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The Mesniu are closely connected with the Sky-god Horus, who was possibly of Semitic origin, and another Semitic wave, quite distinct from that which entered Egypt by way of the Isthmus, may very well also have reached Egypt by the Wadi Hammamat, or, equally possibly, from the far south, coming down to the Nile from the Abyssinian mountains.
The etymology of the name Varuna is doubtful, but the representation of him in the Rig-Veda points to the sky as his original form he is a clear example of a sky-god who becomes universal. Of his earliest history we have no information in the most ancient records he is already fully formed.
Even the great god Juppiter who was destined to become almost identical with the name and fame of Rome was not yet a god of the state and politics, but merely the sky-god, especially the lightning god, Juppiter Feretrius, the "striker," who had a little shrine on the Capitoline where later the great Capitoline temple of Juppiter Optimus Maximus was to stand.
Thus both in form and in meaning the ceremony would answer to the nuptials of the King and Queen of May. In the great mysteries solemnised at Eleusis in the month of September the union of the sky-god Zeus with the corn-goddess Demeter appears to have been represented by the union of the hierophant with the priestess of Demeter, who acted the parts of god and goddess.
But nowhere has he attained so eminent a position as in Greece. A sky-god is naturally conceived of as universal ruler, but in any particular region he assumes the characteristics of the ruling human personages of the place and time. Zeus appears first as a barbarian chieftain with the ordinary qualities of such persons.
Frazer considers the etymological connection of Zeus with the Sanscrit word for sky, an insufficient reason for regarding Zeus as, in origin, a sky-god. Though the oak was the tree of Zeus, the heavens were certainly his province, and, despite the oak of Dodona, and the oak on the Capitol, he is much more generally connected with the sky than with the tree.
If that was so, we need not wonder that the priest guarded with drawn sword the mystic bough which contained the god's life and his own. The goddess whom he served and married was herself, if I am right, no other than the Queen of Heaven, the true wife of the sky-god.
Yet he seems never to have come to stand for anything intellectually or morally high except in late philosophical thought. Though the guardian of public as well as private houses, he was not the patron of the city. He remained in the cult a sort of family and clan god, and represented only the ideas of a primitive mode of life, the great rôle being assigned to the sky-god.
It is at least possible that there was a sky-god her at Letopolis, and likewise the hawk-god was a sky-god her at Edfu, and hence the mixture of the two deities. It is always the hawk-headed Horus who wars against Set, and attends on the enthroned Osiris. One of the earlier of these forms is that of the boy Horus standing upon crocodiles, and grasping scorpions and noxious animals in his hands.
It is a plausible theory that the reverence which the ancient peoples of Europe paid to the oak, and the connexion which they traced between the tree and their sky-god, were derived from the much greater frequency with which the oak appears to be struck by lightning than any other tree of our European forests.
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