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Exploring the electric universe
From ancient mythology to cosmic plasma discharge
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Jan 11, 2005
The Lightning Wheel in Ancient Times
In the aftermath of Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul (modern France),
scores of local Celtic gods and goddesses were deliberately assimilated
to members of the Greek and Roman pantheon. A particularly popular
Celtic god was Taranis, literally "thunder", whose cult was incorporated
in that of Jupiter. Jupiter was, of course, the Roman thunder god par
excellence. But despite the extensive syncretism, the local gods managed
to retain many of their original attributes. Taranis' stock attribute
was a wheel. Sometimes the god is shown holding this wheel in one hand.
The statue shown above, which misses the head, is of Provencal origin
and is now on display in the archaeological museum at Avignon. In other
cases, the god itself was represented by the wheel. The little bronze
wheels shown above, excavated in Alesia, are thought to symbolize
Taranis. Alesia was probably the most famous Gaulish stronghold attacked
by Caesar, but the wheels have been found in many other places.
The pivotal question is: why wheels? What connection exists between the
thunderbolt and the wheel? The explanation panel provided in the
attractive little museum at Alesia explains that the wheel "is a cosmic
element. It designates, like the little wheels, the celestial universe."
It seems fair enough that the wheels had a cosmic significance, but why
of all gods would Taranis be associated with it? It is true that the
revolution of the stars around the pole was often symbolised as a giant
wheel in the heavens, but Taranis' wheel would seem to have deeper roots.
Various ancient societies associated the lightning with a wheel. Marija
Gimbutas has shown that the Baltic thunder god, Perkunas, was thought to
procure fire by rotating his lightning-club in the nave of the solar
wheel. In India the thunderbolt was envisaged as a disc with a hole in
the middle that rotated when launched and shot lightning in all
directions. This disc was a form of the /vajra/, the sacred lightning
weapon of Indra, and was later depicted in the hands of Vishnu as the /
cakra./ Could it be that Taranis' wheel derived from a similar
tradition? If so, where could the belief in such a lightning wheel
itself have come from?
There are many indications that the ancients located the lightning wheel
at the pole of heaven. For example, the twirling disc of Vishnu
symbolically denoted "the revolving of the universe on its axis", as the
symbologist Cooper observed. And the Chinese held that the lightning
flashes through the /lie kou/, a hole at the centre of a large disc.
Whilst the disc itself denoted the sky, the hole at the centre was
explicitly identified with the pole. Scores of other traditions,
especially from the Americas and Siberia, allude to the 'hole at the
pole', above which either the sun or the thunderbolt dwells. All of this
goes to show that there is no tension between the lightning wheel and
the representation of the dome of heaven as a wheel. Taranis' wheel
corresponded at once to the turning wheel of heaven and the lightning wheel.
But one question remains unanswered: just how could the idea of
lightning at the pole have arisen? And how could the equally odd notion
of the hole at the pole have come about, provided that the ancients were
not talking of the hole in the ozone layer? The answer to such
intriguing questions is the immediate fallout of the model promoted on
this website. The prototype of the lightning that the myths are
concerned with was the cosmic axis in its glowing aspect, a stupendous
plasma discharge tube that formed during the late Palaeolithic in
response to high-energy disturbances in the magnetic field of the earth
and an increased solar wind. The surrounding plasma sheath, spinning
around the axis and emitting fiery jets, appears to have been the
prototype of the turning wheel, viewed from an axial perspective. The
wheel of the thunder god is only one of literally hundreds of equally
puzzling mythical motifs that the plasma model explains at once.
Contributed by Marinus Anthony van der Sluijs
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