Leaving this last detail aside for the present, I suggest that the main motive in this strange story of the swallowing or hiding of the successive possible pretenders to the crown is the dread which each king naturally felt of him who was coming after. But this still leaves much unexplained; the second main element which I find is the worship of sacred flints or thunder-stones.
When Kronos set about swallowing Zeus, you will remember, Gaia put a big stone in swaddling clothes and gave it to great Kronos. And he ‘put it inside his belly’, ἑὴν ἑσκάτθετο νηδύν (487). Then, ‘in the passing of the years’--whatever that exactly means--‘beguiled by the counsels of Gaia, great crooked-hearted Kronos spewed up his brood again, being conquered by the craft and force of his son’. (Two reasons there, belonging probably to different stories--in one he was overcome by the craft of Gaia, in the other by the _mana_ of his son.) ‘And the first thing he vomited up was the stone, which he had swallowed last.... Then straightway Zeus set loose his father’s brothers, the Titanes. They were grateful, and gave him three gifts, thunder and thunder-bolt and lightning; formerly vast Earth had hidden them away: and it is by them that Zeus rules over mortals and immortals.’[57]
That is to say Zeus in this story is a thunder-god. The thunder or lightning is his _mana_. And not only a thunder-god, he is a thunder-stone. The identity has been, of course, disguised in our present version of the myth. It is muddled, like everything else in Hesiod.[58] But it shows through. When Kronos sets about swallowing Zeus, it is the stone he swallows. And it is only when ‘by the counsels of Earth’ Cronos vomits up the stone that Zeus can take any action; and that action takes the form of thunder and lightning, the special property of a thunder-stone. In the word ‘thunder-stone’, or κεραυνία, the ancients seem to have mixed, and perhaps confused, two ideas: that of a meteorite, which seemed to be the actual bolt which fell in the thunder, and that of an ordinary flint, nephrite, jade, or the like, which has its mysterious fire inside it. The fire is the soul, or indwelling _mana_, of the flint.
A careful reading of Hesiod’s story will, I think, convince most anthropologists that Zeus _is_ the stone. And as a matter of fact it is not uncommon for both Zeus and Jupiter to appear as stones. In the temple of Jupiter Feretrius, the oldest temple of Jupiter in Rome, founded by Romulus, there was a sacred flint which was called _Jupiter Lapis_--it was not _Jovis Lapis_. It was used for killing the victim in solemn treaties. It must have been one of those ‘thunder-stones resembling axes’ of which Pliny speaks; what we should call neolithic axe-heads. There seems to have been more than one _Jupiter Lapis_; for in 201 B.C. the Senate sent several such with the _fetiales_ to Africa. I need not dwell on other cases; the Zeus Kappôtas at Gythîum, apparently a bigger stone, as Orestes could sit upon it; the Zeus Kasios or Keraunios at Seleucîa; the stone of Zeus Sthenios, on the road from Trozên to Hermione; or the thunder-stone on Mount Ida, in Crete, with which Pythagoras was purified by the Idaean Dactyls, the attendants of Zeus. They are all in De Visser’s book.