Zeus : a study in ancient religion - Warburg Institute

The double axe and the labarum 609
lucky star of Venus'. Having disposed of a solar and of a stellar
hypothesis, Schremmer attacks the problem de novo, indeed ab ova.
Surveying the whole history of the double axe, he argues that in the
Stone Age and the Bronze Age it was worshipped first as 'ein selb-
standiges Zauberwerkzeug^'and then as the attribute of some deity;
that in Asia Minor, to judge from numismatic evidence, the sacred
weapon, there called the Idbrys, survived, usually as a divine attribute,
far into the historic period {c. 400 B.C. c. 200 A.D.) ; that it received
a fresh lease of life from its association with lupiter Dolichenus, the
Roman army taking it, under its old name^ as his attribute through
Pannonia and Raetia into Germany and Gaul ; that in the north
like met like, when the double axe of lupiter encountered the hammer
of Donar ; and that from the north Constantine brought a
military i'z^//?/;;/, bearing the ancient name oi labarum, to which later
the monogram of Christ was attached. Very ingeniously, but also
very improbably, Schremmer supposes that Constantine ascribed
his victories to the possession of an actual Idbrys and finds a dis-
torted allusion to it in a curious passage of Nikephoros Kallistos*.
That belated historian {s. xiv A.D.) tells how Constantine brought a
big porphyry pillar from Rome to Constantinople^ set upon it a
bronze effigy of himself holding in his right hand a large golden
apple surmounted by the cross, and buried beneath its base a variety
of sacred relics including 'the axe with which Noah made the ark.'
The big pillar still stands in a square at Stainboul marking the site
^ This symbol, usually regarded as the mirror of Venus (A. Bouche-Leclercq L'astro-
logie grecque Paris 1899 p. xix), is explained by Jeep loc. cit. p. 89 as a derivative of
( = 0W(706pOs).
'^ B. Schremmer