Lads, you'll need to fight
Before 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.[47] 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.'
[1] G. B. ii. 147.
[2] G. B. iii. 166.
[3] G. B. iii. 346.
[4] G. B. ii. 95.
[5] G. B. ii. 160.