Trishul - Energy Weapon of the Gods
A messy post but a useful depository of images and info on ancient energy weapons for the time being.
Odin's spear Gungnir
Thunderbolts Mjölnir
Vajra (Tibetan Dorje)
Why does the devil have a pitchfork?
(One answer from Quora)
Hades, god of the underworld, known to the Romans as Pluto, is the closest classical cognate to our figure of the devil. The symbols of Hades included his throne (he was king of the underworld—the land of the dead), his hound Cerberus who sometimes had 2 or 3 heads, and his “sceptre.”
This sceptre, in more recent centuries, is sometimes describes as a “bident”—a two pronged equivalent of Poseidon’s trident. However classical writers are imprecise on this point, and on the exact nature of Hades staff.
Ovid writes, in Metamorphoses:
The naiad Cyane held out her arms outstretched to bar his [Hades] way. But Hades restrained his wrath no longer. Urging on his steeds, his terrible steeds, and brandishing aloft his royal sceptre in his strong right arm, he hurled it to the bottom of the pool. The smitten earth opened a way to Hell and down the deep abyss the chariot plunged.
But Seneca, in Hercules Furens, describes Hades staff as a 3-pronged fork—a trident.
What time thou [Heracles] wast making war on Pylos, Nestor's land, Hades brought to combat with thee his plague-dealing hands, brandishing his three-forked spear.
The ancients were variable on the number of heads on the dog and the number of tines on the fork. But the image of Hades himself seems to have been the prototype of our particular pitchforking devil.
