object:1.68 - The Golden Bough
book class:The Golden Bough
author class:James George Frazer
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter
LXVIII. The Golden Bough
THUS the view that Balder's life was in the mistletoe is entirely in
harmony with primitive modes of thought. It may indeed sound like a
contradiction that, if his life was in the mistletoe, he should
nevertheless have been killed by a blow from the plant. But when a
person's life is conceived as embodied in a particular object, with
the existence of which his own existence is inseparably bound up,
and the destruction of which involves his own, the object in
question may be regarded and spoken of indifferently as his life or
his death, as happens in the fairy tales. Hence if a man's death is
in an object, it is perfectly natural that he should be killed by a
blow from it. In the fairy tales Koshchei the Deathless is killed by
a blow from the egg or the stone in which his life or death is
secreted; the ogres burst when a certain grain of sand--doubtless
containing their life or death--is carried over their heads; the
magician dies when the stone in which his life or death is contained
is put under his pillow; and the Tartar hero is warned that he may
be killed by the golden arrow or golden sword in which his soul has
been stowed away.
The idea that the life of the oak was in the mistletoe was probably
suggested, as I have said, by the observation that in winter the
mistletoe growing on the oak remains green while the oak itself is
leafless. But the position of the plant--growing not from the ground
but from the trunk or branches of the tree--might confirm this idea.
Primitive man might think that, like himself, the oak-spirit had
sought to deposit his life in some safe place, and for this purpose
had pitched on the mistletoe, which, being in a sense neither on
earth nor in heaven, might be supposed to be fairly out of harm's
way. In a former chapter we saw that primitive man seeks to preserve
the life of his human divinities by keeping them poised between
earth and heaven, as the place where they are least likely to be
assailed by the dangers that encompass the life of man on earth. We
can therefore understand why it has been a rule both of ancient and
of modern folk-medicine that the mistletoe should not be allowed to
touch the ground; were it to touch the ground, its healing virtue
would be gone. This may be a survival of the old superstition that
the plant in which the life of the sacred tree was concentrated
should not be exposed to the risk incurred by contact with the
earth. In an Indian legend, which offers a parallel to the Balder
myth, Indra swore to the demon Namuci that he would slay him neither
by day nor by night, neither with staff nor with bow, neither with
the palm of the hand nor with the fist, neither with the wet nor
with the dry. But he killed him in the morning twilight by
sprinkling over him the foam of the sea. The foam of the sea is just
such an object as a savage might choose to put his life in, because
it occupies that sort of intermediate or nondescript position
between earth and sky or sea and sky in which primitive man sees
safety. It is therefore not surprising that the foam of the river
should be the totem of a clan in India.
Again, the view that the mistletoe owes its mystic character partly
to its not growing on the ground is confirmed by a parallel
superstition about the mountain-ash or rowan-tree. In Jutland a
rowan that is found growing out of the top of another tree is
esteemed "exceedingly effective against witchcraft: since it does
not grow on the ground witches have no power over it; if it is to
have its full effect it must be cut on Ascension Day." Hence it is
placed over doors to prevent the ingress of witches. In Sweden and
Norway, also, magical properties are ascribed to a "flying-rowan"
(_flgrnn_), that is to a rowan which is found growing not in the
ordinary fashion on the ground but on another tree, or on a roof, or
in a cleft of the rock, where it has sprouted from seed scattered by
birds. They say that a man who is out in the dark should have a bit
of "flying-rowan" with him to chew; else he runs a risk of being
bewitched and of being unable to stir from the spot. Just as in
Scandinavia the parasitic rowan is deemed a countercharm to sorcery,
so in Germany the parasitic mistletoe is still commonly considered a
protection against witch-craft, and in Sweden, as we saw, the
mistletoe which is gathered on Midsummer Eve is attached to the
ceiling of the house, the horse's stall or the cow's crib, in the
belief that this renders the Troll powerless to injure man or beast.
The view that the mistletoe was not merely the instrument of
Balder's death, but that it contained his life, is countenanced by
the analogy of a Scottish superstition. Tradition ran that the fate
of the Hays of Errol, an estate in Perthshire, near the Firth of
Tay, was bound up with the mistletoe that grew on a certain great
oak. A member of the Hay family has recorded the old belief as
follows: "Among the low country families the badges are now almost
generally forgotten; but it appears by an ancient MS., and the
tradition of a few old people in Perthshire, that the badge of the
Hays was the mistletoe. There was formerly in the neighbourhood of
Errol, and not far from the Falcon stone, a vast oak of an unknown
age, and upon which grew a profusion of the plant: many charms and
legends were considered to be connected with the tree, and the
duration of the family of Hay was said to be united with its
existence. It was believed that a sprig of the mistletoe cut by a
Hay on Allhallowmas eve, with a new dirk, and after surrounding the
tree three times sunwise, and pronouncing a certain spell, was a
sure charm against all glamour or witchery, and an infallible guard
in the day of battle. A spray gathered in the same manner was placed
in the cradle of infants, and thought to defend them from being
changed for elfbairns by the fairies. Finally, it was affirmed, that
when the root of the oak had perished, 'the grass should grow in the
hearth of Errol, and a raven should sit in the falcon's nest.' The
two most unlucky deeds which could be done by one of the name of Hay
was, to kill a white falcon, and to cut down a limb from the oak of
Errol. When the old tree was destroyed I could never learn. The
estate has been sold out of the family of Hay, and of course it is
said that the fatal oak was cut down a short time before." The old
superstition is recorded in verses which are traditionally ascribed
to Thomas the Rhymer:
While the mistletoe bats on Errol's aik,
And that aik stands fast,
The Hays shall flourish, and their good grey hawk
Shall nocht flinch before the blast.
But when the root of the aik decays,
And the mistletoe dwines on its withered breast,
The grass shall grow on Errol's hearthstane,
And the corbie roup in the falcon's nest.
It is not a new opinion that the Golden Bough was the mistletoe.
True, Virgil does not identify but only compares it with mistletoe.
But this may be only a poetical device to cast a mystic glamour over
the humble plant. Or, more probably, his description was based on a
popular superstition that at certain times the mistletoe blazed out
into a supernatural golden glory. The poet tells how two doves,
guiding Aeneas to the gloomy vale in whose depth grew the Golden
Bough, alighted upon a tree, "whence shone a flickering gleam of
gold. As in the woods in winter cold the mistletoe--a plant not
native to its tree--is green with fresh leaves and twines its yellow
berries about the boles; such seemed upon the shady holm-oak the
leafy gold, so rustled in the gentle breeze the golden leaf." Here
Virgil definitely describes the Golden Bough as growing on a
holm-oak, and compares it with the mistletoe. The inference is
almost inevitable that the Golden Bough was nothing but the
mistletoe seen through the haze of poetry or of popular
superstition.
Now grounds have been shown for believing that the priest of the
Arician grove--the King of the Wood--personified the tree on which
grew the Golden Bough. Hence if that tree was the oak, the King of
the Wood must have been a personification of the oakspirit. It is,
therefore, easy to understand why, before he could be slain, it was
necessary to break the Golden Bough. As an oak-spirit, his life or
death was in the mistletoe on the oak, and so long as the mistletoe
remained intact, he, like Balder, could not die. To slay him,
therefore, it was necessary to break the mistletoe, and probably, as
in the case of Balder, to throw it at him. And to complete the
parallel, it is only necessary to suppose that the King of the Wood
was formerly burned, dead or alive, at the midsummer fire festival
which, as we have seen, was annually celebrated in the Arician
grove. The perpetual fire which burned in the grove, like the
perpetual fire which burned in the temple of Vesta at Rome and under
the oak at Romove, was probably fed with the sacred oak-wood; and
thus it would be in a great fire of oak that the King of the Wood
formerly met his end. At a later time, as I have suggested, his
annual tenure of office was lengthened or shortened, as the case
might be, by the rule which allowed him to live so long as he could
prove his divine right by the strong hand. But he only escaped the
fire to fall by the sword.
Thus it seems that at a remote age in the heart of Italy, beside the
sweet Lake of Nemi, the same fiery tragedy was annually enacted
which Italian merchants and soldiers were afterwards to witness
among their rude kindred, the Celts of Gaul, and which, if the Roman
eagles had ever swooped on Norway, might have been found repeated
with little difference among the barbarous Aryans of the North. The
rite was probably an essential feature in the ancient Aryan worship
of the oak.
It only remains to ask, Why was the mistletoe called the Golden
Bough? The whitish-yellow of the mistletoe berries is hardly enough
to account for the name, for Virgil says that the bough was
altogether golden, stems as well as leaves. Perhaps the name may be
derived from the rich golden yellow which a bough of mistletoe
assumes when it has been cut and kept for some months; the bright
tint is not confined to the leaves, but spreads to the stalks as
well, so that the whole branch appears to be indeed a Golden Bough.
Breton peasants hang up great bunches of mistletoe in front of their
cottages, and in the month of June these bunches are conspicuous for
the bright golden tinge of their foliage. In some parts of Brittany,
especially about Morbihan, branches of mistletoe are hung over the
doors of stables and byres to protect the horses and cattle,
probably against witchcraft.
The yellow colour of the withered bough may partly explain why the
mistletoe has been sometimes supposed to possess the property of
disclosing treasures in the earth; for on the principles of
homoeopathic magic there is a natural affinity between a yellow
bough and yellow gold. This suggestion is confirmed by the analogy
of the marvellous properties popularly ascribed to the mythical
fern-seed, which is popularly supposed to bloom like gold or fire on
Midsummer Eve. Thus in Bohemia it is said that "on St. John's Day
fern-seed blooms with golden blossoms that gleam like fire." Now it
is a property of this mythical fern-seed that whoever has it, or
will ascend a mountain holding it in his hand on Midsummer Eve, will
discover a vein of gold or will see the treasures of the earth
shining with a bluish flame. In Russia they say that if you succeed
in catching the wondrous bloom of the fern at midnight on Midsummer
Eve, you have only to throw it up into the air, and it will fall
like a star on the very spot where a treasure lies hidden. In
Brittany treasure-seekers gather fern-seed at midnight on Midsummer
Eve, and keep it till Palm Sunday of the following year; then they
strew the seed on the ground where they think a treasure is
concealed. Tyrolese peasants imagine that hidden treasures can be
seen glowing like flame on Midsummer Eve, and that fern-seed,
gathered at this mystic season, with the usual precautions, will
help to bring the buried gold to the surface. In the Swiss canton of
Freiburg people used to watch beside a fern on St. John's night in
the hope of winning a treasure, which the devil himself sometimes
brought to them. In Bohemia they say that he who procures the golden
bloom of the fern at this season has thereby the key to all hidden
treasures; and that if maidens will spread a cloth under the
fast-fading bloom, red gold will drop into it. And in the Tryol and
Bohemia if you place fern-seed among money, the money will never
decrease, however much of it you spend. Sometimes the fern-seed is
supposed to bloom on Christmas night, and whoever catches it will
become very rich. In Styria they say that by gathering fern-seed on
Christmas night you can force the devil to bring you a bag of money.
Thus, on the principle of like by like, fern-seed is supposed to
discover gold because it is itself golden; and for a similar reason
it enriches its possessor with an unfailing supply of gold. But
while the fern-seed is described as golden, it is equally described
as glowing and fiery. Hence, when we consider that two great days
for gathering the fabulous seed are Midsummer Eve and
Christmas--that is, the two solstices (for Christmas is nothing but
an old heathen celebration of the winter solstice)--we are led to
regard the fiery aspect of the fern-seed as primary, and its golden
aspect as secondary and derivative. Fern-seed, in fact, would seem
to be an emanation of the sun's fire at the two turning-points of
its course, the summer and winter solstices. This view is confirmed
by a German story in which a hunter is said to have procured
fern-seed by shooting at the sun on Midsummer Day at noon; three
drops of blood fell down, which he caught in a white cloth, and
these blood-drops were the fern-seed. Here the blood is clearly the
blood of the sun, from which the fern-seed is thus directly derived.
Thus it may be taken as probable that fern-seed is golden, because
it is believed to be an emanation of the sun's golden fire.
Now, like fern-seed, the mistletoe is gathered either at Midsummer
or at Christmas--that is, either at the summer or at the winter
solstice--and, like fern-seed, it is supposed to possess the power
of revealing treasures in the earth. On Midsummer Eve people in
Sweden make divining-rods of mistletoe, or of four different kinds
of wood one of which must be mistletoe. The treasure-seeker places
the rod on the ground after sundown, and when it rests directly over
treasure, the rod begins to move as if it were alive. Now, if the
mistletoe discovers gold, it must be in its character of the Golden
Bough; and if it is gathered at the solstices, must not the Golden
Bough, like the golden fern-seed, be an emanation of the sun's fire?
The question cannot be answered with a simple affirmative. We have
seen that the old Aryans perhaps kindled the solstitial and other
ceremonial fires in part as sun-charms, that is, with the intention
of supplying the sun with fresh fire; and as these fires were
usually made by the friction or combustion of oak-wood, it may have
appeared to the ancient Aryan that the sun was periodically
recruited from the fire which resided in the sacred oak. In other
words, the oak may have seemed to him the original storehouse or
reservoir of the fire which was from time to time drawn out to feed
the sun. But if the life of the oak was conceived to be in the
mistletoe, the mistletoe must on that view have contained the seed
or germ of the fire which was elicited by friction from the wood of
the oak. Thus, instead of saying that the mistletoe was an emanation
of the sun's fire, it might be more correct to say that the sun's
fire was regarded as an emanation of the mistletoe. No wonder, then,
that the mistletoe shone with a golden splendour, and was called the
Golden Bough. Probably, however, like fern-seed, it was thought to
assume its golden aspect only at those stated times, especially
midsummer, when fire was drawn from the oak to light up the sun. At
Pulverbatch, in Shropshire, it was believed within living memory
that the oak-tree blooms on Midsummer Eve and the blossom withers
before daylight. A maiden who wishes to know her lot in marriage
should spread a white cloth under the tree at night, and in the
morning she will find a little dust, which is all that remains of
the flower. She should place the pinch of dust under her pillow, and
then her future husband will appear to her in her dreams. This
fleeting bloom of the oak, if I am right, was probably the mistletoe
in its character of the Golden Bough. The conjecture is confirmed by
the observation that in Wales a real sprig of mistletoe gathered on
Midsummer Eve is similarly placed under the pillow to induce
prophetic dreams; and further the mode of catching the imaginary
bloom of the oak in a white cloth is exactly that which was employed
by the Druids to catch the real mistletoe when it dropped from the
bough of the oak, severed by the golden sickle. As Shropshire
borders on Wales, the belief that the oak blooms on Midsummer Eve
may be Welsh in its immediate origin, though probably the belief is
a fragment of the primitive Aryan creed. In some parts of Italy, as
we saw, peasants still go out on Midsummer morning to search the
oak-trees for the "oil of St. John," which, like the mistletoe,
heals all wounds, and is, perhaps, the mistletoe itself in its
glorified aspect. Thus it is easy to understand how a title like the
Golden Bough, so little descriptive of its usual appearance on the
tree, should have been applied to the seemingly insignificant
parasite. Further, we can perhaps see why in antiquity mistletoe was
believed to possess the remarkable property of extinguishing fire,
and why in Sweden it is still kept in houses as a safeguard against
conflagration. Its fiery nature marks it out, on homoeopathic
principles, as the best possible cure or preventive of injury by
fire.
These considerations may partially explain why Virgil makes Aeneas
carry a glorified bough of mistletoe with him on his descent into
the gloomy subterranean world. The poet describes how at the very
gates of hell there stretched a vast and gloomy wood, and how the
hero, following the flight of two doves that lured him on, wandered
into the depths of the immemorial forest till he saw afar off
through the shadows of the trees the flickering light of the Golden
Bough illuminating the matted boughs overhead. If the mistletoe, as
a yellow withered bough in the sad autumn woods, was conceived to
contain the seed of fire, what better companion could a forlorn
wanderer in the nether shades take with him than a bough that would
be a lamp to his feet as well as a rod and staff to his hands? Armed
with it he might boldly confront the dreadful spectres that would
cross his path on his adventurous journey. Hence when Aeneas,
emerging from the forest, comes to the banks of Styx, winding slow
with sluggish stream through the infernal marsh, and the surly
ferryman refuses him passage in his boat, he has but to draw the
Golden Bough from his bosom and hold it up, and straightway the
blusterer quails at the sight and meekly receives the hero into his
crazy bark, which sinks deep in the water under the unusual weight
of the living man. Even in recent times, as we have seen, mistletoe
has been deemed a protection against witches and trolls, and the
ancients may well have credited it with the same magical virtue. And
if the parasite can, as some of our peasants believe, open all
locks, why should it not have served as an "open Sesame" in the
hands of Aeneas to unlock the gates of death?
Now, too, we can conjecture why Virbius at Nemi came to be
confounded with the sun. If Virbius was, as I have tried to show, a
tree-spirit, he must have been the spirit of the oak on which grew
the Golden Bough; for tradition represented him as the first of the
Kings of the Wood. As an oak-spirit he must have been supposed
periodically to rekindle the sun's fire, and might therefore easily
be confounded with the sun itself. Similarly we can explain why
Balder, an oak-spirit, was described as "so fair of face and so
shining that a light went forth from him," and why he should have
been so often taken to be the sun. And in general we may say that in
primitive society, when the only known way of making fire is by the
friction of wood, the savage must necessarily conceive of fire as a
property stored away, like sap or juice, in trees, from which he has
laboriously to extract it. The Senal Indians of California "profess
to believe that the whole world was once a globe of fire, whence
that element passed up into the trees, and now comes out whenever
two pieces of wood are rubbed together." Similarly the Maidu Indians
of California hold that "the earth was primarily a globe of molten
matter, and from that the principle of fire ascended through the
roots into the trunk and branches of trees, whence the Indians can
extract it by means of their drill." In Namoluk, one of the Caroline
Islands, they say that the art of making fire was taught men by the
gods. Olofaet, the cunning master of flames, gave fire to the bird
_mwi_ and bade him carry it to earth in his bill. So the bird flew
from tree to tree and stored away the slumbering force of the fire
in the wood, from which men can elicit it by friction. In the
ancient Vedic hymns of India the fire-god Agni "is spoken of as born
in wood, as the embryo of plants, or as distributed in plants. He is
also said to have entered into all plants or to strive after them.
When he is called the embryo of trees or of trees as well as plants,
there may be a side-glance at the fire produced in forests by the
friction of the boughs of trees."
A tree which has been struck by lightning is naturally regarded by
the savage as charged with a double or triple portion of fire; for
has he not seen the mighty flash enter into the trunk with his own
eyes? Hence perhaps we may explain some of the many superstitious
beliefs concerning trees that have been struck by lightning. When
the Thompson Indians of British Columbia wished to set fire to the
houses of their enemies, they shot at them arrows which were either
made from a tree that had been struck by lightning or had splinters
of such wood attached to them. Wendish peasants of Saxony refuse to
burn in their stoves the wood of trees that have been struck by
lightning; they say that with such fuel the house would be burnt
down. In like manner the Thonga of South Africa will not use such
wood as fuel nor warm themselves at a fire which has been kindled
with it. On the contrary, when lightning sets fire to a tree, the
Winamwanga of Northern Rhodesia put out all the fires in the village
and plaster the fireplaces afresh, while the head men convey the
lightning-kindled fire to the chief, who prays over it. The chief
then sends out the new fire to all his villages, and the villagers
reward his messengers for the boon. This shows that they look upon
fire kindled by lightning with reverence, and the reverence is
intelligible, for they speak of thunder and lightning as God himself
coming down to earth. Similarly the Maidu Indians of California
believe that a Great Man created the world and all its inhabitants,
and that lightning is nothing but the Great Man himself descending
swiftly out of heaven and rending the trees with his flaming arms.
It is a plausible theory that the reverence which the ancient
peoples of Europe paid to the oak, and the connexion which they
traced between the tree and their sky-god, were derived from the
much greater frequency with which the oak appears to be struck by
lightning than any other tree of our European forests. This
peculiarity of the tree has seemingly been established by a series
of observations instituted within recent years by scientific
enquirers who have no mythological theory to maintain. However we
may explain it, whether by the easier passage of electricity through
oak-wood than through any other timber, or in some other way, the
fact itself may well have attracted the notice of our rude
forefathers, who dwelt in the vast forests which then covered a
large part of Europe; and they might naturally account for it in
their simple religious way by supposing that the great sky-god, whom
they worshipped and whose awful voice they heard in the roll of
thunder, loved the oak above all the trees of the wood and often
descended into it from the murky cloud in a flash of lightning,
leaving a token of his presence or of his passage in the riven and
blackened trunk and the blasted foliage. Such trees would
thenceforth be encircled by a nimbus of glory as the visible seats
of the thundering sky-god. Certain it is that, like some savages,
both Greeks and Romans identified their great god of the sky and of
the oak with the lightning flash which struck the ground; and they
regularly enclosed such a stricken spot and treated it thereafter as
sacred. It is not rash to suppose that the ancestors of the Celts
and Germans in the forests of Central Europe paid a like respect for
like reasons to a blasted oak.
This explanation of the Aryan reverence for the oak and of the
association of the tree with the great god of the thunder and the
sky, was suggested or implied long ago by Jacob Grimm, and has been
in recent years powerfully reinforced by Mr. W. Warde Fowler. It
appears to be simpler and more probable than the explanation which I
formerly adopted, namely, that the oak was worshipped primarily for
the many benefits which our rude forefathers derived from the tree,
particularly for the fire which they drew by friction from its wood;
and that the connexion of the oak with the sky was an after-thought
based on the belief that the flash of lightning was nothing but the
spark which the sky-god up aloft elicited by rubbing two pieces of
oak-wood against each other, just as his savage worshipper kindled
fire in the forest on earth. On that theory the god of the thunder
and the sky was derived from the original god of the oak; on the
present theory, which I now prefer, the god of the sky and the
thunder was the great original deity of our Aryan ancestors, and his
association with the oak was merely an inference based on the
frequency with which the oak was seen to be struck by lightning. If
the Aryans, as some think, roamed the wide steppes of Russia or
Central Asia with their flocks and herds before they plunged into
the gloom of the European forests, they may have worshipped the god
of the blue or cloudy firmament and the flashing thunderbolt long
before they thought of associating him with the blasted oaks in
their new home.
Perhaps the new theory has the further advantage of throwing light
on the special sanctity ascribed to mistletoe which grows on an oak.
The mere rarity of such a growth on an oak hardly suffices to
explain the extent and the persistence of the superstition. A hint
of its real origin is possibly furnished by the statement of Pliny
that the Druids worshipped the plant because they believed it to
have fallen from heaven and to be a token that the tree on which it
grew was chosen by the god himself. Can they have thought that the
mistletoe dropped on the oak in a flash of lightning? The conjecture
is confirmed by the name thunder-besom which is applied to mistletoe
in the Swiss canton of Aargau, for the epithet clearly implies a
close connexion between the parasite and the thunder; indeed
"thunder-besom" is a popular name in Germany for any bushy nest-like
excrescence growing on a branch, because such a parasitic growth is
actually believed by the ignorant to be a product of lightning. If
there is any truth in this conjecture, the real reason why the
Druids worshipped a mistletoe-bearing oak above all other trees of
the forest was a belief that every such oak had not only been struck
by lightning but bore among its branches a visible emanation of the
celestial fire; so that in cutting the mistletoe with mystic rites
they were securing for themselves all the magical properties of a
thunder-bolt. If that was so, we must apparently conclude that the
mistletoe was deemed an emanation of the lightning rather than, as I
have thus far argued, of the midsummer sun. Perhaps, indeed, we
might combine the two seemingly divergent views by supposing that in
the old Aryan creed the mistletoe descended from the sun on
Midsummer Day in a flash of lightning. But such a combination is
artificial and unsupported, so far as I know, by any positive
evidence. Whether on mythical principles the two interpretations can
really be reconciled with each other or not, I will not presume to
say; but even should they prove to be discrepant, the inconsistency
need not have prevented our rude forefathers from embracing both of
them at the same time with an equal fervour of conviction; for like
the great majority of mankind the savage is above being hidebound by
the trammels of a pedantic logic. In attempting to track his devious
thought through the jungle of crass ignorance and blind fear, we
must always remember that we are treading enchanted ground, and must
beware of taking for solid realities the cloudy shapes that cross
our path or hover and gibber at us through the gloom. We can never
completely replace ourselves at the standpoint of primitive man, see
things with his eyes, and feel our hearts beat with the emotions
that stirred his. All our theories concerning him and his ways must
therefore fall far short of certainty; the utmost we can aspire to
in such matters is a reasonable degree of probability.
To conclude these enquiries we may say that if Balder was indeed, as
I have conjectured, a personification of a mistletoe-bearing oak,
his death by a blow of the mistletoe might on the new theory be
explained as a death by a stroke of lightning. So long as the
mistletoe, in which the flame of the lightning smouldered, was
suffered to remain among the boughs, so long no harm could befall
the good and kindly god of the oak, who kept his life stowed away
for safety between earth and heaven in the mysterious parasite; but
when once that seat of his life, or of his death, was torn from the
branch and hurled at the trunk, the tree fell--the god died--smitten
by a thunderbolt.
And what we have said of Balder in the oak forests of Scandinavia
may perhaps, with all due diffidence in a question so obscure and
uncertain, be applied to the priest of Diana, the King of the Wood,
at Aricia in the oak forests of Italy. He may have personated in
flesh and blood the great Italian god of the sky, Jupiter, who had
kindly come down from heaven in the lightning flash to dwell among
men in the mistletoe--the thunder-besom--the Golden Bough--growing
on the sacred oak in the dells of Nemi. If that was so, we need not
wonder that the priest guarded with drawn sword the mystic bough
which contained the god's life and his own. The goddess whom he
served and married was herself, if I am right, no other than the
Queen of Heaven, the true wife of the sky-god. For she, too, loved
the solitude of the woods and the lonely hills, and sailing overhead
on clear nights in the likeness of the silver moon looked down with
pleasure on her own fair image reflected on the calm, the burnished
surface of the lake, Diana's Mirror.
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