to the Smiter. This is not impossible, but it does not absolve us from the
necessity of choosing between two incompatible analyses of Perkunas’
name.^18
Possible cognates in south-east EuropeInscriptions from Bulgaria attest a hero-cult of one Perkos or Perko ̄n. He was
presumably an old Thracian divinity of some kind, and the similarity of the
name to those we have been considering has prompted the guess that he
belonged in this context. It is not an implausible guess, but a guess it
remains.^19
The Albanian Perëndi ‘Heaven’, ‘God’, has been analysed as a compound of
which the first element is related to Perunu ̆ and the second to *dyeus.^20
At Lebadea in Boeotia there was a cult of a divinity Herkyna or Herkynna,
identified with Demeter, and a stream of the same name (Lycophron 153, Livy
- 27, Paus. 9. 39. 2–3, Hesych. ε 5931). If she was originally a cognate of
Fio ̨ rgyn, the goddess of the wooded landscape, it is understandable that she
could be equated with Demeter. The problem is that Herk- for *Perk(w)- could
only be a Celtic form, which would be very unexpected so far south. The
Gauls who invaded Greece in 279 can hardly have managed to leave a
goddess behind. If the similarity of Herkyna’s name to those we have been
considering is not fortuitous, it is theoretically possible that at some earlier
period a Celtic splinter group had found its way down there, perhaps in the
late second or early first millennium when Illyrian and other tribes from the
north-west were infiltrating. Feminine river-names are more typical of Celtic
than of Greek or Illyrian.
The thunder-god’s functions were taken over in Greece by the great sky-
god, Zeus. What was his name when he still existed as an independent deity?
It is tempting to conjecture that it was Keraunos, the name used in historical
Greek for Zeus’ thunderbolt. It is perfectly plausible that the obsolete god’s
name should come to be used in this way; we have seen that this is exactly
what happened to the Baltic and the Slavonic thunder-gods. Heraclitus (B 64)
spoke of Keraunos as a purposeful cosmic force, allied to Zeus and ‘steering
everything’. A Mantinean inscription of the mid-fifth century , consisting
of the two words ∆ι: Κεραυνο
, marked a place where lightning had(^18) See Jakobson (1962–88), ii. 636 f.; Nagy (1974), 115 f. ≈ (1990), 185 f.
(^19) G. Mihailov, Inscriptiones Graecae in Bulgaria repertae (Serdica 1956), nos. 283–283 bis
= Ηρωει Περκωνει, Περκω(ι) = Ηρωι. Cf. V. I. Georgiev, Linguistique Balkanique 18.1
(1975), 46; I. Duridanov in Meid (1998), 562.
(^20) Pisani (1969), 242; Lambertz (1973), 496 f.
- Storm and Stream 243