Zeus : a study in ancient religion - Warburg Institute

' Minoan '
The double axes of Tenedos 663
objects have in fact come to light in Tenedos (fig. 602)^
and suggest that here in early days was a
' Minoan '
settlement. The settlers called
themselves Asterioi^and doubtless discovered
with joy that at Asterion in their island were
river-crabs marked with a double axe^ The
curious combination of crab and double axe
recalls the joint cult of Zeus Osogda and Zeus
Labrdyndos at Mylasa^. The circumstances,
however, though similar, are not identical.
In Karia a local deity, whose attribute was
Fig. 602.
the crab, having been Hellenised into a Zeus of the sea, was fused
'
with a Zeus of the sky, inheritor of the ancient ' Minoan double
axe, the resultant god being known to the Greeks as Zenoposeidon.
In Tenedos too we are concerned with the legacy of the double
axe. But here, in the Thraco-Phrygian area, the principal sky-god
was Dios, who was worshipped in twofold form as Father and Son
—Zeus and Dionysos, said the Greeks'. It matters little, therefore,
whether we assert that among the Tenedians the ' Minoan '
axe
passed into the hands of a Dionysiac Zeus or into those of a Zeus-
like Dionysos. Not improbably the former developed into the
latter, stress being laid first on the older and afterwards on the
younger aspect of the god. But in either case we mean him who
was at once the husband and the son of Semele. His effigy and
hers are combined as the Thraco-Phrygian equivalent of the
'Minoan' Kronos and Rhea. What then of the crabs? Presumably
in Tenedos, as in Karia, they belonged to some local deity identified
with Zeus.
Confirmation is not far to seek. Thirty miles or so to the west
of Tenedos lies Lemnos, a great centre of Cabiric cult". Cor-
discern in the new dawn [;