Themis, a study of the social origins of Greek ... - Warburg Institute

IV] The Woodpecker-king 101
Zeus stole the sceptre from the woodpecker in Greece but too
effectively. The tradition of Keleos the old king of Eleusis 1 lived
on ;
but who remembers that he was the rain-bird, the green woodpecker
living at Woodpecker-town (Keleai), the woodpecker who
yaffles in our copses to-day ? In German mythology 2 he survives,
but as miscreant not as king. The woodpecker was ordered by
God to dig a well. He refused, fearing to soil his fine clothes.
God cursed him for his idleness. He was never again to drink
from a pond and must always cry giet, giet (giess) for rain. The
many thirst-stories found in folk-lore all point to rain-birds.
It was in Italy not Greece that the royal woodpecker lived on,
and it is there that we shall find him realize his function not as
omen-bird but as magician-king, not portending the weather but
actually making it.
The design in Fig. 17 is from a gem, a carnelian now in the
Berlin Museum 3 . A bird, who for the
moment shall be nameless, is perched
on a post round which is coiled a snake 4 .
At the foot is a ram slain in sacrifice.
A young warrior carrying a shield
stands before the bird with upraised
hand as though saluting it or asking
a question. The interpretation of the
gem, though it has analogies to the
scene on the Hagia Triada sarcophagos
to be later discussed 5 , must
have re-
mained pure conjecture, but for a
passage in Denys of Halicarnassos as
follows
:
Three hundred stadia further (in the country of the Apennines) is Tiora,
called Matiene. Here there is said to have been an oracle of Mars of great
antiquity. It is reported to have been similar in character to the fabled
oracle at Dodona, except that, whereas at Dodona it was said that a dove
lands : -the cock in Persia, the kite among certain Greeks, the cuckoo among the
Phenicians ; and this is why birds are wont to sit upon their sceptres.
1 Paus. ii. 14. 2. Another mystery-priest is Trochilus, the wren, P. i. 14. 2.
For classical references to birds here and elsewhere see D'Arcy Thompson, A
Glossary of Greek Birds.
2 Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, n. p. 674.
3 Furtwangler, Ant. Gem, pi. xxiv. 10, p. 119.
4 The snake, I think, marks the post as, like the tree, belonging to earth,
springing from the under-ground,
5 p. 159.
' chthonic'
Fig. 17.