Double Ax

In a poem Simonides calls the murderous implement the ‘bull-slaying servant of Dionysos,’ a servant who acted in accordance with its master’s wishes. One could go still further, however, and call the god himself ‘double ax,’ ‘Dionysos Pelekys’

Kerényi argues that the double ax is so constitutively linked to Dionysian cult — confirmed by numismatic and literary evidence — that the implement and the god become interchangeable epithets.

Kerényi, Carl, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, 1976thesis

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there prevails an implicit confidence in the spontaneity of nature, both in its negative, killing, sacrificial aspect (lion and double ax), and in

Campbell reads the double ax as a symbol of the Great Goddess’s killing-sacrificial aspect, intrinsic to a pre-patriarchal mythic order in which nature’s destructive and generative powers are held in undissociated unity.

Campbell, Joseph, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964thesis

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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 interprets the ax in fairy-tale tradition as originally a goddess-instrument whose patriarchal re-attribution registers the historical displacement of older women’s religion by newer masculine religious orders.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting

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Creto-Mycenaean culture is likewise a typical domain of the Great Mother; the same groups of symbolic and ritual characteristics recur as are to be met with in Egypt and in Canaan, in Phoenicia, Babylonia, Assyria, and in the Near Eastern cultures general

Neumann establishes the Creto-Mycenaean context — the primary archaeological home of the double ax — as paradigmatically organized around Great Mother symbolism and the incomplete differentiation of masculine and feminine principles.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019supporting

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the Path of the Swinging Ax. The day had dawned; the Coronation of the King was at hand.

Jung’s dream seminar records a visionary text featuring a swinging ax as a dramatic presiding symbol in a coronation setting, tangentially evoking the ax’s archaic sacral associations without explicit mythological elaboration.

Jung, C.G., Dream Interpretation Ancient and Modern: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936-1941, 2014aside

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