Thunder Gods Across Cultures

The thunder god is one of the most widespread of all divine figures, and he appears in nearly every mythological tradition. He is bearded, armed, riding the storm, throwing the lightning, and bringing the rain. He holds the world together, and he breaks the powers of chaos. The names change — Thor, Zeus, Jupiter, Perun, Indra, Shango, Raijin, Lei Gong, Hadúr, Ukko, Taara, Tlaloc, Chaac, Illapa, Wandjina — but the figure, in his essential features, is recognisably the same.

The Indo-European Sky-Fathers

The Indo-European sky-fathers are the best-known branch of the thunder-god family. Zeus of the Greeks, Jupiter of the Romans, Perun of the Slavs, and Thor of the Norse are all descendants of a single older figure: the Perkwunos, the bright-headed sky-god of the proto-Indo-European peoples, who held the hammer and threw the lightning. The classical scholar Georges Dumézil showed how the figure recurs in each of the Indo-European cultures with the same set of attributes: protector of order, breaker of giants, wielder of the hammer or axe, bringer of rain. Zeus sat on Olympus and watched the world; Jupiter of the Romans held the title Jupiter Tonans, “the thundering”; Perun of the Slavs sat in the highest branch of the world tree and threw the lightning at his enemies; Thor of the Norse was the wielder of Mjollnir, the hammer that returned to his hand after it was thrown.

Indra of the Hindus

Indra of the Vedic tradition is the king of the gods, the warrior of the sky, the rider of the elephant Airavata, and the wielder of the vajra, the diamond thunderbolt. His great deed was the slaying of the dragon Vritra, who had held the waters of heaven captive in a mountain cave. Indra broke the mountain with his vajra, released the waters, and made the rivers run. The same myth can be seen in the Greek story of Zeus and Typhon, in the Norse story of Thor and the Midgard Serpent, and in the Slavic story of Perun and Veles. Indra is celebrated in the Rig Veda in hundreds of hymns, and he remains a major figure in the popular religion of India, Nepal, and the diaspora.

Shango of the Yoruba

Shango of the Yoruba is the thunder god of West Africa, and his cult is one of the most fully preserved of the African religious traditions. He was the third king of the Oyo kingdom, deified after his death. He is the wielder of the oshe, the double-headed axe, and his symbol is the araba, the red-and-white stone. Shango was carried to the New World in the hold of the slave ships, and his cult is one of the most important of the surviving African religious traditions in the Americas. In Brazil he became the Xangô of the Candomblé; in Cuba, the Changó of the Santería; in Haiti, one of the loa of Vodou. In each, the older attributes remain: the thunder, the axe, the justice, the red and the white.

Raijin and Fujin of Japan

Raijin and Fujin are the gods of thunder and wind, and they are among the most striking of the Asian weather figures. Raijin is depicted with a ring of drums around his waist; he beats the drums, and the sound is the thunder. Fujin is the god of wind, and he carries a great bag of wind on his shoulders; when he opens the bag, the wind blows. The two are often shown together, and they are familiar from the great painted screens of the Japanese tradition. The Shinto shrines of the two are among the most visited in Japan, and the rites are still performed in times of storm.

Lei Gong of China

Lei Gong, the “Duke of Thunder,” is the Chinese thunder god. He is depicted as a fearsome warrior with a dark face, a single eye in the centre of his forehead, and a chisel and mallet. When the gods decide that a wrongdoer should be punished, Lei Gong strikes him with the lightning, and the chisel and mallet leave the marks said to be Chinese characters on the body of the person struck. The mark of the lightning is, in this older view, a written judgement of the sky. The same figure appears in Korea as Haneullim, in Vietnam as the “thunder prince,” and across much of Southeast Asia.

The Slavic Perun and the Finno-Ugric Ukko

Perun of the Slavs and Ukko of the Finns and Estonians are the thunder gods of the great Eurasian forest belt. Perun was the great sky-god of the East Slavic tradition, and his cult was the centre of the pre-Christian Slavic religion. His idol stood in the Kyiv court until Vladimir the Great cast it into the Dnieper in 988. The figure of Perun survived the Christianisation of the Slavs, often in the form of the Christian saint Elijah, who was said to ride the sky in a chariot of fire. Ukko of the Finns is the husband of the earth-goddess Akka, and he sends the rain and the sun. The Estonian Taara and the Hungarian Hadúr are similar figures of the Finno-Ugric and Magyar traditions.

The American Sky-Fathers

Tlaloc of the Aztecs was the god of rain and of the four cardinal directions; his cult required the sacrifice of children, whose tears were said to bring the rain. The Maya Chaac was a similar figure, depicted with a long nose and a lightning axe, who lived in the deep waterholes of the Yucatan. The Inca Illapa was a great figure of the storm, and his name is still a common surname in the Andes. The same figure can be seen further south, in the Guarani Tupã and the storm gods of the tropical forest.

The Wandjina of Australia

The Wandjina of the Kimberley region of Western Australia are some of the oldest painted figures in the world. They are great beings with white faces, dark eyes, and elaborate headdresses, painted on the rocks of the Kimberley at least four thousand years ago. The Wandjina are the bringers of the rain, and they watch the country from the rocks. The figures are renewed by being repainted at the end of the wet season, so that the rains will come again. They are not thunder gods in the strict sense — but they are sky beings, and the rain-calling is at the heart of their cult.

Shared Attributes of the Thunder Gods

Across all these traditions, the thunder gods share a set of features that makes them recognisably the same figure:

The hammer or axe. Thor’s Mjollnir, Indra’s vajra, Shango’s oshe, Zeus’s thunderbolt, Raijin’s drumsticks, Lei Gong’s chisel and mallet — each is a form of the same weapon, the strike of the sky.
The chariot drawn by goats, rams, or other animals. Thor’s goats, Indra’s elephant, the chariots of the Slavic and Finno-Ugric thunder gods — each is a way of picturing the thunder god as a warrior riding out on the storm.
The double function as giver of fertility and bringer of destruction. The thunder god sends the rain that feeds the field, and he sends the lightning that kills the wrongdoer. He is the protector and the punisher.
The role as protector of order. The thunder god breaks the powers of chaos — the giants, the dragons, the monsters — and he maintains the order of the world.
The connection with a sacred tree, mountain, or rock. The oak of Donar, the ash of the Irminsul, the mountain tops of Tlaloc, the rocks of the Wandjina — each is a place where the sky touches the earth.

These shared attributes are not coincidences. They are the residue of a very old pattern of thinking about the sky, a pattern that was carried across the world by the movements of peoples and the slow trade of ideas. The thunder god is one of the deepest of human images, and the figure is alive, in some form, in nearly every culture of the world.

Sources and Further Reading

Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Harcourt, 1959.
Dumézil, Georges. Archaic Roman Religion. University of Chicago Press, 1970.
Sjoo, Monica, and Mor, Barbara. The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth. Harper & Row, 1987.
Lincoln, Bruce. Myth, Cosmos, and Society: Indo-European Themes of Creation and Destruction. Harvard University Press, 1986.