See Rendel Harris, The Ascent of Olympus, passim. In his Ascent of Olympus Dr. Rendel Harris has shown that the sacred oak of Zeus was regarded as “the animistic repository of the thunder, and in that sense the dwelling-place of Zeus … that the woodpecker who nested in it … was none other than Zeus himself, and it may turn out that Athena, who sprang from the head of the thunder-oak, was the owl that lived in one of its hollows” (p. 57).

Manuel de Ministros, p. 35.