The axe appears in the depth-psychology corpus primarily as a cultic and mythic instrument rather than an everyday tool, accumulating layers of sacrificial, chthonic, and initiatory significance across several overlapping traditions. Walter Burkert's work on Greek sacrificial ritual traces the axe's central role in the Bouphonia: the ox-slayer swings the axe, kills the bull, and then throws the axe away—a gesture that encodes both the necessity and the guilt of sacred violence. Jane Harrison extends this reading by arguing that the axe was the very symbol of Sky-Zeus himself, so that sprinkling it with water constituted a rain-charm of the highest efficacy. In the Dionysian register, Kerényi identifies the double axe (pelekys) as so intimately bound to Dionysos that the god could be addressed as 'Dionysos Pelekys,' the cult instrument becoming a theophanic name. Clarissa Pinkola Estés draws the axe into feminist mythopoetics, arguing that in women's healing rites the axe of pruning originally belonged to the Goddess before patriarchal narrative transferred it to the father, rendering its wounding of the psyche ambivalently both destructive and generative. Burkert's account of Lykurgus—who, in divine frenzy, turns the axe on his own children—maps the axe onto the border between divine madness and human order. Across these readings the axe functions as an instrument of severance that simultaneously opens a threshold: between life and death, sky and earth, old religion and new.
In the library
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The double ax had to be new, direct from the smithy, and to be wielded by a youth. In a poem Simonides calls the murderous implement the 'bull-slaying servant of Dionysos,' … one could go still further, and call the god himself 'double ax,' 'Dionysos Pelekys'
Kerényi argues that the double axe was not merely Dionysian cult equipment but could stand as a theophanic name for the god himself, collapsing the instrument of sacrifice into the deity's own identity.
Kerényi, Carl, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, 1976thesis
The axe was the symbol, the presentation of the Sky-Zeus; what acted prayer could be more potent, more magical, than to sprinkle the axe with water?
Harrison identifies the sacrificial axe as the direct cultic representation of Sky-Zeus and interprets the ritual wetting of the axe as a rain-charm operating through sympathetic magic.
Harrison, Jane Ellen, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912thesis
In ancient women's religion, this sort of ax innately belongs to the Goddess, not to the father. This sequence in the fairy tale strongly suggests that the father's ownership of the ax comes about in the story as a result of the scrambling together of the old and the newer religions.
Estés reclaims the axe as originally a Goddess-instrument of ritual pruning and regeneration, reading its possession by the father in the fairy tale as evidence of the suppression of older matriarchal religion.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
The 'ox-slayer' (Boutypos) who administered the fatal blow then threw away his axe and … the axe cut through, and loosed the heifer's might.
Burkert reads the ritual casting-away of the axe after sacrifice as a gesture encoding collective guilt, the weapon being simultaneously the agent of sacred killing and an object that must be disowned.
Burkert, Walter, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, 1972thesis
Then, straightway, Nestor's son / Stood near and struck. The tendons of the neck / The axe cut through, and loosed the heifer's might.
Harrison cites the Homeric sacrifice to Athena to demonstrate the axe's concrete ritual function—severing neck tendons to release the sacrificial animal's vital force—within communal religious practice.
Harrison, Jane Ellen, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting
cutting down his own children with the axe: a victim for a victim. In the logic of the story, Lykurgus is Dionysus' enemy … Lykurgus actually occupies the position of the priest of Dionysus.
Burkert interprets the myth of Lykurgus turning the axe on his own offspring not as historical resistance to Dionysian cult but as the polar tension between divine madness and priestly order enacted within a single ritual structure.
Burkert, Walter, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, 1972supporting
we seem to stand in the ancient Cretan shrine, with about us the symbols of Ouranos, the lightning-axe and the bird, and Gaia, the up-springing tree dew-watered
Harrison places the axe among the paired cosmic symbols of the Cretan shrine—lightning-axe for Ouranos, tree for Gaia—positioning it within the hierogamy of sky and earth.
Harrison, Jane Ellen, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting
Double axe and Bucranium. PM I 435: II 619; MMR 205 … Double axe and horn symbol: PM I 196 Fig. 144 … The earliest representation of a god with double axe seems to occur in a Late Hittite (8th century) lion hunting relief
Burkert assembles archaeological evidence linking the double axe consistently with the bucranium and horn symbols across Minoan and Near Eastern contexts, establishing the weapon's antiquity as a sacred object.
Burkert, Walter, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, 1977supporting
ἀξίνη [f.] 'axe' (Il.) … Compared with Lat. ascia 'axe' and Germanic words for 'axe', Go. aqizi, etc. … Szemerenyi … remarks that Akk. ḫaṣṣinu and Amm. baṣṣina are so close that they must be the same word.
Beekes documents the contested etymology of the Greek word for axe, noting possible Semitic substrate origins alongside Indo-European comparanda, underscoring the implement's pan-Mediterranean cultural reach.
Beekes, Robert, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010supporting
πέλεκυς [m.] 'axe, double axe, hatchet' (Il.) … σφυρο-πέλεκυς 'hammer-axe' (Att inscr.) … ἡμι-πέλεκκον [n.] 'half-axe', 'axe with one edge'
Beekes provides the Greek lexical field around pelekys, the term for the Minoan-Mycenaean double axe, including compound forms that reflect its practical and ritual variants.
Beekes, Robert, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010aside