Thunder axe

Few days ago @CotswoldArch posted this on X:

Imagine digging Iron Age and Roman pits in central Bedfordshire, and coming across 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 Neolithic beauty? 🤯

This polished Late Neolithic axehead is made of a volcanic rock called gabbro. These axeheads were widely exchanged around the British Isles, and sometimes even across the Irish Sea into Ireland, but that doesn't explain how it ended up in a pit some 2000 years after its creation!

Older artefacts found in newer archaeological features are often termed as 'residual' – redeposited from earlier activity – yet our pit appeared undisturbed. We want to think it was intentionally kept – possibly a prehistoric "curiosity", treasured by the people living centuries later...

I don't think this stone axe was kept as "curiosity". I think it was kept as a protective talisman known as "thunder axe"...

Check this out:

Prehistoric axe head, engraved during the medieval time (9th–early 13th century.) with the image of Christ and St Elijah (Byzantine, Balkan???). Currently kept in Met museum...

Balkan Slavs believed that these stone axes fell from the sky when lightning struck the ground and were attributed to Perun. They were known as thunderstones...Hence Perun's axe...I talked about this in my post "Axe or hammer"...

St Elijah was in Balkan Slavic countries known as St Elijah the Thunderer...So a thunder god replaced with a thunder saint...

I talked about Elijah in my post "Thundering sun god"...

Here is also a very interesting article about Elijah and Teshub, which proposes that Elijah was just a thinly disguised Sky (Thunder) god...

So that explains St Elijah being depicted on the Thunder Axe...

Interestingly, Zeus's thunderbolt was imagined to be a stone or a stone axe. Hence the belief that stone axes had protective powers which is why they were used as magical amulets. 

I talked about (stone) axe as a symbol of Zeus/Jupiter and thunder (gods) in general in my post "Kataibates"...

I also talked about why storm gods from different cultures carry (stone) axes in my post "Mamaragan"...

Adad, Mesopotamian storm god, holding an axe and lightning bolt...

Teshub, Hittite thunder god, also wielded a (thunder) axe. While standing on a bull...About to kill a snake/dragon...I talked about this relief in my post "Teshub killing snake"...

How old is this association between storm (thunder) gods an (stone) axes? 

I suggested that this link between a stone, more specifically flint axes, and thunder gods, already existed in the 4th millennium BC Europe...I explained why I thought so in my post "Sun stones" about exploding flint axes rituals fron Neolithic Denmark...

Knowing all this, it is no wonder that people believed that thunderbolts were made of stone well into middle ages...A 15th-century engraving depicts the town of Ensisheim in present-day France being struck by a thunderbolt (stone)...I talked about this in my post "Jack and magic beans", about giants who lived on a stone sky and who hurled giants rocks down on earth...The original sky (stone) thunder gods...

One of these "thunderbolts" was found and secured in a church to ensure it wouldn’t escape back into the sky...