“Sing forth and laud Parjanya, son of Heaven, who sends the gift of rain:
May he provide our pasturage.
Parjanya is the god who forms in kine, in mares, in plants of earth
And womanhood, the germ of life.”[[1218]]
In short, “Parjanya is a god who presides over the lightning, the thunder, the rain, and the procreation of plants and living creatures. But it is by no means clear whether he is originally a god of the rain, or a god of the thunder. For, as both phenomena are always associated in India, either of the two opinions is admissible, if no deciding evidence comes from another quarter.”[[1219]] On this point something will be said presently. Here it is enough to have indicated the ease with which the notion of the thunder-god passes into, or is combined with, the idea of a god of fertility in general.
|God of thunder, rain, and fertility among the Iroquois.| The same combination meets us in Heno, the thunder-spirit of the Iroquois. His office was not only to hurl his bolts at evil-doers, but to cool and refresh the ground with showers, to ripen the harvest, and to mature the fruits of the earth. In spring, when they committed the seeds to the soil, the Indians prayed to him that he would water them and foster their growth: and at the harvest festival they thanked him for his gift of rain.[[1220]] The Hos |Goddess of lightning, rain, and fertility among the Hos.| of Togoland in West Africa distinguish two deities of the lightning, a god Sogble and a goddess Sodza, who are husband and wife and talk with each other in the sound of thunder. The goddess has epithets applied to her which seem to shew that she is believed to send the rain and to cause the plants to grow. She is addressed as “Mother of men and beasts, ship full of yams, ship full of the most varied fullness.” Further, it is said to be she who blesses the tilled land. Moreover, like the Hindoo thunder-god Parjanya, who slays demons, the Ho thunder-goddess drives away evil spirits and witches from people’s houses; under her protection children multiply and the inmates of the house remain healthy.[[1221]] The Indians of the Andes, about |Gods of thunder, rain, and fertility among the Indians of the Andes and the Abchases of the Caucasus.| Lake Titicaca, believe in a thunder-god named Con or Cun, whom they call the “lord” or “father” of the mountains (Ccollo-auqui). He is regarded as a powerful being, but irritable and difficult of access, who dwells on the high mountains above the line of perpetual snow. Yet he gives great gifts to those who win his favour; and when the crops are languishing for lack of rain, the Indians try to rouse the god from his torpor by pouring a small libation of brandy into a tarn below the snow-line; for they dare not set foot on the snow lest they should meet the dreadful thunder-god face to face. His bird is the condor as the eagle was the bird of the Greek thunder-god Zeus.[[1222]] Similarly in time of drought the Abchases of the Caucasus sacrifice an ox to Ap-hi, the god of thunder and lightning, and an old man prays him to send rain, thunder, and lightning, telling him that the crops are parched, the grass burnt up, and the cattle starving.[[1223]] These examples shew how readily a thunder-god may come to be viewed as a power of fertility; the connecting link is furnished by the fertilising rain which usually accompanies a thunder-storm.
|Traces of the worship of the oak in modern Europe.| As might have been expected, the ancient worship of the oak in Europe has left its print in popular custom and superstition down to modern times. Thus in the French department of Maine it is said that solitary oak-trees in the fields are still worshipped, though the priests have sought to give the worship a Christian colour by hanging images of saints on the trees.[[1224]] In various parts of Lower Saxony and Westphalia, as late as the first half of the nineteenth century, traces survived of the sanctity of certain oaks, to which the people paid a half-heathenish, half-Christian worship. In the principality of Minden young people of both sexes used to dance round an old oak on Easter Saturday with loud shouts of joy. And not far from the village of Wormeln, in the neighbourhood of Paderborn, there stood a holy oak in the forest, to which the inhabitants of Wormeln and Calenberg went every year in solemn procession.[[1225]] Another vestige of superstitious reverence for the oak in Germany is the custom of passing sick people and animals through a natural or artificial opening in the trunk of an oak for the purpose of healing them of their infirmities.[[1226]] At a village near Ragnit in East Prussia there was an oak which, down to the seventeenth century, the villagers regarded as sacred, firmly believing that any person who harmed it would be visited with misfortune, especially with some bodily ailment.[[1227]] About the middle of the nineteenth century the Lithuanians still laid offerings for spirits under ancient oaks;[[1228]] and old-fashioned people among them preferred to cook the viands for funeral banquets on a fire of oak-wood, or at least under an oak-tree.[[1229]] On the rivulet Micksy, between the governments of Pskov and Livonia in Russia, there stood a stunted, |Worship of the oak in modern Russia.| withered, but holy oak, which received the homage of the neighbouring peasantry down at least to 1874. An eye-witness has described the ceremonies. He found a great crowd of people, chiefly Esthonians of the Greek Church, assembled with their families about the tree, all dressed in gala costume. Some of them had brought wax candles and were fastening them about the trunk and in the branches. Soon a priest arrived, and, having donned his sacred robes, proceeded to sing a canticle, such as is usually sung in the Orthodox Church in honour of saints. But instead of saying as usual, “Holy saint, pray the Lord for us,” he said, “Holy Oak Hallelujah, pray for us.” Then he incensed the tree all round. During the service the tapers on the oak were lighted, and the people, throwing themselves on the ground, adored the holy tree. When the pastor had retired, his flock remained till late at night, feasting, drinking, dancing, and lighting fresh tapers on the oak, till everybody was drunk and the proceedings ended in an orgy.[[1230]]
|Ceremonial fires kindled by the friction of oak-wood.| Another relic of the ancient sanctity of the oak has survived to modern times in the practice of kindling ceremonial fires by means of the friction of oak-wood. This has been done, either at stated seasons of the year or on occasions of distress, by Slavs, Germans, and Celts.[[1231]] Taken together with the perpetual sacred fires of oak-wood which we have found among the Slavs, the Lithuanians, and the ancient Romans,[[1232]] the wide prevalence of the practice seems clearly to point back to a time when the forefathers of the Aryans in Europe dwelt in forests of oak, fed their fires with oak-wood, and rekindled them, when they chanced to go out, by rubbing two oaken sticks against each other.
|In the great European god of the oak, the thunder, and the rain, the original element seems to have been the oak.| From the foregoing survey of the facts it appears that a god of the oak, the thunder, and the rain was worshipped of old by all the main branches of the Aryan stock in Europe, and was indeed the chief deity of their pantheon.[[1233]] It was natural enough that the oak should loom large in the religion of people who lived in oak forests, used oak timber for building, oak sticks for fuel, and oak acorns for food and fodder; but we have still to explain how they were led to associate the thunder and the rain with the oak in their conception of this great divinity. From the nature of the case our solution of the problem must be conjectural; we can only guess at the |The clue to the development of a lightning-god out of an oak-god may have been the notion that the heavenly fire or lightning was made, like the earthly fire, by the friction of oak-wood.| train of thought which prompted our forefathers to link together things which to us seem so very different. Thunder and rain may indeed naturally be regarded as akin since the two so often occur together; but the difficulty is to understand why the oak should be joined with them. Which of the three elements was the original nucleus about which the others afterwards clustered? In our ignorance of the facts, this question amounts to asking whether, on the principles of savage thought, it is easier to suppose that an original god of thunder and rain should afterwards add the oak-tree to his attributes, or that, on the contrary, an old god of the oak should annex to himself the thunder and the rain? In favour of the first of these suppositions it may be said that a god of thunder and rain might in time be regarded as a god of the oak, because thunder and rain come from the sky, and the oak reaches skyward and is often struck by lightning.[[1234]] But this train of thought is hardly likely to carry conviction even to the mind of a savage. On the other hand, it is not difficult to imagine how early man in Europe might suppose the thunder, or rather the lightning, to be derived from the oak. Seeing that fire on earth was regularly kindled by the rubbing of oaken sticks together, he might readily infer that fire in heaven was produced in like manner; in other words, that the flash of lightning was the spark elicited by some one who was lighting his fire in the usual fashion up aloft; for the savage commonly explains natural phenomena by ideas drawn from the circle of his own daily life. Similarly, people who are accustomed to make fire by means of flints sometimes suppose that lightning is produced in the same way. This is reported of the Armenians,[[1235]] and it may be inferred of the many peoples who believe that the flint implements of prehistoric races are thunder-bolts.[[1236]]
|When an oak-god had once grown into a lightning-god, he would easily develop into a god of the rain and the sky.| Thus it is easy to conceive how a god of the oak, viewed as the source of earthly fire, should come to be regarded as a god of the lightning, and hence, by an easy extension of ideas, as a god of thunder and rain. Accordingly we may provisionally assume that the great Aryan gods who combine these various functions have been evolved in this fashion. A further step in their promotion would be taken when the whole sky was assigned to their dominion. The Greeks and Italians certainly advanced their Zeus and Jupiter to this lofty position;[[1237]] but there seems to be no evidence that the Aryans of the north ever raised their corresponding deities to the rank of sky-gods in general. It is commonly indeed assumed that the sky was the original province of all these deities, or rather of the single Aryan god from which they are descended. But on this theory it is hard to see why the god of the sky should have taken up with the oak, and not only that, but should have clung to it even after he had, in some places at least, begun to sit very loose to his old home, the vault of heaven. Surely his fidelity to the oak from the earliest to the latest times among all the different families of his European worshippers is a strong argument for regarding the tree as the primary, not a secondary, element in his composite nature.