núadu
Airgetlám. also seemingly
has a sword as his token. Now Tīw is evened with the Romans Mars whence the third day of the week, our Tuesday, earlier Tīwes- or Tīȝes- dæȝ,
"Tīw's day" (the Northern Týsdagr, now Tisdag, "day of Týr") is in Latin "dies
Martis" (see French Mardi) the "day of Mars". And we we read with interest that Henry Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim putteth “all thorny trees, …”
under Mars (bk, 1, ch. 26). Procopius also has this to say in his History of the Wars book 6, ch. 15 lvs. 420 to 421:
Οἱ μέντοι ἄλλοι Θουλῖται ὡς εἰπεῖν ἅπαντες οὐδέν τι μέγα διαλλάσσουσι τῶν ἄλλων ἀνθρώπων, θεοὺς μέντοι καὶ δαίμονας πολλοὺς σέβουσιν, οὐρανίους τε καὶ ἀερίους, ἐγγείους τε καὶ θαλασσίους, καὶ ἄλλα ἄττα δαιμόνια ἐν ὕδασι πηγῶν τε καὶ ποταμῶν εἶναι λεγόμενα. θύουσι δὲ ἐνδελεχέστατα ἱερεῖα πάντα καὶ ἐναγίζουσι, τῶν δὲ ἱερείων σφίσι τὸ κάλλιστον ἄνθρωπός ἐστιν ὅνπερ δορυάλωτον ποιήσαιντο πρῶτον· τοῦτον γὰρ τῷ Ἄρει θύουσιν, ἐπεὶ θεὸν αὐτὸν νομίζουσι μέγιστον εἶναι. ἱερεύονται δὲ τὸν αἰχμάλωτον οὐ θύοντες μόνον, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἀπὸ ξύλου κρεμῶντες, καὶ ἐς τὰς ἀκάνθας ῥιπτοῦντες, ταῖς ἄλλαις τε κτείνοντες θανάτου ἰδέαις οἰκτίσταις. οὕτω μὲν Θουλῖται βιοῦσιν. ὧν ἔθνος ἓν πολυάνθρωπον οἱ Γαυτοί εἰσι, παρ᾿ οὓς δὴ Ἐρούλων τότε οἱ ἐπηλύται ἱδρύσαντο. [Procopius. History of the Wars, Volume III: Books 5-6.15. (Gothic War). Awent by H. B. Dewing. Loeb Classical Library 107. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916.]
That the Scrithiphini (οἳ Σκριθίφινοι) and Gauti ( οἱ
Γαυτοί) live on “the island of Thule” (see book 6, ch. 15)
shows us that by this name what we would now call Scandinavia is
meant. See Wīdsīð
line 59: “mid Sweom ond mid Geatum ond mid
Suþdenum”. And line 79: “Mid Scottum ic wæs ond mid Peohtum
ond mid Scridefinnum”.
Lastly, in the Germanic tongues the t-d-th sounds can be thought of as belonging together in a way, and being, if not the same, then near enough to be swapped about as we find them to be, and if we look at the meanings of the other two runestaves namely ᛏ tīr and ᛞ dæȝ we will see that they fit in well with the thought that Þ Þorn is Tīw's tree. For the Northmen understand ᛏ tīr as ᛏ Týr, as the verse bears witness: ᛏ er æinendr ása; opt værðr smiðr blása. ᛏ (Týr ) is the onehand of the gods; oft will the smith blow. And ᛞ dæȝ "day" I have said elsewhere is a token for the sun as a god, not a goddess, which we must then think has something to do with our Tīw.
The Northmen's Þurs would sit badly with these. Then there is the thought that the third rune in the runestave row might have something to do with the third day of the week which is, needless to say, a Tīw's day.
"Saturnus"1. ᚠ fēoh - Sunday, see Odyssey book 12 for the cattle of the sun - on cattle being the wealth of the olden Germans see Germania 5. 2. ᚢ ūr - Monday (Moon exalted in Taurus) 3. ᚦ þorn - Tuesday 4. ᚩ ōs - Wednesday 5. ᚱ rād - Thursday Þór is reiði-týr (Haustlöng) where O.N. reið = O.E. rād "a riding" and see Old English þunorrād means "a storm" but stavely "thunder-riding". 6. ᚳ ċēn - Friday It was a belief of the "Gothic" Middle Ages that Venus bore a torch. Thus Chaucer The Marchantes Tale: " He was so ravysshed on his lady May That for the verray peyne he was ny wood. Almoost he swelte and swowned ther he stood, So soore hath Venus hurt hym with hire brond, ..." "brond" here is "fire, torch". And below is an icon of Lady Venus herself from the Tübinger Hausbuch leaf 270 recto (see [here]) 
“...er Satúrnus
var kallaðr en vér köllum Frey...”
“... he was
called Saturn that we call Freyr...”.
The kindred word ġift (and which has now replaced ġyfu in English) in Old English, as the Old Northern gipt, often meant, not any old gift, but the gift of a bride at a wedding. Indeed the number three, the first odd or male number in the old way of reckoning things, not only makes us think of Mars again but also that how a Þurs is again ill matched. But knowing the 3x3 magic square is a square of Saturn and the Icelanders gloss the rune name Þurs by "Saturnus", we begin to see here that by naming this rune Þurs, the Northmen truly meant"Saturnus" no more than "Saturnus", which is worth bearing in mind. But before we go on there is one further thing worth knowing that links Tīw to thorn trees.
There are over many hundred-courts in England
that have their name from meeting at a thorn tree. Tīw would seem to have been the god of such courts. So much so that in northern Germany and the Netherlands the day of the week named for him was formenged with the
word for a law-court or þing. Thus Gobelinus Persona (1358 – 1421) Cosmidromius, hoc est Chronicon unversale complectens re ecclesiae et reipublicae. 2, 4:
“...dies Martis dicitur 'dingkesdach'. Unde ‘Dingk’ in antiquo vulgari sonat iudicium, prout patet in his vocabulis: holtdingk, vridingk; et quia judicium mortis gentiles attribuebant marti, dies martis ‘dingkesdach’ apud gentiles teutonicos dicebatur. Et in Signum istius iudicium quoddam occultum, concernens p[o]enam morte puniendorum in certis casibus in partibus westfali[a]e, pr[a]ecipue die martis celebratur, quod quidem judicium incol[a]e vridingk appellant.” And we should bear in mind these law-courts or "dingk" were held outside under heaven while the sun shone, that is, while it was still day. So ᛏ tīr + ᛞ dæȝ. It only seems right that these courts were held under or by his tree, a Þ Þorn. A forebisening of something like the German Tuesday "dingk" from England can be found in the Calendar of Patent Rolls (vol. 5) for 1340: 
A turn is a law-court and this one was held at the Spelethorne (1086) or the "Speech thorn" which was the moot-mark of a well known Hundred in south-western Middlesex. Middlesex had one other Hundred named for a thorn-tree to the north-west, namely Elthorne.
So far so good you might think. But then there is Fretherne in Gloucestershire, from Frīȝeþorn (?), the which showeth that the
gyden Frīȝ also watcheth over this tree, maybe as Carna did among the Romans.
Overlap? Maybe, but might these two godheads not share it? I think to Frīȝ we should truly only give the blooms and
scent, and to Tīw the stem and the thorns. As Frīȝ is evened with the Romans' Venus,
thus dies veneris "day of Venus" is our Frīȝedæȝ now Friday "day of Frīȝ",
it seems we may have here with the thorn-tree something akin to
what happened to the old star-sign of Scorpio. For it too was split
between these two gods, and whilst
the sting went to Mars, the claws, and also the fatally fair face that this
unwight was said to have, went to Venus. Macrobius The Saturnalia Book I, chapter 12 (awend. P. V. Davies), lf.86:
“et rursus e regione Scorpius ita diuisus est, ut deo esset utrique communis. nec aestimatur ratione caelesti carere ipsa diuisio, siquidem aculeo uelut potentissimo telo pars armata posterior domicilium Martis est, priorem uero partem, cui Ζυγὸς apud Graecos nomen est, nos Libram uocamus, Venus accepit, quae uelut iugo concordi iungit matrimonia amicitiasque componit.”It is likely that the lore of these two star signs, namely Libra and Scorpio, and earlier the two halves of one great Scorpion, will outfold many things that will help us to better understand Tīw. The most eathe-seen is maybe his one hand. Manilius Astronomica Book 2 (awend. ᚷᚳ): Quod si sollerti circumspicis omnia cura,
fraudata invenies
amissis sidera membris.
Scorpios in Libra
consumit bracchia, ... 258
Now if thou overlookest all with great heed,
thou wilt find bereft star-signs with lost limbs
The Scorpion loseth
[his] arms in Libra, ...
Bearing in mind that Mars wields the Scorpion:
“…
pugnax Mavorti
Scorpios hæret; 444
… “
“…
the fight-loving
Scorpion cleaves to Mavors
(the Old Latin name for Mars, “Mars”
is a shortening of this);
...”.
And why should the Northmen write "oft will the smith blow" after a line about Tīw?
“… fabricataque Libra Vulcani;
...”. 443
Mars and Vulcanus thus share more than Venus. Indeed we might even say that Vulcanus is a frithsome (=peaceful) Mars ... But astrologers also say that the sign of Libra is the stead of "exaltation" of the planet of Saturnus, and we begin to see where the Northmen might have got the idea that Þ had something to do with Saturnus. But the Saturnus to be understood here is the "Craftsman" (Δημιουργός), a dark smith-god who first shaped the world by binding or wedding the "soul of the world" with matter. The slayer of the Bull and the layer out of the labyrinth that is our material universe. The myth of our Wayland, earlier Wēland, the Northern Vǫlundr, also belongs here. In the old way of reckoning the sun was in the sign of Libra, Wæȝe, from the 17th September to 17th. October, and in Scorpio, Þrowend, from 18th. October to 16th. November.
A good deal of Tīw's old worship seems to have got muddled up with Saint Martin of Tours. Gesta Karoli Magni bk. I, ch. 4: "De pauperibus ergo supradictis quendam optimum dictatorem et scriptorem in capellam suam assumpsit. Quo nomine reges Francorum propter cappam sancti Martini, quam secum ob sui tuitionem et hostium oppressionem iugiter ad bella portabant, sancta sua appellare solebant." [ A.J. Grant, outset. and awent. Early Lives of Charlemagne by Eginhard and the Monk of St. Gall, (London: Chatto & Windus, London, 1926), lf. 64.] Martin's cappa, cape or cope, would, needless to say be his red soldier's cloak that he is so often shown carving in two to share with a beggar. And here is the fore-runner of the oriflamme. Now Martin, or rather Martinus, has a name which means "little Mars", and Grimm marks the shift between the two names th'ilk lf.84:
St. Martin's feast day is Martinmas on the 11th. November. This would be when the sun was in the Scorpion. Much of what Bede writes about “Blot-monath” Blōtmōnaþ in his De Temporum Ratione was it seems, shifted to Martinmas. Thus Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 88 a lyric with the
incipit “By thys fyre... hath the line:
“November. At Martynesmasse, I kylle my swyne.”
[R. H. Robbins, Secular Lyrics of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (1952; 2nd ed. 1955)]. And more in keeping with Bede's "pecora" (understood as “þa neat” in Old English martyrology's awending of Bede's Latin) is "Martlemas-beef", thus Francis Grose A Glossary of Provincial and Local Words used in England (1839) lf.103:
And as always Ireland has something helpful for us here, John Brand lf.305:
But in north-western Europe Martinmas means, above all things, geese. There is nothing in the official life of the saint to even begin to outfold why geese should be linked to him. And Dr. Wilhelm Jürgensen in his Martinslieder Untersuchung und Texte (1910)
makes the point well that geese were eaten at Martinmas in ways that
seem to hark back to an old offering. And he marks out for us that: Mars Thincsus (see [here]) is seemingly
shown at Housesteads with a goose; that he was a god worshipped by soldiers from the Twente; and that there is an odd reference
in Martial's Epigrams Book 9, 31 to the offering of geese to Mars even
by the Romans:
Cum Comes Arctois haereret Caesaris armis Velivs, hanc Marti pro duce vovit avem. Luna quater binos non tota peregerat orbes, Debita proscebat iam sibi vota Deus. Ipse suas anser properavit laetus ad aras, Et cecidit sanctis hostia parva focis, Octo vides patulo pendere numismata rostro Alitis? haec extis condita nuper erant. Quae litat argento pro te, non sanguine, Caesar Victima, jam ferro non opus esse decet. When Velius was at Caesar’s side in Arctic warfare, he vowed this bird to Mars for his general’s behoof. The moon had not quite completed eight orbits before the god was demanding the vow already due. The goose hurried joyfully to its appointed altar, and fell, a small offering, victim to the sacred hearth. Do you see eight coins hanging from the bird’s open beak? These were but now hidden in its entrails. A sacrifice that gives a good omen on your behalf with silver, not blood, Caesar, tells us that there is no further need for steel. [Martial. Epigrams, Volume II: Books 6-10. Outset and awent by D. R. Shackleton Bailey. Loeb Classical Library 95. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. ]
That geese are more linked to Michælmas in England might lead us to think that something of Tīw's old worship fell upon Michæl's shoulders as well, but many old gods and goddesses have a share in
Michæl as we shall see in what follows and in later posts. OakWe have already marked the old saying: Beware the oak, it draws the stroke;
Henry Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim putteth the oak tree under Jupiter (see his Three Books of Occult Philosophy Book 1, chap. 26). Culpeper “Jupiter owns the tree”. Agrippa also marketh the “Æsculus” which is the sessile kind of oak that most folk would not tell asunder from the pedunculate kind that is called in Latin “robur” or “quercus”. Thus Philemon
Holland’s “the mightie great Oke named Æsculus” for Pliny’s Latin
“Æsculus” . Both kinds are everywhere hallowed to the thunder-god:
for we read of oaks being the image of their Jupiter among the Celts in
Maximus Tyrius “Κελτοὶ σέβουσι μὲν Δία, ἄγαλμα δὲ Δίὸς Κελτικὸν ὑψηλὴ
δρῦς.” “The Celtæ, indeed, venerate Jupiter, but the Celtic statue of
Jupiter is a lofty oak.”(see also Pliny Nat. Hist. bk. 16, ch. 95); at
Dodona we learn of an oak being hallowed to Zeus; and among the Sclaves
and Easterlings we will mark oak trees hallowed to their thunder gods
(Perun, ‘*Perk(w)unos’ (whence ‘Perkūnas’, ‘Pērkons’ and ‘Percuns’ /
‘Parcuns’ )). A document of the Jesuits, Annales Residentiae Vendensis for the year 1618, writing of the folk about Daugavpils:
"Arbores quoque tanquam sacras in honore habent, quibus dona sua offerunt: masculi offerunt quercui gallum, foeminae vero tiliae gallinam."Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie/Teutonic Mythology (Awending J.S. Stallybrass) I. VIII. lf. 172: “Again the oak was consecrated to Perun, and old documents define boundaries by it (‘do perunova duba’, as far as Perun’s oak).” Which "do perunova duba" is on the boundary of the bishoprich of Przemysl and is to be found in a charter of Leo I of Galicia of 1302 (see Norbert Reiter Das Glaubensgut der Slawen in europäischen Verbund (2009) lf.32 ). P. M. Barford The Early Slavs (2001) 9. lf. 191:
The Vita Sancti Bonifacii hath a well known felling of a holy oak in 723C.E. by Bonifacius at Geismar in Hesse hallowed to the thunder god who may well here be our own thunder god evened with the Southern Jupiter and called Thunor or Thūr: “robur Iovis in loco qui dicitur Gæsmere”.
And Grimm: “Several districts of Lower Saxony and Westphalia have until quite recent times preserved vestiges of holy oaks, to which the people paid a half heathen half christian homage. Thus, in the principality of Minden, on Easter Sunday, the young people of both sexes used with loud cries of joy to dance a reigen (rig, circular dance) round an old oak. In a thicket near the village of Wormeln, Paderborn, stands a holy oak, to which the inhabitants of Wormeln and Calenberg still make a solemn procession every year.” This last was in the vicinity of a ‘Thuneresberhc’ ‘Dunrisberg’ or ‘Thonresberch’ “hill of the god Thūr/Thunor”.
In England we find Holy Oak or Holy Oaks (Halliocks, Halyoke)
in Rutland where a charter dated to 1046 hath “into Ðures leȝe broc” (now Eye Brook),
Ðūr or Þūr being a shortening of Þunor, thus Þunresdæȝ or day of Þunor
(see Dutch Donderdag, German Donnerstag) is also Þūresdæȝ, whence our Thursday.
A charter (S544) of King Eadred to Æthelmær dated to 949 and granting 20 hides at Chetwode (uiginti manentium ad Cetwuda) in Buckinghamshire marks the boundaries of the land-gift as beginning and ending at the Holy Oak there. " Æræst on ða halgan ac, ... ... þæt swa on þone mærhege þe sceot to þære halgan æc." (see here) Often these meare-oaks become known as "gospel oaks". 
Here
we have the boundary markers for the Duchy of Lancaster woods adjoining
the "Forest of Braidon" in northern Wiltshire of 1591 to show that some
things hadn't change that much from "Anglo-Saxon" times. Three oaks
are marked: "Turntrowe oke" "Gospell Oke" "Charlame Oke" maybe for
"Charlman Oke". "Armyn Crosse" is also worth marking. (source: The
Wiltshire Archaeological and History Magazine Vol. VI no.17 Dec, 1859
lf. 200 Duchy of Lancaster. Survey of its Manors, a.d. 1591).
As "on Brædene", Braidon Forest is marked in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under 904.
"Gospell
Oke" "Good-spell oak" is a name widely met with, but with a
surprising significance. It is linked to what are called the minor
rogations once held on Monday to Wednesday preceding Ascension Thursday,
or "HOLY THURSDAY" as it is also called. The earliest possible date of
Ascension is April 30, and the latest possible date is June 3, so
mostly sometime in May, That is when the corn and other things are
growing. An old sermon to be found in Brand's Antiquities hath it:
Now
read this again and for God say Thunor, for God's word say Thunor's
hammer, and for gospels say charms and you'll see it is another case of
the more things change the more they stay the same.
Robert Herrick, in his Hesperides (1648) 55. To Anthea, gives another, older name for the gospel oak which we have met before:
" Dearest, bury me
Under that Holy-oak, or Gospel Tree
Where (though thou see'st not) thou may'st think upon
Me, when you yearly go'st Procession"
And
the footnote reads: "Holy oak, the oak under which the minister read
the Gospel in the procession round the parish bounds in Rogation week".
On
Holy Thursday moreover, Jesus himself becometh oddly Thunor-like thus
in Caxton's awending of the Golden Legend we may read:
Thunderfield in Horley, Surrey, is seemingly a field named for the god, but references to it in old charters as "silvatica" "woody" ( “Suttone . cum Þunresfelda silvatica .” see also the "-ley" in Horley) and as having dens for swine (“... XXX [mansiones] in Suttone cum cubilibus porcorum que illuc pertinent . scilicet in Þunresfelda.”) make us think that there were holy oaks here as well. For besides ships, oak trees of yore straightaway called up thoughts of swine. Thus the verse about the old rūnstæf called Ac, that is “Oak” “Oak-tree”: ᚪ
Þunor belike shares the oak, or at least the acorns, with swine-loving Frēa (O. N. Freyr). And in Sweden although we do find the oak hallowed to Þunor, thus Torseke, Fjälkestad parish, Villands herred, in Skåne (y Thorsseeghe 1551), we will also find oaks hallowed to Frēa thus Fröseke, Älghults parish, Uppvidinge herred, Småland (i Frøseke 1404). But Wōden
is maybe a bit unlooked for, yet we find them too nevertheless.
Odensicke, Ytterselö parish, Selebo herredd, Södermanland (in odhinsheke
1331, j odhinseke 1365) and Onsicke, Skogs-Tibble parish, Hagunda
herredd, Uppland (i Odhenseke 1409).
Sometimes alongside oaks we might also have found stones at one time, thus Penny Drayton's Landmark and sacred trees of Leicestershire and Rutland [here]: "Three Shire Oak marked the boundary of Leicestershire, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire (130:822429). On earlier maps it is shown as 'Three Shire Bush'. Originally there was also a standing stone here, called the 'Star Stone' which was reputed to have fallen from the sky. "
Grimm well marks in his Teutonic
Mythology (1882) chap. 8, lvs. 177 to 178 there are three bits to what we inexactly refer to as lightning or thunder:
“The ancient languages distinguish three acts in the natural
phenomenon: the flash, fulgur ἀστραπή , the sound, tonitrus, βροντή , and the
stroke, fulmen, κεραυνός .”
Now our word for
the flash is lightning as if "lightening" but this is a confusion with the true, and older word which was
"leyting" from "leyte" from Old English līeȝetu f., līȝet m. (found in masculine and feminine forms!), and as late as the Chester
Plays (Harley 2124) of 1607 we still find
it : “Layte, Thunder”. For the sound, the word is indeed "thunder" from Old English
þunor
m., giving us the name of our god, and often further imagined as a
“stefn” voice or “rād” a riding (whence road of roadway,
wrongly broken up as road+way and both halves mistakenly thought to mean
the
same thing, which they don't). But as to what κεραυνός
represents, and I don't think "stroke" is good enough. For neither this, nor the Old English líget-sliht m.,
or Grimm's fulmen (a double of fulgur), truly awends the Greek κεραυνός. In the Latin Telum would be
the word. The best we now have is "thunder bolt" but this is seemingly only an
awending of the Latin. In Shakespeare's plays in a few steads however, we will find the native expression of "thunder stone" which agrees with
what was found in some parts of Germany in Grimm's time. And Grimm quotes Turnei
von Nantheiz 35.150 to show the age of the idea:
“...'ez wart nie stein geworfen dar er enkæme von
der schûre,'
there was never stone thrown there (into the castle high), unless
it came from the storm, Ecke, 203.”
Ṛgvedaḥ 7. 104.5 also knows stone (aśman (अश्मन् ) "thunderbolts":
indrāsomā vartayataṃ divas paryaghnitaptebhiryuvamaśmahanmabhiḥ | 5 Indra and Soma, cast ye downward out of heaven your deadly darts of stone (aśma) burning with fiery flame,And 2.14.6: adhvaryavo yaḥ śataṃ śambarasya puro bibhedāśmaneva pūrvīḥ | 6 Ye ministers, to him who as with thunder (āśman) demolished Śambara's hundred ancient castles; aśman (अश्मन् ) m. can mean: a stone, a rock a precious stone any instrument made of stone (as a hammer etc.) thunderbolt a cloud the firmament From P.I.E *h₂eḱ- + *-mō. And from the same word we have P.I.E *h₂eḱmoros, (Sanskrit अश्मर (aśmará) 'stony'), whence Germanic: *hamaraza our "hammer"! The root is *h₂eḱ- (“sharp”) which gives us our word "edge". [see here and here]. But there is also another native expression which we have to delve into the furthest reaches of our folklore for. F. W. P. Jago, The Ancient Language, and The Dialect of Cornwall, with an Enlarged Glossary of Cornish Provincial Words.(1882) lf.291:  ".. In Brittany, home of Stone Age continuity, the stone celt is dropped into wells to purify the water and to ensure a full supply. There, the travelling umbrella mender will cheerfully accept celts — pierres de tonnerre, as he calls them—as payment for repairs. In the "English Brittany" which contains the duplicate St. Michael's Mount, namely Cornwall, the celt was boiled in water and used as a remedy for rheumatism.
And lf.126: "Dr. Daniel Wilson states that until the close of the eighteenth century, stone celts dug up in Scotland were supposed to be the hammers with which the dead were to knock at the gates of Purgatory. Here is a manifest Christian adaptation."  And we minn the words of our Salomon and Saturnus:
"Seó líget ðæt deófol bærneð . . . and se ðunor hit ðrysceð mid dǽre fýrenan æcxe".
Now after the uptake of Christendom Þunor never went anywhere in so much as he was always what many folk understood by the name of "God" thus we read in Bede's well known book, Book 4, chap. 3: awend. A. M. Sellar (1907) of Saint Chad:
At other times his worship is hidden behind the names of saints. We have already marked the worship of Elijah, Elias or Ilya and so on in the East. In Greece where there was of old an hill top shrine of Zeus a chapel of "saint" Elijah is now often found in its stead. In the West however, our hill tops will more often have chapels to "saint" Michæl who must stand in here for the old thunder-god.
The tops of hills are, above all things, His. In Bœotia on "mount Highest" ( ὄρος Ὕπατος) above Glisas there was a "shrine and likeness (ναὸς καὶ ἄγαλμα)" of "Zeus the Highest (Ὕπατος) " (see Paus. th'ilk 9.19.3). We hear of a likeness of Zeus "ἐπὶ κορυφῇ τοῦ ὄρους" "on the top of the mount" of Petrachus above Chæroneia (see Paus. th'ilk 9.41.6 ) and the old frith-yard (τέμενός) of Zeus Laphystius on the top of Mount Laphystius (9.34.5) above legendary Minyan Orchomenus (9.34.6). About Athens in Attica it gets a bit silly 1.32.2: Πεντελῆσι μὲν Ἀθηνᾶς, ἐν Ὑμηττῷ δὲ ἄγαλμά ἐστιν Ὑμηττίου Διός· βωμοὶ δὲ καὶ Ὀμβρίου Διὸς καὶ Ἀπόλλωνός εἰσι Προοψίου. Καὶ ἐν Πάρνηθι, Παρνήθιος Ζεὺς χαλκοῦς ἐστι, καὶ βωμὸς Σημαλέου Διός· ἔστι δὲ ἐν τῇ Πάρνηθι καὶ ἄλλος βωμός· θύουσι δὲ ἐπ᾽ αὐτοῦ, τοτὲ μὲν Ὄμβριον, τοτὲ δὲ Ἀπήμιον καλοῦντες Δία. Καὶ Ἀγχεσμὸς ὄρος ἐστὶν οὐ μέγα καὶ Διὸς ἄγαλμα Ἀγχεσμίου. But I acknowledge here that some of our hill tops are hallowed to St. Catherine (see St. Catherine's Hill near Guildford, another near Winchester and another one near Christchurch), but Catherine is in Athena's stead thus Pausanias Guide to Greece 8.21.4 (awend. Jones): “πεποίηται δὲ καὶ ἐπὶ ὄρους κορυφῆς σταδίοις τριάκοντα ἀπωτέρω τῆς πόλεως ναὸς καὶ ἄγαλμα Ἀθηνᾶς Κορίας. ” Κορία from κόρυς “head, helmet”. From the same root comes κορυφή “the top of the head; apex; summit” and κορυφαῖος “leader”. Artemis Orthia (Ἄρτεμις Ὀρθία) was also a goddess worshipped on of hill tops (see Paus.th'ilk 2.24.5). And I mark that Artemis in Messenia was shown armed (ἄγαλμα … ὅπλα) and had a shield (ἀσπίδα) (see Paus. th'ilk 4.13.1). On their kinship to the thunder-god see below under 'Oak'. Michæl and Gabriel are often for Þunor and Wōden. In Origen Contra Celsum Book 6, ch. 30 we will find: "... Μιχαὴλ τὸν λεοντοειδῆ" "Michael the Lion-like" and "Γαβριὴλ ... τὸν ἀετοειδῆ" "Gabriel, the eagle-like". And from A World of Wonders (1608):
“... Nay, they would faine make the Angell Gabriel beleeve
that he is God Mercury. ...”.
And thus the so-called "wild hunt" which has long been linked to Wōden in northern Germany (see Nicolaus Gryse's “Spegel des antichristischen pawestdoms”
(1593)) and Sweden, is known in our English folklore as "Gabriel's Hounds" and I mark this from Robert Plot's The Natural History of Stafford-Shire (1686) Ch.1, lf. 22, §44.
Mark "Wednesbury" means the "bury of Wōden". But again with all that is said of Michæl and Gabriel we will see the lore of the "Heavenly Twins", if not of their sisters, swaying things once more. That the church at Thundersley in Essex is hallowed to Saint Peter shows us that Peter himself often stands in for Þunor. I guess his keeping the "keys of the kingdom of heaven" (Matth. 16:19) was understood rather stavely as bestowing upon him the might to wield the sky and the weather. Sometimes Peter's key is also shown in such a way that makes us think it looks more like an axe or a club. And Peter's upside-down "Latin" cross looks alot like a hammer. And we can't help think that when Peter is shown with Paul, Peter has taken over the stead of Barnabas in the Acts of the Apostles 14:11-12: "And when the people saw what Paul had done, they lifted up their voices, saying in the speech of Lycaonia, The gods are come down to us in the likeness of men.Postula Sögur: Páls saga postula (AM 236 fol.) chap. 7: Guþ com til var i manna li[ciom] oc cølluþo þeir Paulum Oþin en Barnabas Þor.
But Peter and Paul have more than a little besides of the "Heavenly Twins". Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa 4:1:5:8:
"aśvinau ha vā idam bhiṣajyantau ceratuḥ ... " " Now the Asvins then wandered about here on earth performing cures."
I could go on, but maybe another time would be better. However, before leaving Þunor for now I must say something about Saint Martin. You have maybe forgotten we marked Chetwode above and that it once had a "holy oak". The church at Chetwode today is the old Priory church built there in 1244 by Sir
Ralphe de Norwich, but there was once an earlier parish church and this was hallowed to St. Martin [here].
Now Martin is a well known saint, and, as we have marked above, seems to have stood in for Mars (Thincsus) on the basis of him being a former soldier and his name meaning in Latin "Little Mars". And this, slight as it is, is nevertheless why all those geese have to be slaughtered at Martinmas in north-western Europe - the goose being the token it seems of Mars Thincsus and a not unknown offering of old to Mars (see Juvenal). However, Martin's reign of destruction in Gaul wherein he felled holy trees and smashed up Roman art everywhere he went, might well be likened to a storm, and this, together with his name sounding in Old French a bit like "marteaus" "hammer" seems to have led others to see him in the stead of their old thunder god. And it is thus that we might have our church at Chetwode hallowed to Saint Martin. There was
at least a well-known church in Norwich called "St. Martin at the
Oak" from a holy oak growing in the churchyard. Thus Francis
Blomefield's An Essay Towards A
Topographical History of the County of Norfolk: Volume 4, the History
of the City and County of Norwich, Part II. first outlaid by W
Miller, London, 1806, "Coselany ward" lvs. 479 to 503 and the parish
of St.Martin in Coslany lvs. 479 to 486, and on lf. 479:
And lf.484:
The kind of Mary that is found in oak trees is what the slavs call "Ognyena Maria" "Fiery Mary" ("sister" of St. Elijah!). This is the Mary of Candlemas whose blessed candles were kept and lit to ward off thunderstorms. Whose image they processed in time of drouth. All the old goddesses who have some kinship to the thunder god could have this rôle bestowed upon them of yore. Hera and Athena being the ones that most readily spring to mind. And we find in Servius' commentary on Vergil's Æneid that Juno and Minerva as well as Vulcan are wielders of Jove's bolt. Thus Æschylus in his Eumenides 827 to 828 (awend. Herbert Weir Smyth) has Athena say:
καὶ κλῇδας οἶδα δώματος μόνη θεῶν,And in Euripides tragedy The Trojan Women the same goddess, nettled by the lack of awe shown by the Achæans to her temple in their sacking of Troy: καὶ Ζεὺς μὲν ὄμβρον καὶ χάλαζαν ἄσπετον On them will Zeus also send his rain and fearful hail, [Euripides. The Plays of Euripides, awent by E. P. Coleridge. Volume I. London. George Bell and Sons. 1891]. A. B. Cook Zeus (1925) vol. 2, pt.1 lvs.625 to 626: "Athena, who in various ways recalls the great mother-goddess of Crete, is on occasion equipped with the double axe. Simias of Rhodes in his picture-poem the Double Axe makes Epeios the Phocian dedicate to Athena as an acceptable gift the axe with which he had made the wooden horse and thereby captured Troy. The fateful tool was to be seen in her temple at Eilenia in the district of Lagaria near Metapontum. Again, bronze coins of the Oxyrhynchite nome, struck by Domitian, Trajan (fig. 529), Hadrian (fig. 530), and Antoninus Pius, have for reverse type Athena bearing Nike in one hand and a double axe with straight or rounded edges in the other, ... Lastly, a ' Gnostic ' amulet in the St Geneviève collection (fig. 532) represents Athena armed with the double axe amid a group of Egyptising deities." Cook gives another Oxyrhynchite forebisening as figure 100 in vol. 3, lf.190.    Left: Minerva with the axe from Cook's figure 532, in th'ilk vol. 2, pt.1, lf. 626. Skáldskaparmál 11. Þórskenningar. "Hvernig skal kenna Þór? Svá, at kalla hann ... faðir Magna ok Móða ok Þrúðar, ..." "How shall Þór be known? Thus, to call him ... the father of Magni and Móði and Þrúðr, ...". Magni and Móði are for the Dioscuri. Þrúðr for any of the thunder-god's daughters but mainly Athena. Þrúðr in Old English would be Þrȳþ, which name with sundry prefixes is a well known ladies' name in old English. But Zeus's other daughter, the other κόρη Διός (κόρη Διός, of Athene, Aeschylus, Eumenides 415; Λητῴα κόρη, of Artemis, Id.Fr.170, Sophocles, Electra 570) namely Artemis who has alot to do with oaks herself. But at Orchomenus in Arcadia Pausanias Guide to Greece 8.13.2 (awend. Jones): “πρὸς δὲ τῇ πόλει ξόανόν ἐστιν Ἀρτέμιδος: ἵδρυται δὲ ἐν κέδρῳ μεγάλῃ, καὶ τὴν θεὸν ὀνομάζουσιν ἀπὸ τῆς κέδρου Κεδρεᾶτιν. ” “Near the city is a wooden image of Artemis. It is set in a large cedar tree, and after the tree they call the goddess the Lady of the Cedar (Κεδρεᾶτις).”
Cedar here may well mean the κέδρος μικρά or juniper. Strabo 15.1.29 brooks the
word "cedar" for the Himalayan cedar or deodār, which the Rājanighaṇṭu (verse 12.28) says is also called "Indradru" "tree of Indra". And for a supposed "moon goddess" so often linked to water, it is odd that Artemis is also shown holding a torch (see inter alia Paus. 8.37.4; 8.37.1), and in Arcadia on Mount Crathis she has become a fire-goddess outright thus Pausanias th'ilk 8.15.9 (awend. Jones):
And torch races on horseback were held to Artemis Bendis in Athens (see Plato's Republic, bk.1, 328a) at the time of the Panathenaia when Athena was being worshipped. The Athens-folk also had two other torch races (see Suda, lambda, 88) that they called the
Hephaistia and the Prometh[e]ia both seemingly to call to mind the gift of fire. Fire and Water blended together like this are however what we should hope to see in a thunder-goddess.
The wappen of Martigny in Valais, that is Martiniacum, which name means the stead of Martin, shows an hammer.
James Orchard
Halliwell-Phillipps A Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words
(1847) vol. 2, lf.543:
 A "maleus beati Martini" "hammer of Saint Martin" was long kept in the Utrecht cathedral hoard-house, and said to belong to the saint but is a silver shaft given to an old stone-axe head! It is now in the Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht. See [here].
But
the marking of "twins" here warns us that the lore of the "Heavenly Twins" is in the background working away. And it is from this that we find that there are two saint Martins, and why he is so often shown as a knight on the back of a white horse,
albeit
sharing his cloak with a beggar. And an oak tree is the well-beloved haunt of the "Heavenly Twins" thus Pindar in his Tenth Nemean Ode (awend. Diane Arnson Svarlien):
Before leaving Þunor for now, I think it is worth marking here that what is said in the North of Þórr seems to have managed to preserve its pristine ancient Indo-European character notwithstanding all the later additions made by the pœtes. Þór's father is not so much Óðin as Alföðr, and although these two are indeed often taken to be one and the same, and the pœtes sang as much, yet the seam between the two can everywhere be seen thus Brian Branston well wrote in The Lost Gods of England (1993) ch. 5, lf.72: "There can be no doubt but that Allfather and Odinn (no matter how they got mixed up later on) were originally two different personages."We can see Alföðr as Alföðr (rather than a hybris Óðin-Alföðr) in the following words from Gylfaginning 3: "Gangleri hóf svá mál sitt: "Hverr er æðstr eða elztr allra goða?" Why is Alföðr called Alföðr? Gylfaginning 9: "Ok fyrir því má hann heita Alföðr, at hann er faðir allra goðanna ok manna ok alls þess, er af honum ok hans krafti var fullgert. Jörðin var dóttir hans ok kona hans. Af henni gerði hann inn fyrsta soninn, en þat er Ása-Þórr. Honum fylgði afl ok sterkleikr. Þar af sigrar hann öll kvikvendi."That Ása-Þórr, our Þunor, is named outright here, is a "gift of the gods" towards our understanding of who Alföðr truly is, for it allows us to see that whoever he is, we know two things about him:
i) the Earth is his wife,
ii) and Þunor is his true son.
Anyone who knows their Ṛgvedaḥ will then readily grasp that it is Dyaus the old sky-father who is truly meant for Alföðr. For Dyaus is
well nigh everywhere in that work matched with the Earth (there called
Prithvi, for her breadth), and Indra, who answers to our Þunor, is his foremost son. Thus in 4.17 we may read (awend. Griffith):
tvam mahāṃ indra tubhyaṃ ha kṣā anu kṣatram maṃhanā manyata dyauḥ |The Northerners' wording "faðir allra goðanna ok manna" leads us to the same thing. Thus Hesiod has his muses sing in his Theology: δεύτερον αὖτε Ζῆνα, θεῶν πατέρ᾽ ἠδὲ καὶ ἀνδρῶν, 47And the Southern Jove and Zeus, are readily seen to be one with the Dyaus of the Ṛgvedaḥ. Alföðr may also be seen in the Edda to be the same as Naglfari, Annarr (or Ónarr 'gaping') and Dellingr, the three husbands of Nótt "Night" (Gylfaginning 10). And it is worth bearing in mind that in the beginning of Sigrdrífumál, Sigrdrífa/Brynhildr calls on Day and Night, and their sons and daughters, before she calls upon the Æsir and the Asyniur! Before going on, I mark Ursula Dronke's words about Gimlé from The Poetic Edda (1997) vol.2, lf.152 61/4: “ ‘Fire-Lee or -Shelter’, not found elsewhere, was a name probably devised by the poet or his circle to express the safety of this blessed hall from both Surtalogi and the flames of the Christian hell.”
Gimlé is not Valhöll.
Oak, Ash and Thorn?Oak, Ash and Thorn might ring a bell to some. "O do not tell the priests of our arts. For they would call it sin,
And I mark with many others that
they are all the names of runes in the English runestave-row or "runic alphabet". Beside
these three, there are four other runestaves named for trees : ᚳ cen,
as German Kien "pine-tree", ᛇ eoh - "yew-tree", ᛈ peorð as Irish ogham "ceirt" "bush" (see Welsh "perth") which the Auraicept glosses as aball "apple", and ᛒ beorc - "birch" (see "berk-" in Berkley). But there is something about oak, ash and thorn being put together. None
of the other trees that bestowed their names on runes are linked in the
same way as these three are. Rudyard Kipling was stirred to verse by
it, thus his A
Tree Song, from Puck
of Pook’s Hill (1906):
OF all the trees that grow so
fair,
Old England to adorn, Greater are none beneath the Sun, Than Oak, and Ash, and Thorn. Sing Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, good sirs, (All of a Midsummer morn!) Surely we sing no little thing, In Oak, and Ash, and Thorn! Oak of the Clay lived many a day, Or ever Æneas began. Ash of the Loam was a lady at home, When Brut was an outlaw man. Thorn of the Down saw New Troy Town (From which was London born); Witness hereby the ancientry Of Oak, and Ash, and Thorn! Yew that is old in churchyard-mould, He breedeth a mighty bow. Alder for shoes do wise men choose, And beech for cups also. But when ye have killed, and your bowl is spilled, And your shoes are clean outworn, Back ye must speed for all that ye need, To Oak, and Ash, and Thorn! Ellum she hateth mankind, and waiteth Till every gust be laid, To drop a limb on the head of him That anyway trusts her shade: But whether a lad be sober or sad, Or mellow with ale from the horn, He will take no wrong when he lieth along 'Neath Oak, and Ash, and Thorn! Oh, do not tell the Priest our plight, Or he would call it a sin; But - we have been out in the woods all night, A-conjuring Summer in! And we bring you news by word of mouth- Good news for cattle and corn- Now is the Sun come up from the South, With Oak, and Ash, and Thorn! Sing Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, good sirs (All of a Midsummer morn): England shall bide till Judgment Tide, By Oak, and Ash, and Thorn! |
But
this belike looks back to the ballad of
Glasgerion from the Percy Folio which hath:
“Glasgerion
swore a full great oath
By oak
and ash and thorn,...”.
And this is a hidden oath I think to forestall saying the names of the old gods outright. The
harper Glasgerion was known to Chaucer in his Hous of Fame, III, in which an eagle takes Chaucer to heaven…
Oak, Ash and Thorn or to swap gods for trees, Þunor, Wōden and Tīw, or in Latin, Jupiter, Mercurius and Mars. But if we swap Hercules for Jupiter, Þunor
having more of the character of Hercules than Jupiter, although the two
are not too unalike to begin with, we have chap. 9 of Tacitus' Germania:
“ Deorum maxime Mercurium colunt, cui certis diebus humanis quoque hostiis litare fas habent. Herculem ac Martem concessis animalibus placant:...”.[awend. by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb]
“Mercury is the deity whom they chiefly worship, and on certain days they deem it right to sacrifice to him even with human victims. Hercules and Mars they appease with more lawful offerings.”
If
we switch Jupiter for Hercules then we have the three gods who would
seem to be at the heart of the old belief of the Gauls. Thus the Commenta Bernensia on Lucan's De Bello Civili sive Pharsalia book 1 lines 445-6 where Teutates, Esus and Taranis are set forth thus:
The brooking of Oaks, ashes and thorns for the meeting steads of Hundred courts beyond all other kinds of tree is markworthy. Thus Olof S. Anderson English Hundred Names volume 3, 10. Names denoting Various Objects, Trees, Stones, etc. lf.184
“Teutates mars 'sanguine diro' placatur, siue quod proelia numinis eius instinctu administrantur, siue quod Galli antea soliti ut aliis deis huic quoque homines immolare. Hesum Mercurium credunt, si quidem a mercatoribus colitur, et prasidem bellorum et caelestum deorum maximum Taranin Iouem adsuetum olim humanis placari capitibus, nunc uero gaudere pecorum.”In what follows the evenlings of Mars and Mercury are bewrixled and Taranis is here said to be Ditis pater not Jupiter, but is this a mistake for Diovis Pater? But the way offerings were made is most markworth:
“Teutates Mars. They softened with 'accursed blood', either for that fights are wielded by the goad of his godhead, or, that the Gauls whilom were wont to offer men and other things to their gods. They believe Hesus is Mercury, and he is indeed worshipped by chapmen. And Taranis Jove overseeth fights and is the greatest of the heavenly gods. They were once wont to soothe him with the heads of men, but now indeed to be happy with livestock.”
“Mercurius lingua Gallorum teutates dicitur qui humano apud illos sanguine colebatur. Teutates Mercurius sec apud Gallos placatur: in plenum semicupium homo in caput demittitur ut ibi suffocetur. Hesus Mars sic placatur: Homo in arbore suspenditur usque donec per curorem membra digesserit. Taranis Ditis pater hoc modo aput eos placatur: in alueo ligneo aliquod homines cremantur.”Of the early kings of the Swedes we will find that King Fjölnir drowned in a ker of mead (Ynglinga saga 14), Vísburr was burnt (Ynglinga saga 17) and Agni was hung (Ynglinga saga 22). In England we hanged wrong-doers until 1964, and this long brooking of the noose is from its deep links to Wōden. Tyburn "Tree" on a crossroads (Oxford Street and Edgware Road) at the west end of London was an old hanging stead. A charter of King Æthelred to Westminster Abbey (S 903) from 1002C.E., has in the meares in the neighbourhood of Tyburn "andlang strate to þare ealdan werhrode" "along the street to the old gallows (werhrode)". Whilst another charter of King Eadwig to Bishop Oswulf (S647), has in the meares of the land-gift at Stanton St Bernard, Wiltshire "Þonon on þa wearh roda on wodnes dic" "thence on the gallows (wearh roda) at Woden’s ditch (now Wansdyke)". The "Stafford" knot sometimes said to have been first made to hang three men at once is another token of Wōden. Might we link Tīw then with water? A Worcestershire charter of 849C.E. (S1272) has in rhe meares "7 ðonne ut in Creodan ac . sue in Tyes mere" "and thence out to Creoda's Oak and so to Tīw's mere or lake" . Akin to it would be Tissø (vest Sjælland) “Tyr's lake” (1452: Tisøe). And here I wonder if Tisvilde (Frederiksborg Amt, Sjælland) “Tyr's spring” (1389: Tiswillæ) should be set under this heading. And thus Arthur throws his sword into a lake. It is worth minning Tacitus' Germania 12 here:
“Mercurius in the Gaulish tongue was named Teutates and was worshipped among them with human blood. Teutates was soothed thus by the Gauls: a man was thrust headlong in a full, half-bath, and thereby stifled. Hesus Mars was soothed thus: a man was hung on a tree and then it was done so his limbs were sundered. Taranis or Ditis Pater was pleased in this way among them: they burnt some men in wooden frameworks.”
12. Licet apud concilium accusare quoque et discrimen capitis intendere. Distinctio poenarum ex delicto: proditores et transfugas arboribus suspendunt; ignavos et imbelles et corpore infames coeno ac palude, injecta insuper crate, mergunt. Diversitas supplicii illuc respicit, tanquam scelera ostendi oporteat, dum puniuntur, flagitia abscondi. Sed et levioribus delictis, pro modo poenarum, equorum pecorumque numero convicti mulctantur: pars mulctae regi vel civitati, pars ipsi, qui vindicatur, vel propinquis ejus exsolvitur.So that all wrongdoers would have been infolded in the wording "wearg and earg" where "wearg" is the kind fit to be hanged whilst earg are the morass-ward leaning.
12. In their councils an accusation may be preferred or a capital crime prosecuted. Penalties are distinguished ac-cording to the offence. Traitors and deserters are hanged on trees; the coward, the unwarlike, the man stained with abominable vices, is plunged into the mire of the morass, with a hurdle put over him. This distinction in punishment means that crime, they think, ought, in being punished, to be exposed, while infamy ought to be buried out of sight. Lighter offences, too, have penalties proportioned to them; he who is convicted, is fined in a certain number of horses or of cattle. Half of the fine is paid to the king or to the state, half to the person whose wrongs are avenged and to his relatives.
The brooking of Oaks, ashes and thorns for the meeting steads of Hundred courts beyond all other kinds of tree is markworthy. Thus Olof S. Anderson English Hundred Names volume 3, 10. Names denoting Various Objects, Trees, Stones, etc. lf.184
“Of special kinds of
trees, those most often referred to in hundred-names, and chosen as
meeting-places, are the oak, the ash and the thorn. We are reminded of
Glasgerion's oath 'by oak and ash and thorn',[Child, English and Scottish
Popular Ballads, p. 137.] the sacred trees of the North (Mawer, PNs and History
23). The oak was an object of worship among the ancient Teutons (cf. (on) ða
halgan æc 949 BCS 883 and Holy Oakes Le, DB Haliach) , and the ash-tree and the
thorn also have heathen religious associations.”
Thus, keeping to mine own dear West-sexene Lawe, we find in Berkshire that Compton Hundred was once known as Naked-THORN (Nachededorn(e) hd' 1086 DB) from the naked thorn by which it met. Rowbury (later a third of Faircross Hundred) met at Court-OAK
on Rowbury Hill. Whilst the the so-called “Seven Hundreds of
Beynhurst, Ripplesmere, Charlton, Bray, Cookham, Sonning and Wargrave”
(truly made up from the four old hundreds of Beynhurst, Charlton, Bray,
and Ripplesmere) had their court at “Beyndon Hill and Bare OAKS”. And “Bare Oaks” or “bare ook” is in Polychronicon:
“...Barkschire, þat haþ þat name of a baar ook þat is in þe forest of Wyndesore; for at þat bare ook men of þat schire were i-wont come to gidres and make here tretys, and þere take hir counsail, and rede. ...”.
In Wiltshire the hundreds of Heytesbury and Warminster met at Iley OAK. Under this Ælfred camped before seeing off the Danish sea-wolves at Edington.
In Hamp’shire the court for Holdshott Hundred met under “The Hundred OAK”. We also hear of an Hundred of Owl-THORN (Hundred' de Ulethorn' 1215 Cl) which may be another name for Finchdean Hundred.
And although not a hundred-court, the court leet held at the Cutthorn at Southampton, marked as "spinam de Kotterorne" in 1228, "Kotterorne" being for "Kotte-þorne", should not be overlooked here. A sign now set up on the stow reads:
"On this ancient mound called CUTTHORN close to the original northern boundary of the town, the Court Leet or lawday of Southampton was held from time immemorial on the third Tuesday after Easter in each year. The court is still regularly held but after moving to the Bargate in the 17th century and then to the Audit House it now assembles at the Civic Centre on the first Tuesday after Michaelmas."
In Somerset, Bruton Hundred (from which a Cat’s ASH Hundred hath also been made at a later date) met at the Cat’s Ash, and Horethorne Hundred at a THORN in Charlton Horethorne. There was also at one time a blackTHORN hundred.
In Dorset Godder-THORN
hundred (Godetronestona hundret 1084 Geld Roll, Godrunesthornhundredum
1194, 1195 P, Nettle1) would seem to have met by a thorn from which it
took its name.
From Devonshire the so called Haytor hundred should be Hai-THORN or Haythorne.
From Surrey Copthorne Hundred (Cope(de)dorne hd' 1086 DB) must have met at a THORN so called.
From Sussex we learn of an ASH tree in Midhurst under which the court of Easebourne hundred was kept, and we may ween that it was an OAK where Henfield hundred met and from which it came to be called Tipnoak .
In Kent in Aylesford Lathe Eyhorne hd (Haiborne (sic), Aihorde, Haihorne hund' 1086 DB) rightly heithorn (1200P) “haythorne” (1255Ass 361 m 43,) from a haw-THORN which was belike near Eyhorne Street.
The Holy Trinity
þáttr Hálfdanar svarta from the Flateyjarbók:
"... en Odinn heitir morgum nofnnum. ... Þride af þui at þeir hofdu auita ordit at sa er einn ok þrir er bazstr er ok hofdu þa spurnn af þrenningunne ok sneru þui j uillu."
"... But Óðin is called by many names. ... Þriði for that they had become aware that he that is best is one and three and had learned of the Trinity but turned that into foolishness."
“Capitulum 26.
Nunc de supersticione Sueonum pauca dicemus. Nobilissimum illa gens templum habet, quod Ubsola dicitur, non longe positum ab Sictona civitate. In hoc templo, quod totum ex auro paratum est, statuas trium deorum veneratur populus, ita ut potentissimus eorum Thor in medio solium habeat triclinio; hinc et inde locum possident Wodan et Fricco. Quorum significationes eiusmodi sunt: 'Thor', inquiunt, 'praesidet in aere, qui tonitrus et fulmina, ventos ymbresque, serena et fruges gubernat. Alter Wodan, id est furor, bella gerit, hominique ministrat virtutem contra inimicos. Tertius est Fricco, pacem voluptatemque largiens mortalibus'. Cuius etiam simulacrum fingunt cum ingenti priapo. Wodanem vero sculpunt armatum, sicut nostri Martem solent; Thor autem cum sceptro Iovem simulare videtur. Colunt et deos ex hominibus factos, quos pro ingentibus factis immortalitate donant, sicut in Vita sancti Anscarii leguntur Hericum regem fecisse.Capitulum 27.
Omnibus itaque diis suis attributos habent sacerdotes, qui sacrificia populi offerant. Si pestis et famis imminet, Thorydolo lybatur, si bellum, Wodani, si nuptiae celebrandae sunt, Fricconi. ...”
“Now we will say a little of the superstition of the Swedes.] These folk have a most noble temple, which is called Uppsala, not far from the borough of Sigtuna. In this temple, all furnished with gold, are statues of three gods which the folk worship: Thor, as the most mighty god, has his throne in the middle of the hall, and on either side of him Odin and Frey are holding a place. Their betokenings are of the following kind: Thor, they say, lords it in the air – who makes thunder, lightning, winds, rain-showers, fair weather, and the fruits [of the earth]. The second, Odin that is fury, makes wars, and bestows on man manliness against foes. The third is Frey, bestowing peace and pleasure to mortals. His idol, therefore, they shape with a mighty phallus. Odin is graven armed, in the fashion of our Mars; Thor with a sceptre looks like Jupiter. And they worship gods made from men, who for their noble deeds they bestowed immortality, even as we read in the life of Saint Ansgar they did to king Eric.
They have priests allotted to all their gods, who offer the folk's sacrifices. If sickness or famine threatens they libate the idol Thor; if war, Odin; and if they are celebrating a wedding Frey.”
Here
“Frēa” has been set to Þunor or Þūr, the Northern Þórr “Thor”, and
Wōden/Óðinnr "Odin". Týr/Tīw/Tīȝ might not be missing so much as having
his stead betokened by Þunor in the same way as Hercules could fill in
for Mars among the Romans. You don't need two kṣatriyaḥ (क्षत्रियः).
It is a little known thing but the three crowns in the coat of arms of
Sweden are more than likely to betoken these three gods and seemingly
therefore to be understood as three kings. These same three gods are the ones that get all the “gripir” (what
we in English would call “mathoms”
māþmas) in Skáldskaparmál 43 and alone of all deem which is best:
Þunor is also shown as a mean between two extremes, namely between war (Wōden) and peace (Frēa), or, as we might say in Old English betwēox gūþe and friþe. Which puts me in mind of Mahabharat Bk.12, ch. 328 where Vishnu (as Nārāyaṇaḥ (नारायणः)) says:
And I think we can thus be so bold as to understand these three as a Western trimūrtiḥ (त्रिमूर्तिः). Shiva as an Eastern Dionysus/Bacchus, or as the wild hunter Rudra, is for Wōden. Vishnu, here understood as Indra (Indrakarman), is Þunor. But Vishnu will ever fly back and forth between being understood by us as Vāyuḥ (Mercurius) or as Indra. And Frēa is for Brahma: both Frēa and Brahma being linked to Saturn, thus Varaha mahira Brihat Jâtâka ch. 2 §5:
The
Sanskrit is "vahny ambu agnija- keśava- indra- śaci kāḥ sūrya-
ādi-nātʰāḥ kramāt" where "Vahni" is another name for Agni, Ambu for
ambupa or ambupati "Lord of Water", a well-worn byname of Varuna, Agnija
"fire-born" for Subrahmanya or Skanda, the Hindu Mars, Keshava
"fair-head" a byname of Vishnu, Indra needs no outfolding, Saci is a
byname of Indrani, and "Ka", meaning "Who" is an odd, but well known
way of naming Brahma. The order is of the days of the week.
"... ok skyldi þat atkvæði standast, sem segði Óðinn, Þórr, Freyr."No one seems to have grasped the weight of this or what is being said about these three gods here. Which is a shame for as “Wate” “Fruote” and “Hôrant” they pop up in Kûdrûn to help “Hetele der riche” of the “Hegelingen” win Hilde! “Wate” (kin to Hetele “sin kunne” (205) so a "Hegeling"...) is our Wade and is for Thor hence he is “wate der alde, der helt von Sturmlant” (465) and Wade in Þiðreks saga af Bern wades with Wayland in a way not unlike Thor and Orvandill. “Fruote”, our Froda, the Northern Fróði, is for Freyr who in Skírnismál from the Codex Regius, is twice named “inn fróði” and Frið-fróði is meant to have wielded Denmark at the same time as Freyr wielded the Svíar or Svíþjóð “Swedes” (see Ynglinga saga cap. 12 “Á hans dögum hófst Fróða friðr, þá var ok ár um öll lönd; kendu Svíar þat Frey.” “In his days was the frith (=peace) of Fróði there was also good years in all lands; the Swedes set it to Freyur.”). But forsooth Fróði and Freyr are one. And “Hôrant”, our Heorrenda (see Deor), is a byname of Odin where as Hjarrandi it can be found on the same list as we have already marked in Arnamagnus handwrit AM 748 I b 4° folio 18 recto.
"... and that verdict was to prevail which Odin, Thor, and Freyr should render (awend. Brodeur)".
Now I wouldn't be the first
one by miles to link these to the three gods that Simon Grunau (“bruder Symon Grunaw von Tolckemitte”) has as
the three great gods of the old Prussians in his Cronika (1526), Patollo, Perkuno, Potrimppo, (see [here]). And whilst not worthy of a wholehearted belief, it nevertheless has some worth, and,
if we can allow it, we should think
that these three gods of ours, and theirs (for they more or less match),
must be further beshead (=differenced) by eld (=age), with Wōden the
oldest, Frēa the youngest and Þunor of middle eld. At which point we
can see time being dealt out between them, Wōden the past, Þunor the
present and Frēa the future. And thus spanning the same thought as the Weird Sisters [here] as weird is only the will of the gods, and of these gods above all others. This is the oldest and best understanding. So Frēa would oversee all sending forth of souls, begettings, beginnings and births, the dawning of the day and the new of the moon, childhood and youth. Spring. Þunor things at their full growth and strength, mid-day, full moon, grown-ups, mother and father. Summer. Wōden things grown old, the afternoon and even, old moon, old men and women. And as the old are often wrathful ... flytings and fightlocks. Harvest-tide. The fetching home of souls. What brings the end back to the beginning again... well that is the mystery of the gods.
Þunor is also shown as a mean between two extremes, namely between war (Wōden) and peace (Frēa), or, as we might say in Old English betwēox gūþe and friþe. Which puts me in mind of Mahabharat Bk.12, ch. 328 where Vishnu (as Nārāyaṇaḥ (नारायणः)) says:
“yasya prasādajo brahmā rudraś ca krodhasaṃbhavaḥ”
“I have created Brahman from the attribute of Grace, Rudra from my Wrath,…”
And I think we can thus be so bold as to understand these three as a Western trimūrtiḥ (त्रिमूर्तिः). Shiva as an Eastern Dionysus/Bacchus, or as the wild hunter Rudra, is for Wōden. Vishnu, here understood as Indra (Indrakarman), is Þunor. But Vishnu will ever fly back and forth between being understood by us as Vāyuḥ (Mercurius) or as Indra. And Frēa is for Brahma: both Frēa and Brahma being linked to Saturn, thus Varaha mahira Brihat Jâtâka ch. 2 §5:
And of Frēa we may read in the Trójumanna saga from the Hauksbók :
“...er Satúrnus
var kallaðr en vér köllum Frey...”
“... he was
called Saturn that we call Freyr...”.
Both are linked to boars. That Frēa rides a golden boar should be well known. But in the East the myth of the boar lifting the earth out of the sea was first told with the understanding that the boar was Brahma, not Vishnu. Rāmāyana, xi. 110, 3 (awend. Muir):
"Sarvaṁ salilam evāsīt pṛithivī tatra nirmitā| tataḥ samabhavad Brahmā svayambhūr daivataiḥ saha | sa varāhas tato bhūtvā projjahāra vasundharām ityādi |"
" All was water only, and in it the earth was fashioned. Then arose Brahma, the self existent, with the deities. He then, becoming a boar, raised up the earth," etc.
And both are linked to the Golden Eld. Thus in the Vana-parva of Mahābhārata bk.3, 181, 11a to 18a (awend. Muir):
nirmalāni śarīrāṇi viśuddhāni śarīriṇāmAlthough Prajapati can have a somewhat floating meaning in Hindu writings, Prajapati is brooked here in its true meaning whereby it is one and the same as Brahma. Thus the fish says to Manu in the Mahābhārata bk.3:
sasarja dharmatantrāṇi pūrvotpannaḥ prajāpatiḥ
amoghabalasaṃkalpāḥ suvratāḥ satyavādinaḥ
brahmabhūtā narāḥ puṇyāḥ purāṇāḥ kurunandana
sarve devaiḥ samāyānti svacchandena nabhastalam
tataś ca punar āyānti sarve svacchandacāriṇaḥ
svacchandamaraṇāś cāsan narāḥ svacchandajīvinaḥ
alpabādhā nirātaṅkā siddhārthā nirupadravāḥ
draṣṭāro devasaṃghānām ṛṣīṇāṃ ca mahātmanām
pratyakṣāḥ sarvadharmāṇāṃ dāntā vigatamatsarāḥ
āsan varṣasahasrāṇi tathā putrasahasriṇaḥ
tataḥ kālāntare 'nyasmin pṛthivītalacāriṇaḥ
kāmakrodhābhibhūtās te māyāvyājopajīvinaḥ
lobhamohābhibhūtāś ca tyaktā devais tato narāḥ
aśubhaiḥ karmabhiḥ pāpās tiryaṅ narakagāminaḥ
"The first-born Prajapati formed the bodies of corporeal creatures pure, spotless, and obedient to duty. The holy men of old were not frustrated in the results at which they aimed; they were religious, truth-speaking, and partook of Brahma's nature (brahmabhūtā). Being all like gods they ascended to the sky and returned at will. They died too when they desired, suffered few annoyances, were free from disease, accomplished all their objects, and endured no oppression. Self-subdued and free from envy, they beheld the gods and the mighty rishis, and had an intuitive perception of all duties. They lived for a thousand years, and had each a thousand sons.
Then at a later period of time, the inhabitants of the earth became subject to desire and anger, and subsisted by deceit and fraud. Governed by cupidity and delusion, devoted to carnal pursuits, sinful men by their evil deeds walked in crooked paths leading to hell," etc., etc.
“aham Prajāpatir Brahmā yat-paraṁ nādhigamyate”
“I am the Prajapati Brahma, than whom nothing higher can be reached.”
The Golden Eld in the North was a more down-to-earth kind of thing but it was linked to Freyr. For the Golden Eld is called in the North "Fróða friðr" and is euhemerised as the days when Frið-fróði was king of Denmark and Freyr was king of the Swedes. But that these two kings are one, and for a god, as we have said above, may be seen from Skírnismál where Freyr is twice named “inn fróði”.
Now what about our oak, ash and thorn? If only the thorn wasn't for Týr/Tīw/Tīȝ, but for Freyr/Frēa... Well, I think that the thorn then, although it could be given to Týr/Tīw/Tīȝ, was much more often given to Frēa! And to my help here I call (with tongue-in-cheek) Monsieur Georges Dumézil who has Quirinus among the Romans as the god of his third function notwithstanding that he is truly the same as Mars the god of his second function ("Mars enim cum saevit Gradivus dicitur, cum tranquillus est Quirinus" "Mars indeed when wrathful is called Gradivus, when frithsome he is Quirinus." Servius comm. to Vergil's Aeneid 1.292). But knowing Frēa to be the elf-king (here) and thorn trees in our folklore are the elves' trees above all. See "Alvysch' thornys" 1319, in field names of Milton Abbas in Dorset, from A. D. Mills, The Place-Names of Dorset (1989) Pt.3, lf.225. It seems only right that the elvish tree should, with greater right, belong to the king of elves! And we begin to see how the wielding of a sword as a weapon might link Týr with Freyr, but Freyr himself, as we all know, gave up his sword for love and now has to make do with a hart's horn! But that a link would then be made between these two gods, the god of war and the god of peace nevertheless, is worth bearing in mind. Þjóðólfr ór Hvini moreover brooks “Týs áttungr” in his Ynglingatal for a king who is the offspring (áttungr) of Freyr, not Týr. And then there is the goose. We have already marked it down as a token of Mars, Roman and Greek writers mark it out as Venus's bird (Lydus On the Months 4.63 under April), or Juno's (Diodorus Siculus Library of History Book 14, ch. 116 "Τοὺς μὲν οὖν φύλακας ἔλαθον, χῆνες δ´ ἱεροὶ τῆς Ἥρας τρεφόμενοι, καὶ θεωρήσαντες ἀναβαίνοντας κραυγὴν ἐποίουν." "They escaped detection by the guards, but the sacred geese of Hera, which were kept there, noticed the climbers and set up a cackling."), if not a token of Priapus (Petronius Satyricon 137 “occidisti Priapi delicias, anserem omnibus matronis acceptissimum. ” “You have slaughtered the delight of Priapus, a goose, the very darling of married women!”). And we call to mind here that Adam of Bremen evens Freyr (as Fricco) with Priapus and has him offered to at weddings over which Juno presided among the Romans. And this unfolds the knot about Seaxnēat/Saxnōt so that those who say "Thunær ende Uuôden ende Saxnôte" (Vatican Codex pal. 577) are Tacitus's Hercules, Mercurius and Mars (Germania 9), and those who say they are Adam of Bremen's "Thor" "Wodan" and "Fricco" (Freyr) are both right! Jacob Grimm again at the end of his chapitle on Wuotan in vol. 1 [ch. Vii, lf. 150] well writes:
"... Ziu und Froho sind blosse ausflüsse Wuotans."
"... Ziu (Týr/Tīw/Tīȝ) and Froho (Freyr/Frēa) are mere emanations of Wuotan ... "
Óðin-Þór-Freyr
Wōden-Þunor- Frēa
Shiva-Vishnu-Brahma
Ash-Oak-Thorn
And let Master Proclus have the last words which should banish all misgivings.
“Πάντα γὰρ ἐν πᾶσι τὰ θεῖά ἐστιν
καὶ διαφερόντως τὰ συστοιχα ἀλλήλων
μετέχει καὶ ἐν ἀλλήλοις ὑφέστηκεν.
”(Teubner 139)
“For all divine natures are in all, and particularly such as are
co-ordinate with each other, participate of, and subsist in each
other.” (awending Proclus's Commentary on Plato's Cratylus
(to 401b) by Thomas Taylor).
“Πάντα ἄρα μετείληχεν ἀλλήλων τὰ
αἴτια καὶ ἐν ἀλλήλοις ἐστὶν, ὥστε
καὶ ὁ τὸν δημιουργὸν λέγων ἐν αὑτῷ
τὸ παράδειγμα περιέχειν ἔστιν ὅπη
φησὶν ὀρθῶς, καθάπερ ὁ θεῖος Ἰάμβλιχος
διατάττεται καὶ ὁ τὸ παράδειγμα
δημιουργὸν ἀποφαινόμενος, ὥσπερ ὁ
γενναῖος Ἀμέλιος.”
“...All the causes therefore participate of each other, and are in
each other; so that he who says as the divine Iamblichus, that the
demiurgus comprehends in himself the paradigm, and he who evinces, as
the illustrious Amelius, that the paradigm is the demiurgus, in
certain respects, speak rightly...” (awending Proclus's Commentary on Plato's Cratylus by Thomas Taylor).
Farewell.
Superb! How can I cite you?
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