axe is a thunderbolt, exists among Europeans and savages alike. In
the West of England, the laborers will tell you that the thunder-axes
they dig up fell from the sky. In Brittany, says Mr. Tylor, the old
man who mends umbrellas at Carnac, beside the mysterious stone avenues
of that great French Stonehenge, inquires on his rounds for _pierres
de tonnerre_, which of course are found with suspicious frequency in
the immediate neighborhood of prehistoric remains. In the Chinese
Encyclopædia we are told that the “lightning stones” have sometimes
the shape of a hatchet, sometimes that of a knife, and sometimes that
of a mallet. And then, by a curious misapprehension, the sapient
author of that work goes on to observe that these lightning stones are
used by the wandering Mongols instead of copper and steel. It never
seems to have struck his celestial intelligence that the Mongols made
the lightning stones instead of digging them up out of the earth. So
deeply had the idea of the thunderbolt buried itself in the recesses
of his soul, that though a neighboring people were still actually
manufacturing stone axes almost under his very eyes, he reversed
mentally the entire process, and supposed they dug up the thunderbolts
which he saw them using, and employed them as common hatchets. This
is one of the finest instances on record of the popular figure which
grammarians call the _hysteron proteron_, and ordinary folk describe
as putting the cart before the horse. Just so, while in some parts
of Brazil the Indians are still laboriously polishing their stone
hatchets, in other parts the planters are digging up the precisely
similar stone hatchets of earlier generations, and religiously
preserving them in their houses as undoubted thunderbolts. I have
myself had pressed upon my attention as genuine lightning stones, in
the West Indies, the exquisitely polished greenstone tomahawks of the
old Carib marauders. But then, in this matter, I am pretty much in the
position of that philosophic sceptic who, when he was asked by a lady
whether he believed in ghosts, answered wisely, “No, madam, I have seen
by far too many of them.”
One of the finest accounts ever given of the nature of thunderbolts
is that mentioned by Adrianus Tollius in his edition of “Boethius on
Gems.” He gives illustrations of some neolithic axes and hammers, and
then proceeds to state that in the opinion of philosophers they are
generated in the sky by a fulgureous exhalation (whatever that may
look like) conglobed in a cloud by a circumfixed humor, and baked
hard, as it were, by intense heat. The weapon, it seems, then becomes
pointed by the damp mixed with it flying from the dry part, and leaving
the other end denser; while the exhalations press it so hard that
it breaks out through the cloud, and makes thunder and lightning. A
very lucid explanation certainly, but rendered a little difficult of
apprehension by the effort necessary for realising in a mental picture
the conglobation of a fulgureous exhalation by a circumfixed humor.
One would like to see a drawing of the process, though the sketch
would probably much resemble the picture of a muchness, so admirably
described by the mock turtle. The excellent Tollius himself, however,
while demurring on the whole to this hypothesis of the philosophers,
bases his objection mainly on the ground that if this were so, then
it is odd that thunderbolts are not round, but wedge-shaped, and that
they have holes in them, and those holes not equal throughout, but
widest at the ends. As a matter of fact Tollius has here hit the right
nail on the head quite accidentally; for the holes are really there,
of course, to receive the haft of the axe or hammer. But if they were
truly thunderbolts, and if the bolts were shafted, then the holes would
have been lengthwise as in an arrowhead, not crosswise, as in an axe or
hammer. Which is a complete _reductio ad absurdum_ of the philosophic
opinion.
Some of the cerauniæ, says Pliny, are like hatchets. He would have
been nearer the mark if he had said “are hatchets” outright. But this
_aperçu_, which was to Pliny merely a stray suggestion, became to the
northern peoples a firm article of belief, and caused them to represent
to themselves their god Thor or Thunor as armed, not with a bolt, but
with an axe or hammer. Etymologically Thor, Thunor, and thunder are the
self-same word; but while the southern races looked upon Zeus or Indra
as wielding his forked darts in his red right hand, the northern races
looked upon the Thunder-god as hurling down an angry hammer from his
seat in the clouds. There can be but little doubt that the very notion
of Thor’s hammer itself was derived from the shape of the supposed
thunderbolt, which the Scandinavians and Teutons rightly saw at once
to be an axe or mallet, not an arrowhead. The “fiery axe” of Thunor is
a common metaphor in Anglo-Saxon poetry. Thus, Thor’s hammer is itself
merely the picture which our northern ancestors formed to themselves,
by compounding the idea of thunder and lightning with the idea of the
polished stone hatchets they dug up among the fields and meadows.
Flint arrowheads of the stone age are less often taken for
thunderbolts, no doubt because they are so much smaller that they look
quite too insignificant for the weapons of an angry god. They are more
frequently described as fairy-darts or fairy-bolts. Still, I have known
even arrowheads regarded as thunderbolts and preserved superstitiously
under that belief. In Finland, stone arrows are universally so viewed;
and the rainbow is looked upon as the bow of Tiermes, the thunder-god,
who shoots with it the guilty sorcerers.
But why should thunderbolts, whether stone axes or flint arrowheads, be
preserved, not merely as curiosities, but from motives of superstition?
The reason is a simple one. Everybody knows that in all magical
ceremonies it is necessary to have something belonging to the person
you wish to conjure against, in order to make your spells effectual. A
bone, be it but a joint of the little finger, is sufficient to raise
the ghost to which it once belonged; cuttings of hair or clippings of
nails are enough to put their owner magically in your power; and that
is the reason why, if you are a prudent person, you will always burn
all such off-castings of your body, lest haply an enemy should get hold
of them, and cast the evil eye upon you with their potent aid. In the
same way, if you can lay hands upon anything that once belonged to an
elf, such as a fairy-bolt or flint arrowhead, you can get its former
possessor to do anything you wish by simply rubbing it and calling
upon him to appear. This is the secret of half the charms and amulets
in existence, most of which are real old arrowheads, or carnelians cut
in the same shape, which has now mostly degenerated from the barb to
the conventional heart, and been mistakenly associated with the idea
of love. This is the secret, too, of all the rings, lamps, gems, and
boxes, possession of which gives a man power over fairies, spirits,
gnomes, and genii. All magic proceeds upon the prime belief that you
must possess something belonging to the person you wish to control,
constrain, or injure. And, failing anything else, you must at least
have a wax image of him, which you call by his name, and use as his
substitute in your incantations.
On this primitive principle, possession of a thunderbolt gives you
some sort of hold, as it were, over the thunder-god himself in person.
If you keep a thunderbolt in your house it will never be struck by
lightning. In Shetland, stone axes are religiously preserved in every
cottage as a cheap and simple substitute for lightning-rods. In
Cornwall the stone hatchets and arrowheads not only guard the house
from thunder, but also act as magical barometers, changing color with
the changes of the weather, as if in sympathy with the temper of the
thunder-god. In Germany, the house where a thunderbolt is kept is safe
from the storm; and the bolt itself begins to sweat on the approach
of lightning-clouds. Nay, so potent is the protection afforded by a
thunderbolt that where the lightning has once struck it never strikes
again; the bolt already buried in the soil seems to preserve the
surrounding place from the anger of the deity. Old and pagan in their
nature as are these beliefs, they yet survive so thoroughly into
Christian times that I have seen a stone hatchet built into the steeple
of a church to protect it from lightning. Indeed, steeples have always
of course attracted the electric discharge to a singular degree by
their height and tapering form, especially before the introduction of
lightning-rods; and it was a sore trial of faith to mediæval reasoners
to understand why heaven should hurl its angry darts so often against
the towers of its very own churches. In the Abruzzi the flint axe has
actually been Christianised into St. Paul’s arrows—_saetti de San
Paolo_. Families hand down the miraculous stone from father to son as a
precious legacy; and mothers hang them on their children’s necks side
by side with medals of saints and madonnas, which themselves are hardly
so prized as the stones that fall from heaven.
Another and very different form of thunderbolt is the belemnite, a
common English fossil often preserved in houses in the west country
with the same superstitious reverence as the neolithic hatchets. The
very form of the belemnite at once suggests the notion of a dart or
lance-head, which has gained for it its scientific name. At the present
day, when all our girls go to Girton and enter for the classical
tripos, I need hardly translate the word belemnite “for the benefit
of the ladies,” as people used to do in the dark and unemancipated
eighteenth century; but as our boys have left off learning Greek
just as their sisters are beginning to act the “Antigone” at private
theatricals, I may perhaps be pardoned if I explain, “for the
benefit of the gentlemen,” that the word is practically equivalent
to javelin-fossil. The belemnites are the internal shells of a sort
of cuttle-fish which swam about in enormous numbers in the seas
whose sediment forms our modern lias, oolite, and gault. A great
many different species are known and have acquired charming names in
very doubtful Attic at the hands of profoundly learned geological
investigators, but almost all are equally good representatives of
the mythical thunderbolt. The finest specimens are long, thick,
cylindrical, and gradually tapering, with a hole at one end as if on
purpose to receive the shaft. Sometimes they have petrified into iron
pyrites or copper compounds, shining like gold, and then they make very
noble thunderbolts indeed, heavy as lead, and capable of doing profound
mischief if properly directed. At other times they have crystallised
in transparent spar, and then they form very beautiful objects, as
smooth and polished as the best lapidary could possibly make them.
Belemnites are generally found in immense numbers together, especially
in the marlstone quarries of the Midlands, and in the lias cliffs of
Dorsetshire. Yet the quarrymen who find them never seem to have their
faith shaken in the least by the enormous quantities of thunderbolts
that would appear to have struck a single spot with such extraordinary
frequency. This little fact also tells rather hardly against the theory
that the lightning never falls twice upon the same place.
Only the largest and heaviest belemnites are known as thunder stones;
the smaller ones are more commonly described as agate pencils. In
Shakespeare’s country their connection with thunder is well known, so
that in all probability a belemnite is the original of the beautiful
lines in “Cymbeline”—
Fear no more the lightning flash,
Nor the all-dreaded thunder stone,
where the distinction between the lightning and the thunderbolt is
particularly well indicated. In every part of Europe belemnites and
stone hatchets are alike regarded as thunderbolts; so that we have the
curious result that people confuse under a single name a natural fossil
of immense antiquity and a human product of comparatively recent but
still prehistoric date. Indeed, I have had two thunderbolts shown me at
once, one of which was a large belemnite and the other a modern Indian
tomahawk. Curiously enough, English sailors still call the nearest
surviving relatives of the belemnites, the squids or calamaries of the
Atlantic, by the appropriate name of sea-arrows.
Many other natural or artificial objects have added their tittle to
the belief in thunderbolts. In the Himalayas, for example, where
awful thunderstorms are always occurring as common objects of the
country, the torrents which follow them tear out of the loose soil
fossil bones and tusks and teeth, which are universally looked upon as
lightning-stones. The nodules of pyrites, often picked up on beaches,
with their false appearance of having been melted by intense heat, pass
muster easily with children and sailor folk for the genuine
thunderbolts. But the grand upholder of the belief, the one true
undeniable reality which has kept alive the thunderbolt even in a
wicked and sceptical age, is beyond all question the occasional falling
of meteoric stones. Your meteor is an incontrovertible fact; there is
no getting over him; in the British Museum itself you will find him
duly classified and labelled and catalogued. Here, surely, we have
the ultimate substratum of the thunderbolt myth. To be sure, meteors
have no kind of natural connection with thunderstorms; they may fall
anywhere and at any time; but to object thus is to be hypercritical.
A stone that falls from heaven, no matter how or when, is quite good
enough to be considered as a thunderbolt.
Meteors, indeed, might very easily be confounded with lightning,
especially by people who already have the full-blown conception of a
thunderbolt floating about vaguely in their brains. The meteor leaps
upon the earth suddenly with a rushing noise; it is usually red-hot
when it falls, by friction against the air; it is mostly composed of
native iron and other heavy metallic bodies; and it does its best to
bury itself in the ground in the most orthodox and respectable manner.
The man who sees this parlous monster come whizzing through the clouds
from planetary space, making a fiery track like a great dragon as it
moves rapidly across the sky, and finally ploughing its way into the
earth in his own back garden, may well be excused for regarding it
as a fine specimen of the true antique thunderbolt. The same virtues
which belong to the buried stone are in some other places claimed for
meteoric iron, small pieces of which are worn as charms, specially
useful in protecting the wearer against thunder, lightning, and evil
incantations. In many cases miraculous images have been hewn out of the
stones that have fallen from heaven; and in others the meteorite itself
is carefully preserved or worshipped as the actual representative of
god or goddess, saint or madonna. The image that fell down from Jupiter
may itself have been a mass of meteoric iron.
Both meteorites and stone hatchets, as well as all other forms of
thunderbolt, are in excellent repute as amulets, not only against
lightning, but against the evil eye generally. In Italy they protect
the owner from thunder, epidemics, and cattle disease, the last two of
which are well known to be caused by witchcraft; while Prospero in the
“Tempest” is a surviving proof how thunderstorms, too, can be magically
produced. The tongues of sheep-bells ought to be made of meteoric iron
or of elf-bolts, in order to insure the animals against foot-and-mouth
disease or death by storm. Built into walls or placed on the threshold
of stables, thunderbolts are capital preventives of fire or other
damage, though not perhaps in this respect quite equal to a rusty
horseshoe from a prehistoric battle-field. Thrown into a well they
purify the water; and boiled in the drink of diseased sheep they render
a cure positively certain. In Cornwall thunderbolts are a sovereign
remedy for rheumatism; and in the popular pharmacopœia of Ireland they
have been employed with success for ophthalmia, pleurisy, and many
other painful diseases. If finely powdered and swallowed piecemeal,
they render the person who swallows them invulnerable for the rest
of his lifetime. But they cannot conscientiously be recommended for
dyspepsia and other forms of indigestion.
As if on purpose to confuse our already very vague ideas about
thunderbolts, there is one special kind of lightning which really seems
intentionally to simulate a meteorite, and that is the kind known as
fireballs or (more scientifically) globular lightning. A fireball
generally appears as a sphere of light, sometimes only as big as a
Dutch cheese, sometimes as large as three feet in diameter. It moves
along very slowly and demurely through the air, remaining visible for
a whole minute or two together; and in the end it generally bursts
up with great violence, as if it were a London railway station being
experimented upon by Irish patriots. At Milan one day a fireball of
this description walked down one of the streets so slowly that a small
crowd walked after it admiringly, to see where it was going. It made
straight for a church steeple, after the common but sacrilegious
fashion of all lightning, struck the gilded cross on the topmost
pinnacle, and then immediately vanished, like a Virgilian apparition,
into thin air.
A few years ago, too, Dr. Tripe was watching a very severe
thunderstorm, when he saw a fireball come quietly gliding up to him,
apparently rising from the earth rather than falling towards it.
Instead of running away, like a practical man, the intrepid doctor
held his ground quietly and observed the fiery monster with scientific
nonchalance. After continuing its course for some time in a peaceful
and regular fashion, however, without attempting to assault him, it
finally darted off at a tangent in another direction, and turned
apparently into forked lightning. A fireball, noticed among the
Glendowan Mountains in Donegal, behaved even more eccentrically, as
might be expected from its Irish antecedents. It first skirted the
earth in a leisurely way for several hundred yards like a cannon-ball;
then it struck the ground, ricochetted, and once more bounded along
for another short spell; after which it disappeared in the boggy soil,
as if it were completely finished and done for. But in another moment
it rose again, nothing daunted, with Celtic irrepressibility, several
yards away, pursued its ghostly course across a running stream (which
shows, at least, there could have been no witchcraft in it), and
finally ran to earth for good in the opposite bank, leaving a round
hole in the sloping peat at the spot where it buried itself. Where it
first struck, it cut up the peat as if with a knife, and made a broad
deep trench which remained afterwards as a witness of its eccentric
conduct. If the person who observed it had been of a superstitious
turn of mind, we should have had here one of the finest and most
terrifying ghost stories on the entire record, which would have made
an exceptionally splendid show in the Transactions of the Society
for Psychical Research. Unfortunately, however, he was only a man of
science, ungifted with the precious dower of poetical imagination;
so he stupidly called it a remarkable fireball, measured the ground
carefully like a common engineer, and sent an account of the phenomenon
to that far more prosaic periodical, the “Quarterly Journal of the
Meteorological Society.” Another splendid apparition thrown away
recklessly, forever!
There is a curious form of electrical discharge, somewhat similar to
the fireball but on a smaller scale, which may be regarded as the exact
opposite of the thunderbolt, inasmuch as it is always quite harmless.
This is St. Elmo’s fire, a brush of lambent light, which plays around
the masts of ships and the tops of trees, when clouds are low and
tension great. It is, in fact, the equivalent in nature of the brush
discharge from an electric machine. The Greeks and Romans looked upon
this lambent display as a sign of the presence of Castor and Pollux,
“fratres Helenæ, lucida sidera,” and held that its appearance was an
omen of safety, as everybody who has read the “Lays of Ancient Rome”
must surely remember. The modern name, St. Elmo’s fire, is itself a
curiously twisted and perversely Christianized reminiscence of the
great twin brethren; for St. Elmo it’s merely a corruption of Helena,
made masculine and canonised by the grateful sailors. It was as Helen’s
brothers that they best knew the Dioscuri in the good old days of
the upper empire; and when the new religion forbade them any longer
to worship those vain heathen deities, they managed to hand over the
flames at the masthead to an imaginary St. Elmo, whose protection stood
them in just as good stead as that of the original alternate immortals.
Finally, the effects of lightning itself are sometimes such as to
produce upon the mind of an impartial but unscientific beholder the
firm idea that a bodily thunderbolt must necessarily have descended
from heaven. In sand or rock, where lightning has struck, it often
forms long hollow tubes, known to the calmly discriminating geological
intelligence as fulgurites, and looking for all the world like
gigantic drills such as quarrymen make for putting in a blast. They
are produced, of course, by the melting of the rock under the terrific
heat of the electric spark; and they grow narrower and narrower as they
descend till they finally disappear. But to a casual observer, they
irresistibly suggest the notion that a material weapon has struck the
ground, and buried itself at the bottom of the hole. The summit of
Little Ararat, that weather-beaten and many-fabled peak (where an
enterprising journalist not long ago discovered the remains of Noah’s
Ark), has been riddled through and through by frequent lightnings, till
the rock is now a mere honeycombed mass of drills and tubes, like an
old target at the end of a long day’s constant rifle practice. Pieces
of the red trachyte from the summit, a foot long, have been brought
to Europe, perforated all over with these natural bullet marks, each
of them lined with black glass, due to the fusion of the rock by the
passage of the spark. Specimens of such thunder-drilled rock may be
seen in most geological museums. On some which Humboldt collected
from a peak in Mexico, the fused slag from the wall of the tube has
overflowed on to the surrounding surface, thus conclusively proving (if
proof were necessary) that the holes are due to melting heat alone, and
not to the passage of any solid thunderbolt.