Thunder god

“ As the thunder clashed above him, and the lightning tore the dark clouds asunder, it seemed to him as if God Himself, in His glory, had deigned to reveal Himself, to give him the strength and the power that he needed, the guidance which comes as a divine breath from Heaven in the supreme hour of a man's life, when Death and Duty and Love stand at the parting of the ways and beckon with unseen hands. ”

“ But we also find,—and this is closely connected with what has been said above,—that the axe has from time immemorial been considered, both in Greece and elsewhere, a symbol of the thunder or sun god. It soon becomes evident that the god of the sun and the god of thunder have originally been one and the same deity, although the ancients had not learnt to understand as we have the intimate connection which exists between the thunder and the sun.
Amongst the Aryan peoples of India we find a god whose favourite weapon in his fight against the demons is the thunderbolt. ”

“ The flash of fire, and the noise it makes in a watery cloud, are really at the same time; but, because the motion of light is much quicker than that of sound, we see the lightning some time before we hear the thunder, as we see the firing of a great gun at a distance before we hear the report of it. The thunder is here called the voice of God's excellency, because by it he proclaims his transcendent power and greatness. ”

“ From this moment the storm became progressive in dreadful magnitude, and the thunder, in concomitance with the most vivid flashes of lightning, pealed through the sky, with an awful grandeur and magnificence, that were exalted and even rendered more sublime by the still solemnity of religious worship. Every heart now prayed fervently—every spirit shrunk into a deep sense of its own guilt and helplessness—and every conscience was terror-stricken, as the voice of an angry God thundered out of his temple of storms though the heavens ”

“ Thunder in the black skies beating down the rain,
Thunder in the black cliffs, looming o’er the main,
Thunder on the black sea and thunder in my brain.
God’s on the night wind, Satan’s on his throne
By the red lake lurid and great grim stone–
Still through the roofs of Hell the brooding thunders drone.
Trident for a rapier, Satan thrusts and foins
Crouching on his throne with his great goat loins–
Souls are his footstools and hearts are his coins. ”

“ This learned head of a great college at the heart of Christendom taught that "the surest remedy against thunder is that which our Holy Mother the Church practices, namely, the ringing of bells when a thunderbolt impends: thence follows a twofold effect, physical and moral—a physical, because the sound variously disturbs and agitates the air, and by agitation disperses the hot exhalations and dispels the thunder; but the moral effect is the more certain, because by the sound the faithful are stirred to pour forth their prayers, by which they win from God the turning away of the thunderbolt." ”

“ Thunder is associated with the rainy season, and it may have been assumed, therefore, that the thunder god was powerless against the sandstorm demon, who was chased, however, by the moon, and finally overcome by the triumphant sun when it broke through the darkening sand drift and brightened heaven and earth, "netting" the rebellious demon who desired to establish the rule of evil over gods and mankind.
In the "Legend of Etana" the Eagle, another demon which links with the Indian Garuda, slayer of serpents, devours the brood of the Mother Serpent. ”

“ If we fully believe that God is in the storm, and that it is his voice which is heard in the thunder, and his face which is seen in the flashing of the lightning, the less shall we be terrified with the apprehension of unknown dangers. ”

“ The rain and thunder are mostly taken as acts of the Heaven-god, as where Zeus hurls the thunderbolt and sends the showers. But some peoples have a special Rain-god, like the Khonds of Orissa, who pray to Pidzu Pennu that he will pour down the waters through his sieve upon their fields. Others have a special Thunder-god, like the Yorubas, who say it is Shango who casts down with the lightning-flash and the thunder-clap his thunder-axes, which are the stone celts they dig up in the ground ”

“ Mock thunder, we know, has been made by various peoples as a rain-charm in modern times; [582] why should it not have been made by kings in antiquity?
|The legends of the deaths of Roman kings point to a close connexion between the king and the thunder-god.| In this connexion it deserves to be noted that, according to the legend, Salmoneus, like his Alban counterpart, was killed by a thunderbolt; and that one of the Roman kings, Tullus Hostilius, is reported to have met with the same end in an attempt to draw down Jupiter in the form of lightning from the sky. ”

“ These have impressed themselves upon the imagination of man, not only on account of their majesty, but also because of man’s impotence. The thunder is the voice of the god, the lightning his destructive and blasting energy.
The most obvious sign for lightning, a zigzag line, is practically ubiquitous. ”

“ Clouds, rain, and hail have all been feared and worshiped by numerous primitive tribes and by many of the early nature cults. Windstorms with thunder and lightning overawed early man. He was so impressed with these elemental disturbances that thunder was regarded as the voice of an angry god. ”

“ Or like a storm-cloud from the sky, wherein is darkness and thunder and lightning; they put their fingers in their ears at the thunder-clap, for fear of death, for God encompasses the misbelievers. The lightning well-nigh snatches off their sight, whenever it shines for them they walk therein; but when it is dark for them they halt; and if God willed He would go off with their hearing and their sight; verily, God is mighty over all. ”

“ The Thunder God, learning of their desertion from their posts of duty, sends his messengers to search for them and when he discovers their location, kills them with thunderbolts during an electric storm, after the manner of Zeus. This explains to many an unsophisticated man the frequent destruction of life and property during thunderstorms. ”

“ Paul had thunder with his lightning, to the shaking of his soul; so had the three thousand, so had the jailer: they that receive light without thunder, are subject to turn the grace of God into wantonness; but they that know the terror of God will persuade men. So then, when he decrees to give the rain of his grace to a man, he makes a way for the lightning and thunder ”

“ Secondly, death by thunder is regarded as a punishment for some secret crime committed against human or divine law, and consequently a man who is not conscious of anything of the kind faces the elements without fear. Away behind the clouds during a storm or typhoon sit the God of Thunder armed with his terrible bolts, and the Goddess of Lightning, holding in her hand a dazzling mirror. With this last she throws a flash of lightning over the guilty man that the God of Thunder may see to strike his victim ”

“ The tale about the lightning has a parallel among the Thādos. The Rain God, a mighty hunter, comes home hot and weary from the chase, and finds that his wife has forgotten to get the zu ready. He stamps about, and swears at her, thus making the thunder, and draws his dao in anger upon her, the flash of which is the lightning. But in Thādo the word for thunder is wān aghin, the clang of the high arch of heaven; wān is the round vault, anything rounded; bān in Meithei compounds has the same force. The Thādo word for lightning is mei aying, fire in darkness. ”

“ This fetish was highly prized by its former owner, and was believed to be a medium whereby the favor of the Great Thunderer, or Thunder God, might be invoked and his anger appeased. This deity is represented in pictography by the eagle, or frequently by one of the Falconidæ; hence it is but natural that the superstitious should look with awe and reverence upon such an abnormality on one of the terrestrial representatives of this deity. ”

“ The thunder-storm comes with perfect certainty, and as a part of a natural and fixed order. We are all agreed upon that now. We all believe, I suppose, that there is an order—that there are laws which govern the physical world, asserting [85] themselves as much in storm and earthquake as in the succession of night and day, of seed-time and harvest. We who are Christians believe that order and those laws to proceed from God, to be expressions of His will. ”

“ The impressive phenomena of thunder and lightning give rise in the case of the child as in that of the Nature-man to some fine myth-making. The American children, as already observed, have different mechanical illustrations for describing the supernatural operation here, thunder being thought of as the noise made by God when groaning, when walking heavily on the floor of heaven, when he has coals "run in"—ideas which show how naïvely the child-mind humanises the Deity, making him a respectable citizen with a house and a coal-cellar. ”

“ I want no thunder and lightning to remind me of my God, nor am I as apt to bethink on most of all His goodness in trouble and tribulations as on a calm, solemn, quiet day in a forest, when His voice is heard in the creaking of a dead branch or in the song of a bird, as much in my ears at least as it is ever heard in uproar and gales. ”

“ And foam and thunder on the stony shore.”
¶ And as the voice of mighty thunderings. The loud, deep, heavy voice of thunder. The distant shouts of a multitude may properly be represented by the sound of heavy thunder. ¶ Saying, Alleluia. Notes on ver. 1. This is the fourth time in which this is uttered as expressive of the joy of the heavenly hosts in view of the overthrow of the enemies of the church. The occasion will be worthy of this emphatic expression of joy. ¶ For the Lord God omnipotent reigneth. Jehovah—God Almighty—the true God. ”

“ Hence the greatest gods of all the ancient nations are weather-gods—rulers of the atmospheric heavens—displaying their anger in the thunder-storm and tornado. It is likely that in most cases, as in many barbarous tribes of modern times, these weather-gods were malevolent beings contending against the genial influences of the heavenly Sun-god ”

“ Abides for ever! Evermore the wind
Is thy august companion; and thy peers
Are cloud, and thunder, and the face sublime
Of blue mid-heaven! On thy awful brow
Is Deity; and in that voice of thine
There is the great imperial utterance
Of God for ever; and thy feet are set
Where evermore, through all the days and years,
There rolls the grand hymn of the deathless wave.
Araluen
Take this rose, and very gently place it on the tender, deep
Mosses where our little darling, Araluen, lies asleep. ”

“ For thunder is always accompanied by lightning; indeed, lightning is the cause of thunder, although the thunder is always heard after the lightning, because sound travels more slowly than light.”
And saw (Syriac, looked up at) the Spirit of God descending like a dove (Egyptian, in the form of a dove) . You will ask first, was this a true and real dove, or was it only the appearance and likeness of a dove? SS. Jerome, Anselm, and Thomas, Salmeron, and others, think that it was a real dove ”

“ God by god flits past in thunder, till his glories turn to shades:
God to god bears wondering witness how his gospel flames and fades.
More was each of these, while yet they were, than man their servant seemed:
Dead are all of these, and man survives who made them while he dreamed. ”

“ Flow on forever, in thy glorious robe
Of terror and of beauty.
Yea, flow on,
Unfathom'd and resistless. God hath set
His rainbow on thy forehead, and the cloud
Mantled around thy feet. And He doth give
Thy voice of thunder power to speak His name
Eternally, bidding the lip of man
Keep silence, and upon thy rocky altar pour
Incense of awe-struck praise. ”

“ For thunder is not more ancient than the Holy Spirit; though they be ungodly, they still dare not say that. And then when we see what follows concerning light and mist, is it not plain that what is said is to be understood of the creation of this world? For we know by every-day experience, that when we have storms on this earth, thunders come first, blasts of wind follow on, the sky grows black with mists, and light shines again out of the darkness. ”

“ From your heart, congealed with fear, there comes no outburst of gratitude, for you do not know that at this moment, in the flashes of lightning, the uproar of the shower, of the thunder, and of the unchained winds, a great providential act is being accomplished. Thunder, in fact, is far more the cause of life than of death. ”

“ A thunder was then heard in the heavens, and the heavens opened and seemed to stoop to the earth, and a flock of angels was seen like a white cloud ascending with his spirit, who were known to be what they were by the trembling of their wings. ”

“ When the thunder-peal comes, it will be too late to warn. The lightning will have come first, shrivelling the earth like a heap of dry grass, and heaven like a roll of old parchments, leaving you alone with your Judge; all the world there, and each one as much alone with Him as if no one else were there, seen through, searched through, scorched through with one gleam of the eyes that are as a flame of fire. ”