The Worship of the Oak. Frazer, Sir James George. The Golden Bough. Sir James George Frazer (1. Both Greeks and Italians associated the tree with their highest god, Zeus or Jupiter, the divinity of the sky, the rain, and the thunder. Perhaps the oldest and certainly one of the most famous sanctuaries in Greece was that of Dodona, where Zeus was revered in the oracular oak. The thunder- storms which are said to rage at Dodona more frequently than anywhere else in Europe, would render the spot a fitting home for the god whose voice was heard alike in the rustling of the oak leaves and in the crash of thunder. Perhaps the bronze gongs which kept up a humming in the wind round the sanctuary were meant to mimick the thunder that might so often be heard rolling and rumbling in the coombs of the stern and barren mountains which shut in the gloomy valley. In Boeotia, as we have seen, the sacred marriage of Zeus and Hera, the oak god and the oak goddess, appears to have been celebrated with much pomp by a religious federation of states. And on Mount Lycaeus in Arcadia the character of Zeus as god both of the oak and of the rain comes out clearly in the rain charm practised by the priest of Zeus, who dipped an oak branch in a sacred spring. In his latter capacity Zeus was the god to whom the Greeks regularly prayed for rain. Nothing could be more natural; for often, though not always, he had his seat on the mountains where the clouds gather and the oaks grow. The Terminal movie reviews & Metacritic score: The Terminal tells the story of Viktor Navorski (Hanks), a visitor to New York City from Eastern Europe, whose. Built my barns and strung my fences in the little border station Tucked away below the foothills where the trails run out and stop. Till a voice, as bad as Conscience, rang interminable changes 5 On one everlasting Whisper day. On the Acropolis at Athens there was an image of Earth praying to Zeus for rain. And in time of drought the Athenians themselves prayed, “Rain, rain, O dear Zeus, on the cornland of the Athenians and on the plains.” Again, Zeus wielded the thunder and lightning as well as the rain. Proverbs are popularly defined as short expressions of popular wisdom. Efforts to improve on the popular definition have not led to a more precise definition. The wisdom is in the form of a general observation about the world.
At Olympia and elsewhere he was worshipped under the surname of Thunderbolt; and at Athens there was a sacrificial hearth of Lightning Zeus on the city wall, where some priestly officials watched for lightning over Mount Parnes at certain seasons of the year. Further, spots which had been struck by lightning were regularly fenced in by the Greeks and consecrated to Zeus the Descender, that is, to the god who came down in the flash from heaven. Altars were set up within these enclosures and sacrifices offered on them. In Mason's Memoirs of Gray (1775), p. 157, we find: ''I am inclined to believe that. Keil & Delitzsch Commentary on the Old Testament. 27 He who diggeth a pit falleth therein; And he that rolleth up a stone, upon himself it rolleth back. The thought that destruction prepared for others recoils upon its. Philip Mauro : The Hope of Israel (1922) Free Online Books @ PreteristArchive.com, The Internet's Only Balanced Look at Preterism and Preterist Eschatology hanegraaff. Several such places are known from inscriptions to have existed in Athens. In this respect the legend of Salmoneus probably reflects the pretensions of a whole class of petty sovereigns who reigned of old, each over his little canton, in the oak- clad highlands of Greece. Like their kinsmen the Irish kings, they were expected to be a source of fertility to the land and of fecundity to the cattle; and how could they fulfil these expectations better than by acting the part of their kinsman Zeus, the great god of the oak, the thunder, and the rain? They personified him, apparently, just as the Italian kings personified Jupiter. Contrasting the piety of the good old times with the scepticism of an age when nobody thought that heaven was heaven, or cared a fig for Jupiter, a Roman writer tells us that in former days noble matrons used to go with bare feet, streaming hair, and pure minds, up the long Capitoline slope, praying to Jupiter for rain. And straightway, he goes on, it rained bucketsful, then or never, and everybody returned dripping like drowned rats. Thus among the Celts of Gaul the Druids esteemed nothing more sacred than the mistletoe and the oak on which it grew; they chose groves of oaks for the scene of their solemn service, and they performed none of their rites without oak leaves. It appears to have been especially dedicated to the god of thunder, Donar or Thunar, the equivalent of the Norse Thor; for a sacred oak near Geismar, in Hesse, which Boniface cut down in the eighth century, went among the heathen by the name of Jupiter’s oak (robur Jovis), which in old German would be Donares eih, “the oak of Donar.” That the Teutonic thunder god Donar, Thunar, Thor was identified with the Italian thunder god Jupiter appears from our word Thursday, Thunar’s day, which is merely a rendering of the Latin dies Jovis. Thus among the ancient Teutons, as among the Greeks and Italians, the god of the oak was also the god of the thunder. Moreover, he was regarded as the great fertilising power, who sent rain and caused the earth to bear fruit; for Adam of Bremen tells us that “Thor presides in the air; he it is who rules thunder and lightning, wind and rains, fine weather and crops.” In these respects, therefore, the Teutonic thunder god again resembled his southern counterparts Zeus and Jupiter. It is said that at Novgorod there used to stand an image of Perun in the likeness of a man with a thunder- stone in his hand. A fire of oak wood burned day and night in his honour; and if ever it went out the attendants paid for their negligence with their lives. Perun seems, like Zeus and Jupiter, to have been the chief god of his people; for Procopius tells us that the Slavs “believe that one god, the maker of lightning, is alone lord of all things, and they sacrifice to him oxen and every victim.” The chief deity of the Lithuanians was Perkunas or Perkuns, the god of thunder and lightning, whose resemblance to Zeus and Jupiter has often been pointed out. Oaks were sacred to him, and when they were cut down by the Christian missionaries, the people loudly complained that their sylvan deities were destroyed. Perpetual fires, kindled with the wood of certain oak- trees, were kept up in honour of Perkunas; if such a fire went out, it was lighted again by friction of the sacred wood. Men sacrificed to oak- trees for good crops, while women did the same to lime- trees; from which we may infer that they regarded oaks as male and lime- trees as female. And in time of drought, when they wanted rain, they used to sacrifice a black heifer, a black he- goat, and a black cock to the thunder god in the depths of the woods. On such occasions the people assembled in great numbers from the country round about, ate and drank, and called upon Perkunas. They carried a bowl of beer thrice round the fire, then poured the liquor on the flames, while they prayed to the god to send showers. Thus the chief Lithuanian deity presents a close resemblance to Zeus and Jupiter, since he was the god of the oak, the thunder, and the rain. Stonehenge - Wikipedia. Stonehenge is a prehistoricmonument in Wiltshire, England, 2 miles (3 km) west of Amesbury and 8 miles (1. Salisbury. Stonehenge's ring of standing stones are set within earthworks in the middle of the most dense complex of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments in England, including several hundred burial mounds. The surrounding circular earth bank and ditch, which constitute the earliest phase of the monument, have been dated to about 3. BC. Radiocarbon dating suggests that the first bluestones were raised between 2. BC. The site and its surroundings were added to UNESCO's list of World Heritage Sites in 1. Stonehenge is owned by the Crown and managed by English Heritage; the surrounding land is owned by the National Trust. William Stukeley in 1. Like Stonehenge's trilithons, medieval gallows consisted of two uprights with a lintel joining them, rather than the inverted L- shape more familiar today. The . Despite being contemporary with true Neolithic henges and stone circles, Stonehenge is in many ways atypical. Italicised numbers in the text refer to the labels on this plan. Trilithon lintels omitted for clarity. Holes that no longer, or never, contained stones are shown as open circles. Stones visible today are shown coloured. Mike Parker Pearson, leader of the Stonehenge Riverside Project based at Durrington Walls, noted that Stonehenge appears to have been associated with burial from the earliest period of its existence: Stonehenge was a place of burial from its beginning to its zenith in the mid third millennium B. C. The cremation burial dating to Stonehenge's sarsen stones phase is likely just one of many from this later period of the monument's use and demonstrates that it was still very much a domain of the dead. There is evidence of large- scale construction on and around the monument that perhaps extends the landscape's time frame to 6. Dating and understanding the various phases of activity is complicated by disturbance of the natural chalk by periglacial effects and animal burrowing, poor quality early excavation records, and a lack of accurate, scientifically verified dates. The modern phasing most generally agreed to by archaeologists is detailed below. Features mentioned in the text are numbered and shown on the plan, right. Before the monument (8. BC forward)Archaeologists have found four, or possibly five, large Mesolithicpostholes (one may have been a natural tree throw), which date to around 8. BC, beneath the nearby modern tourist car- park. These held pine posts around 0. Three of the posts (and possibly four) were in an east- west alignment which may have had ritual significance; no parallels are known from Britain at the time but similar sites have been found in Scandinavia. Salisbury Plain was then still wooded but 4,0. Neolithic, people built a causewayed enclosure at Robin Hood's Ball and long barrow tombs in the surrounding landscape. In approximately 3. BC, a Stonehenge Cursus was built 7. A number of other adjacent stone and wooden structures and burial mounds, previously overlooked, may date as far back as 4. BC. 3. 10. 0 BC). Stonehenge 1. After Cleal et al. The first monument consisted of a circular bank and ditch enclosure made of Late Cretaceous (Santonian Age) Seaford Chalk, measuring about 1. It stood in open grassland on a slightly sloping spot. The bones were considerably older than the antler picks used to dig the ditch, and the people who buried them had looked after them for some time prior to burial. The ditch was continuous but had been dug in sections, like the ditches of the earlier causewayed enclosures in the area. The chalk dug from the ditch was piled up to form the bank. This first stage is dated to around 3. BC, after which the ditch began to silt up naturally. Within the outer edge of the enclosed area is a circle of 5. Aubrey holes after John Aubrey, the seventeenth- century antiquarian who was thought to have first identified them. The pits may have contained standing timbers creating a timber circle, although there is no excavated evidence of them. A recent excavation has suggested that the Aubrey Holes may have originally been used to erect a bluestone circle. A small outer bank beyond the ditch could also date to this period. In 2. 01. 3 a team of archaeologists, led by Mike Parker Pearson, excavated more than 5. Stonehenge. Strontiumisotope analysis of the animal teeth showed that some had travelled from as far afield as the Scottish Highlands for the celebrations. BC)Evidence of the second phase is no longer visible. The number of postholes dating to the early 3rd millennium BC suggest that some form of timber structure was built within the enclosure during this period. Further standing timbers were placed at the northeast entrance, and a parallel alignment of posts ran inwards from the southern entrance. The postholes are smaller than the Aubrey Holes, being only around 0. The bank was purposely reduced in height and the ditch continued to silt up. At least twenty- five of the Aubrey Holes are known to have contained later, intrusive, cremation burials dating to the two centuries after the monument's inception. It seems that whatever the holes' initial function, it changed to become a funerary one during Phase 2. Thirty further cremations were placed in the enclosure's ditch and at other points within the monument, mostly in the eastern half. Stonehenge is therefore interpreted as functioning as an enclosed cremation cemetery at this time, the earliest known cremation cemetery in the British Isles. Fragments of unburnt human bone have also been found in the ditch- fill. Dating evidence is provided by the late Neolithic grooved ware pottery that has been found in connection with the features from this phase. Stonehenge 3 I (ca. BC)Archaeological excavation has indicated that around 2. BC, the builders abandoned timber in favour of stone and dug two concentric arrays of holes (the Q and R Holes) in the centre of the site. These stone sockets are only partly known (hence on present evidence are sometimes described as forming 'crescents'); however, they could be the remains of a double ring. Again, there is little firm dating evidence for this phase. The holes held up to 8. It is generally accepted that the bluestones (some of which are made of dolerite, an igneous rock), were transported by the builders from the Preseli Hills, 1. Pembrokeshire in Wales. Another theory is that they were brought much nearer to the site as glacial erratics by the Irish Sea Glacier. The stones, which weighed about two tons, could have been moved by lifting and carrying them on rows of poles and rectangular frameworks of poles, as recorded in China, Japan and India. It is not known whether the stones were taken directly from their quarries to Salisbury Plain or were the result of the removal of a venerated stone circle from Preseli to Salisbury Plain to . What was to become known as the Altar Stone is almost certainly derived from the Senni Beds, perhaps from 5. Mynydd Preseli in the Brecon Beacons. This phase of the monument was abandoned unfinished, however; the small standing stones were apparently removed and the Q and R holes purposefully backfilled. Even so, the monument appears to have eclipsed the site at Avebury in importance towards the end of this phase. The Heelstone, a Tertiary sandstone, may also have been erected outside the north- eastern entrance during this period. It cannot be accurately dated and may have been installed at any time during phase 3. At first it was accompanied by a second stone, which is no longer visible. Two, or possibly three, large portal stones were set up just inside the north- eastern entrance, of which only one, the fallen Slaughter Stone, 4. Other features, loosely dated to phase 3, include the four Station Stones, two of which stood atop mounds. The mounds are known as . Stonehenge Avenue, a parallel pair of ditches and banks leading 2 miles (3 km) to the River Avon, was also added. Two ditches similar to Heelstone Ditch circling the Heelstone (which was by then reduced to a single monolith) were later dug around the Station Stones. Stonehenge 3 II (2. BC to 2. 40. 0 BC). Plan of the central stone structure today; after Johnson 2. During the next major phase of activity, 3. Oligocene- Miocene sarsen stones (shown grey on the plan) were brought to the site. They may have come from a quarry, around 2. Stonehenge on the Marlborough Downs, or they may have been collected from a . The stones were dressed and fashioned with mortise and tenon joints before 3. The lintels were fitted to one another using another woodworking method, the tongue and groove joint. Each standing stone was around 4. Each had clearly been worked with the final visual effect in mind; the orthostats widen slightly towards the top in order that their perspective remains constant when viewed from the ground, while the lintel stones curve slightly to continue the circular appearance of the earlier monument. The inward- facing surfaces of the stones are smoother and more finely worked than the outer surfaces. The average thickness of the stones is 1. A total of 7. 5 stones would have been needed to complete the circle (6. It was thought the ring might have been left incomplete, but an exceptionally dry summer in 2. The tops of the lintels are 4. Within this circle stood five trilithons of dressed sarsen stone arranged in a horseshoe shape 1. These huge stones, ten uprights and five lintels, weigh up to 5. They were linked using complex jointing. They are arranged symmetrically. The smallest pair of trilithons were around 6 metres (2. Only one upright from the Great Trilithon still stands, of which 6. The images of a 'dagger' and 1. The carvings are difficult to date, but are morphologically similar to late Bronze Age weapons; recent laser scanning work on the carvings supports this interpretation. The pair of trilithons in the north east are smallest, measuring around 6 metres (2. This ambitious phase has been radiocarbon dated to between 2.
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