f life surmounted by the
winged disk.[207]

The bird poised upon the axe in the Cretan picture is the homologue of
the falcon of Horus: it is in fact a second representation of the winged
disk itself. This interpretation is not affected by the consideration
that the falcon may be replaced by the eagle, pigeon, woodpecker or
raven, for these substitutions were repeatedly made by the ancient
priesthoods in flagrant defiance of the properties of ornithological
homologies. The same phenomenon is displayed even more obtrusively in
Central America and Mexico, where the ancient sculptors and painters
represented the bird perched upon the tree of life as a falcon, an
eagle, a vulture, a macaw or even a turkey.[208]

The incident of the winged disk descending to effect the sun-god's
purposes upon earth probably represents the earliest record of the
recognition of thunder and lightning and the phenomena of rain as
manifestations of the god's powers. All gods of thunder, lightning, rain
and clouds derive their attributes, and the arbitrary graphic
representation of them, from the legend which the Egyptian scribe has
preserved for us in the Saga of the Winged Disk.

The sacred axe of Crete is represented elsewhere as a sword which became
the visible impersonation of the deity.[209] There is a Hittite story of
a sword-handle coming to life. Hose and McDougall refer to the same
incident in certain Sarawak legends; and the story is true to the
original in the fact that the sword fell from the sun.[210]

Sir Arthur Evans describes as "the aniconic image of the god" a stone
pillar on which crude pictures of a double axe have been scratched.
These representations of the axe in fact serve the same purpose as the
winged disk in Egypt, and, as we shall see subsequently, there was an
actual confusion between the Egyptian symbol and the Cretan axe.

The obelisk at Abusir was the aniconic representative of the sun-god Re,
or rather, the support of the pyramidal apex, the gilded surface of
which reflected the sun's rays and so made manifest the god's presence
in the stone.

The Hittites seem to have substituted the winged disk as a
representation of the sun: for in a design copied from a seal[211] we
find the Egyptian symbol borne upon the apex of a cone.

The transition from this to the great double axe from Hagia Triada in
the Candia Museum[212] is a relatively easy one, which was materially
helped, as we shall see, by the fact that t