Magic and Religion

The story about Orestes appears to myself to be a late 'ætiological myth,' a story invented to explain the slaying of the slayer – which it does not do; in short, it is an hypothesis. The priesthood is open not to men flying the blood feud like Orestes, but only to runaway slaves. The custom introduced by Orestes was the sacrifice of outlanders, not of priests. The story has a doublette in Pausanias.383 According to Pausanias, Hippolytus was raised from the dead, and, in hatred of his father, and being a fugitive, he went and reigned at the Arician grove of the goddess.

For these reasons, apparently, Statius calls the Arician grove 'profugis regibus aptum,' a sanctuary of exiled princes, Orestes and Hippolytus.384 From Suetonius we learn that the ghastly priest was styled Rex Nemorensis, King of the Wood, and that the envious Caligula, thinking the priest had held office long enough, set another athlete to kill him.385 The title of 'king,' borne by a priest, suggests, of course, the sacrificial king at Borne. Also Mr. Frazer adduces African kings of fire and water, credited with miraculous powers over the elements. They kill nobody and nobody kills them. Then we have Jack-in-the-Green = May-Tree = the Spirit of Vegetation = the May King and the Queen of the May. 'These titles,' as Mannhardt observes, 'imply that the spirit incorporate in vegetation is a ruler, whose creative power extends far and wide.' Possibly so. Now, the King of the Wood, the ghastly priest, lived in the grove of Diana, who (among other things) has the attributes of a tree-spirit. 'May not, then, the King of the Wood, in the Arician grove, have been, like the King of the May … an incarnation of the tree-spirit, or spirit of vegetation?' Given a female tree-spirit, we should rather expect a Queen of the Wood; and we assuredly do not expect a priest of Diana to represent the supreme Aryan god, nay to incarnate him. But this Mr. Frazer thinks probable.386 Again, 'since the King of the Wood could only be assailed by him who had plucked the golden bough, his life was safe from assault as long as the bough, or the tree on which it grew, remained uninjured.'387

Here we remark the nimbleness of Mr. Frazer's method. In vol. i. 4 he had said: 'Tradition averred that the fatal branch' (in the grove near Aricia) 'was that golden bough which, at the Sibyl's bidding, Æneas plucked before he assayed the perilous journey to the world of the dead.' But I have tried to show that, according to Servius, this identification of two absolutely distinct boughs, neither similar nor similarly situated, was the conjecture of 'public opinion' in an age divided from Virgil's date by four hundred years.

In the space between vol. i. 4 and i. 231 the averment of tradition, as Mr. Frazer calls it, the inference of the curious, as I suppose, to the effect that Virgil's golden branch and the Arician branch were identical, has become matter of fact for Mr. Frazer. 'Since the King of the Wood could only be assailed by him who had plucked the Golden Bough,' he says; with what follows.388

But who has told us anything about the breaking, by a fugitive slave, near Aricia, of a golden bough? Nobody, as far as I am aware, has mentioned the circumstance. After an interval of four hundred years, the golden bough of Virgil is only brought by Servius into connection with the wood at Aricia, because Servius, and the public opinion of his age, knew about a branch there, and did not know anything about Virgil's branch of gold.

That branch is a safe passport to Hades. It is sacred, not to a tree-spirit named Diana, but to Infernal Juno, or Proserpine. It cannot be broken by a fugitive slave, or anybody else; no, nor can it be cut with edge of iron. None but he whom the Fates call can break it. It yields at a touch of the predestined man, and another golden branch grows instantly in its place.

Ipse volens facilisque sequetur,Si te fata vocant.Primo avulso non deficit alterAureus.

Virgil's bough thus answers to the magical sword set in a stone in the Arthurian legends, in a tree trunk in the Volsunga Saga, as Mr. H. S. O. Everard reminds me. All the knights may tug vainly at the sword, but you can draw it lightly, si te fata vocant, if you are the predestined king, if you are Arthur or Sigmund. When Æneas bears this bough, Charon recognises the old familiar passport. Other living men, in the strength of this talisman, have already entered the land of the dead.

Ille admirans venerabile donumFatalis virgæ, longo nunc tempore visum.

I have collected all these extraordinary attributes of Virgil's bough (in origin, a suppliant's bough, perhaps), because, as far as I notice, Mr. Frazer lays no stress on the many peculiarities which differentiate Virgil's bough from any casual branch of the tree at Aricia, and connect it with the mystic sword. The 'general reader' (who seldom knows Latin) needs, I think, to be told precisely what Virgil's bough was. Nothing can be more unlike a branch, any accessible branch, of the Arician tree, than is Virgil's golden bough. It does not grow at Aricia. It is golden. It is not connected with a tree-spirit, but is dear to Proserpine. (I easily see, of course, that Proserpine may be identified with a tree spirit.)389 Virgil's branch is not to be plucked by fugitive slaves. It is not a challenge, but a talismanic passport to Hades, recognised by Charon, who has not seen a specimen for ever so long. It is instantly succeeded, if plucked, by another branch of gold, which the Arician twig is not. So I really do not understand how Mr. Frazer can identify Virgil's golden bough with an ordinary branch of a tree at Aricia, which anybody could break, though only runaway slaves, strongly built, had an interest in so doing.

Still less do I think that Virgil meant to identify his branch of gold with mistletoe. He does the reverse: in a poetic simile he compares his bough to mistletoe. A poet does not compare a thing to itself!390 Mr. Frazer cites the Welsh for mistletoe —pren puraur, tree d'or pur. In places, also, mistletoe is used for divining rods, which may be employed by gold-hunters. What wood is not thus used?391 Like other magical plants, mistletoe is gathered at the solstices, when fern-seed is fabled to flame. Must not the golden bough, like the golden fern-seed, be an emanation of the sun's fire? The older solar mythologists would have had not a doubt of it.392

I must admit, then, that I cannot, at present, accept the identification of the branch of gold in Virgil with any branch you please on a certain tree at Aricia. Nor am I aware of any historical evidence that the grove there was an oak grove, or the tree an oak tree, or that the branch to be plucked was a mistletoe bough, or that any branch, for the purpose of the runaway slave, was not as good as another.

That Virgil's branch of gold was mistletoe, that the tree at Aricia was an oak, that the bough to be plucked by the person ambitious of being a ghastly priest was mistletoe, seems (if I follow Mr. Frazer accurately) to be rather needful to the success of the solution of his problem which he finally propounds. He takes, on his road, the Eddaic myth of Balder, which I do not regard as a very early myth; but on that point there is great searching of hearts among Scandinavian specialists. 'No one now,' writes a Scandinavian scholar to me, 'puts any of the Edda poems earlier than 900 A.D., and most of them, if not all, are probably later than that. We do not even know whether they were composed by Christians or pagans, as the Icelanders never lost their interest in the old mythology. It has never been sufficiently noticed that these poems are not religious in any sense; all that their poets cared for was the story. That it will ever be possible to say where the stories came from, I doubt very much: probably they represent the fusion of several quite different veins of legends, heathen and Christian. The Saga writers knew practically nothing about the old heathen worship, and Balder may never have been worshipped at all, or, if he was, it is rather hopeless to conjecture in what capacity.'

Such are the opinions of Mr. W. A. Craigie, whose writings on the Celto-Scandinavian relations of the Northern mythological literature are familiar to students. We return to Mr. Frazer's handling of the Balder story.

Balder, says the Edda, dreamed of death. A goddess made everything in nature swear not to hurt him, except a mistletoe plant, which she thought too young to understand the nature of an oath! Loki learned this, plucked the plant, and, when the gods were hurling things at Balder, asked the blind Hödur to throw the mistletoe. It pierced and slew Balder, and his funeral was of a kind which may, or may not, have been used before the period of inhumation in 'howes' or barrows. Balder's dead body was burned on board his ship, 'the hugest of all ships.'393 I had an impression that this was a not uncommon Viking form of incremation, but Mr. Craigie thinks that it had quite gone out before the historic period. In the legendary period he remembers but one case, in Ynglinga Saga.394 King Haki, being mortally wounded, had his ship piled with the bodies and weapons of the slain; a funeral pyre was erected on board and lit, and the body of Haki was borne forth to sea in the flaming vessel. 'The thing was famous long after.' The story may be borrowed from the Balder story or the Balder story from that of King Haki.

In any case Balder was not sacrificed, but cremated, and the 'huge ship,' of course, is a late Viking idea, an idea the reverse of primitive. Mr. Frazer, however, goes on, apparently assuming that in the original form of the myth Balder was sacrificed, to a theory about certain religious or ritual fires, which survive in folklore. These fires are lit by peasants at various seasons, but are best known at midsummer, while a pretence of burning a man is made, and this at a season when mistletoe is gathered as a magical healing herb, not as a weapon of death. He seems to think that Balder was the spirit of the oak, that human victims, representing the oak and Balder, were, of old, periodically sacrificed, and that people deemed that the oak could not be injured by axes before the mistletoe (in which, they thought, lay its life) was plucked off. Unluckily, I see no evidence that people ever did entertain this opinion – namely, that the oak was invulnerable till the mistletoe was plucked.395

Mr. Frazer says: 'The mistletoe was viewed as the seat of the life of the oak, and, so long as it was uninjured, nothing could kill or even wound the oak.' He shows how this idea might arise. 'The oak, so people might think, was invulnerable,' so long as the mistletoe remained intact.396 But did the people think so? Pliny says a great deal about the Druidical gathering of mistletoe, which, on oaks, 'is very rarely to be met with.' The Druids, I presume, never observed that oaks in general, in fact by an overwhelming majority, lived very well without having any seat of life (mistletoe) at all. Not noticing this obvious fact, they reckoned, it would appear, that an oak with mistletoe on it con Id not be cut till the mistletoe was removed. Perhaps they never tried. Pliny does not say that when the Druid had climbed the tree and removed the mistletoe, he next cut down the tree.397 It does seem desirable to prove that people thought the life of an oak was in the mistletoe (which they might gather without hurting the oak), before we begin to build another theory on our theory that they did hold this opinion.398

This new theory Mr. Frazer goes forth to erect on the basis of the first theory. The theory, in brief, comes to this: that as Balder was the spirit of the oak, and was sacrificed (of which I see no proof), so human beings, representing Balder and the oak, were sacrificed, to reinvigorate vegetation. The mistletoe which slew Balder was the soul-box of both Balder and of the oak, and of the human victims who represented, yearly, the oak and Balder.

About all this much might be said. The killing of 'divine kings,' Balder and others,399 seems to me, as I have already said, in the majority of cases, to be a mere rude form of superannuation. We do not kill a commander-in-chief, or an old professor; we pension them off. But it is not so easy to pension off a king. I think that most of the cases cited mean superannuation, or dissatisfaction with the ruler, not a magical ceremony to improve vegetation. Regicide is, or was, common. Says Birrel (1560-1605): 'There has beine in this Kingdome of Scotland, are hundereth and five Kings, of quhilk there was slaine fifty-sex,' often succeeded by their slayers, like the ghastly priest. I am not convinced that the ghastly priest represented vegetation, and endured the duel ordeal as a commutation of yearly sacrifice, though there is a kind of parallel in the case of the king of Calicut. But that modern mummers are put to death, in a mock ceremony (as Mr. Frazer holds, to quicken vegetation), is proved by much folklore evidence.400

If we admit (which I think far from inevitable) that the ghastly priest was once a kind of May King, periodically slain, and was analogous to Balder, and represented the life of an oak, we are next invited to suppose that the tree at Aricia was also an oak, that the only branch on it to be plucked by the would-be successor was mistletoe, and that the mistletoe was the soul-box of the tree and of the ghastly priest, who could more easily be killed when his life-box (the mistletoe) was damaged.401

There is hardly a link in this chain of reasoning which to me seems strong. I do not see that Balder, in the Edda, was sacrificed. I do not see that the mistletoe was his soul-box. I conceive that the use of so feeble a weapon to kill him is analogous to the slaying of an invulnerable hero, in North American myth, by the weapon of a bulrush: an example of the popular liking for weakness that overcomes strength. I find no evidence that the mistletoe was ever thought to be the soul-box of the oak; none to prove that the tree at Aricia was an oak; nothing to show that the branch to be plucked was the branch of gold in Virgil, and nothing to indicate that Virgil's branch was the mistletoe. To reach Mr. Frazer's solution – that the ghastly priest was an incarnate spirit of vegetation, slain, after the plucking of mistletoe, in order that he might be succeeded by a stronger soul, more apt to increase the life of vegetation – we have to cross at least six 'light bridges' of hypothesis, 'built to connect isolated facts.'402 To me these hypotheses seem more like the apparently solid spots in a peat-bog, on which whoso alights is let into the morass. I feel like Mr. Frazer's 'cautious inquirer,' who is 'brought up sharp on the edge of some yawning chasm.'403

I ought to propose an hypothesis myself. In doing so I shall confine myself (the limitation is not unscientific) to the known facts of the problem. In the grove of Diana (a goddess of many various attributes) was a priest of whom we know nothing but that he was (1) a fugitive slave, (2) called King of the Grove, (3) might be slain and succeeded by any other fugitive slave, (4) who broke a bough of the tree which the priest's only known duty was to protect. These are all the ascertained facts.

Why had the priest to be a runaway slave? Mr. Frazer says: 'He had to be a runaway slave in memory of the flight of Orestes, the traditional founder of the worship…'404 But the Greek story of Orestes, and its doublette as to Hippolytus, are only ætiological myths, fanciful' reasons why,' attached to a Latin usage. Neither Orestes nor Hippolytus was a slave, like the ghastly priest. The story about Orestes, a fugitive, arises out of the custom of Aricia, and does not explain that custom. Mr. Frazer, I presume, admits this, but thinks that the ghastly priest might perhaps, at one time, save himself by being a runaway. But why a slave? If I might guess, I would venture to suggest that the grove near Aricia may have been an asylum for fugitives, as they say that Borne originally was. There are such sanctuaries in Central Australia.

Here, fortunately, Mr. Frazer himself supplies me with the very instances which my conjecture craves. He cites Mr. Turner's 'Samoa' for trees which were sanctuaries for fugitives. These useful examples are given, not in 'The Golden Bough,' but in an essay on 'The Origin of Totemism.'405

'In Upolu, one of the Samoan islands, a certain god, Vave, had his abode in an old tree, which served as an asylum for murderers and other offenders who had incurred the penalty of death.'

I gather from Mr. Turner's 'Nineteen Years in Polynesia' (p. 285) that the death penalty was that of the blood feud. In his 'Samoa,' Mr. Turner writes concerning trees which were sanctuaries:

'If that tree was reached by the criminal, he was safe, and the avenger of blood could pursue no farther, but wait investigation and trial. It is said that the king of a division of Upolu, called Atua, once lived at that spot. After he died the house fell into decay, but the tree was fixed on as representing the departed king, and out of respect for his memory it was made the substitute of a living and royal protector. It was called o le asi pulu tangata, 'the asi tree, the refuge of men.' This reminds me of what I once heard from a native of another island. He said that at one time they had been ten years without a king, and so anxious were they to have some protecting substitute that they fixed upon a large O'a tree (Bischoffia Javanica), and made it the representative of a king, and an asylum for the thief or the homicide when pursued by the injured in hot haste for vengeance.406

There seem to have been three sanctuary trees: one inhabited by a god, Vave; one respected in memory of a king; and one doing duty as a kind of figure-head, or representative of a king.

If my guess that the tree in the Arician grove was once a sanctuary, or asylum for fugitives, including fugitive slaves, is plausible, I cannot, of course, conjecture as to the reason of its protective sanctity. It may have been one of the three Samoan reasons (which none of us could have guessed correctly), or any other motive may have taken effect. A fugitive slave, of course, was not awaiting trial and chance of acquittal. By custom he would be restored to his master's tender mercies, or live on under the tree.

But an unlimited asylum of fugitive slaves was an inconvenient neighbour to Aricia. Hence (it is physically conceivable, but I lay no stress on it) the asylum was at last limited to one fugitive slave at a time. It was not like the forest in the Indian fable, populated by 'millions of hermits,' who cannot have been very solitary anchorites. Any fugitive slave who took sanctuary had to kill and dispossess the prior occupant. There was only sanctuary for one at a time. More would have been most inconvenient. In any case the one solitary duty of the ghastly priest (as far as we know) was to act as garde champêtre to one certain tree. Why this one tree, we do not and cannot know. I am averse to Sir Alfred Lyall's plan of suggesting singular solutions arising out of some possible historical accident in the veiled past, when the problem to be solved is a practice of wide diffusion. The causes, in such cases of wide diffusion, cannot be regarded as mere freaks or recurring accidents. But this affair of the tree and its inviolate branches is isolated, unless we regard the tree as a taboo or sanctuary tree, which it might be for many reasons, as in Samoa, perhaps because it was the residence of a tree-spirit. At all events, the priest's only known duty was to guard the tree.

Then, why had his would-be successor to break a bough before fighting? Obviously as a challenge, and also as a warning. The priest in office was to 'have a fair show;' some 'law' was to be given him. When he found a branch broken, any branch, he was in the position of the pirate captain on whom 'the black spot' was passed.407 He was in the situation of the king of the Eyeos, to whom a present of parrots' eggs meant that it was 'time for him to go.'408 If the bough was mistletoe, and if the fugitive slave, like the Druids in Pliny,409 had to climb for it, then the ghastly priest 'had him at an avail.' It was any odds on the priest, who could 'tree' his man or cut him down as he descended. However, our authorities tell us about no bough in particular, still less about mistletoe. Let me add that, if the bough was mistletoe, the sacred tree would need to be changed every time (of which we hear nothing), for it is not a case of

Uno avulso non deficit alter

with mistletoe.

The bough was broken, then, as a taunt, a challenge, and a warning. 'You can't keep your old tree, make room for a better man!' That is the spirit of the business. The fugitive, utilised as a priest of the grove, was slain when the better man appeared, not that a new soul might keep the vegetation lively, but merely because the best man attainable was needed to guard the taboo tree.

The sacred and priestly character of a runaway fighting slave does not, to me, seem pronounced.410 We know not that he ever sacrificed. Ladies who wished to be mothers visited the shrine, indeed,411 as this Diana was a goddess like Lucina, presiding over birth. I do not deny that the priest might have worked miracles for them (like the Indian forest sages who do the miracle for childless rajahs). But his one known duty, guarding the tree, was inconsistent with much attention to this branch of his sacred calling. 'He prowled about with sword drawn, always on the look out.'412 That is all!

We have not, in this theory, to invent a single fact, or introduce a single belief where we do not know that it existed. Sanctuaries or asyla did exist, we have given examples of sanctuary trees, and the tree was a sanctuary for just one runaway slave at a time: he could not run to burg, as in our old and more merciful law. If he wanted the billet of ghastly priest he had to fight for it:

Lads, you'll need to fightBefore you drive ta peasties.

Before fighting he had to get through the priest's guard and break a branch of the tree which the priest protected, the act being a warning as well as a challenge. This hypothesis introduces no unknown and unproved facts, and colligates all the facts which are known. The title of 'King of the Grove' may mean no more than the title of 'Cock of the North;' or it may be a priestly title, not, even so, necessarily implying that the runaway slave embodied the ruling spirit of the vegetable department.

I have been favoured with objections to my guess. First, if I am right, where is the sanction for the custom at which I conjecture? Well, where is the sanction of the Samoan customs? They reposed (1) on the residence of a god in a tree, (2) on respect for a king who had lived near a tree, (3) on a legal fiction. The sanctuaries of the Arunta Ertnatulunga derive their sanction from hoards of churinga, sacred objects of which, till recently, we knew nothing.413 Obviously I cannot say which of many conceivable and inconceivable primeval reasons gave a sanction to the tree-asylum of Aricia. Once instituted, custom did the rest. The tree was a sanctuary for one fugitive slave, and, next, for another who could kill him.

Secondly, my guess is thought to disregard Mr. Frazer's many other analogies from folklore. Which analogies? Where else do we find a priestly fugitive slave, who held his sacred office by the coir na glaive, the Eight of Sword? I am acquainted with no other example. As I have shown already, the kings who are killed (admitting the Arician fugitive to be a rex) are killed for a considerable variety of reasons, and are never shown to be killed that a sturdier vehicle may be provided for a vegetable deity; while the kings said to incarnate a deity are never said to be killed for religious reasons. If the reverse were the case, then the Arician fugitive, the ghastly priest, might take the benefit of the analogies. I hope that my bald prosaic theory, abjectly Philistine as it is, has the characteristics of a scientific hypothesis. But, like my guess as to the real reason for the death of the Sacæan victim, this attempt to explain the office of the ghastly priest is but a conjecture. The affair is so singular that it may have an isolated cause in some forgotten occurrence. I remember no other classical instance of a priest whose duty was to be always watching a single sacred tree, a thing requiring a vigilance of attention not compatible with much other priestly work: a post so unenviable that only a fugitive slave would be likely to care for the duties and perquisites. Naturally he would not know that he was 'an incarnation of the supreme Aryan god, whose life was in the mistletoe or golden bough.' And, as he did not know, he would not be 'proud of the title.'