It is not a new opinion that the Golden Bough was the mistletoe.[933] True, Virgil does not identify but only compares it with the 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 oak the leafy gold, so rustled in the gentle breeze the golden leaf.”[934] Here Virgil definitely describes the Golden Bough as growing on an 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 [pg 364] the priest of the Arician grove—the King of the Wood—personified the tree on which grew the Golden Bough.[935] Hence, if that tree was the oak, the King of the Wood must have been a personification of the oak-spirit. 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.[936] The perpetual fire which burned in the grove, like the perpetual fire 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 [pg 365] 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 primitive Aryan worship of the oak.[937]
It only remains to ask, Why was the mistletoe called the Golden Bough? The name was not simply a poet's fancy, nor even peculiarly Italian; for in Welsh also the mistletoe is known as “the tree of pure gold.”[938] The whitish-yellow of the mistletoe berries is hardly enough to account for the name. For Virgil says that the Bough was altogether golden, stem as well as leaves,[939] and the same is implied in the Welsh name, “the tree of pure gold.” A clue to the real meaning of the name is furnished by the mythical fern-seed or fern-bloom.
We saw that fern-seed 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.”[940] 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.[941] And if you place fern-seed [pg 366] among money, the money will never decrease, however much of it you spend.[942] Sometimes the fern-seed is supposed to bloom at Christmas, and whoever catches it will become very rich.[943] 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.[944] 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.[945] 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 certain 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 [pg 367] either at Midsummer or Christmas[946]—that is, at the summer and winter solstices—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.[947] 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 primitive Aryans probably kindled the midsummer bonfires as sun-charms, that is, with the intention of supplying the sun with fresh fire. But as this fire was always elicited by the friction of oak wood,[948] it must have appeared to the primitive Aryan that the sun was periodically recruited from the fire which resided in the sacred oak. In other words, the oak must 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 the life of the oak was conceived to be in the mistletoe; therefore the mistletoe must have contained the seed or germ of the [pg 368] 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 would 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.[949] At Pulverbatch, in Shropshire, it was believed within living memory that the oak-tree blooms on Midsummer Eve and the blossom withers before daylight.[950] This fleeting bloom of the oak, if I am right, could originally have been nothing but the mistletoe in its character of the Golden Bough. As Shropshire borders on Wales, the superstition 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,[951] 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 doubtless the mistletoe itself in its glorified aspect. Thus it is easy to understand how a title like the Golden Bough or the “tree of pure gold,” so little descriptive of the real appearance of the plant, should have held its ground as a name for the mistletoe in Italy and Wales, and probably in other parts of the Aryan world.[952]
Now, too, we can fully understand why Virbius 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,”[953] 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 fire as a property stored away, like sap or juice, in trees, from which he has laboriously to extract it. Thus all trees, or at least the particular sorts of trees whose wood he employs in fire-making, must be regarded by him as reservoirs of hidden fire, and it is natural that he should describe them by epithets like golden, shining, or bright. May not this have been the origin of the name, “the Bright or Shining One” (Zeus, Jove) by which the ancient Greeks and Italians designated their supreme god?[954] It is at least highly significant that, amongst [pg 370] both Greeks and Italians, the oak should have been the tree of the supreme god, that at his most ancient shrines, both in Greece and Italy, this supreme god should have been actually represented by an oak, and that so soon as the barbarous Aryans of Northern Europe appear in the light of history, they should be found, amid all diversities of language, of character, and of country, nevertheless at one in worshipping the oak as the chief object of their religious reverence, and extracting their sacred fire from its wood. If we are to judge of the primitive religion of the European Aryans by comparing the religions of the different branches of the stock, the highest place in their pantheon must certainly be assigned to the oak. The result, then, of our inquiry is to make it probable that, down to the time of the Roman Empire and the beginning of our era, the primitive worship of the Aryans was maintained nearly in its original form in the sacred grove at Nemi, as in the oak woods of Gaul, of Prussia, and of Scandinavia; and that the King of the Wood lived and died as an incarnation of the supreme Aryan god, whose life was in the mistletoe or Golden Bough.
If, in bidding farewell to Nemi, we look around us for the last time, we shall find the lake and its surroundings not much changed from what they were in the days when Diana and Virbius still received the homage of their worshippers in the sacred grove. The temple of Diana, indeed, has disappeared, and the King of the Wood no longer stands sentinel over the [pg 371] Golden Bough. But Nemi's woods are still green, and at evening you may hear the church bells of Albano, and perhaps, if the air be still, of Rome itself, ringing the Angelus. Sweet and solemn they chime out from the distant city, and die lingeringly away across the wide Campagnan marshes. Le roi est mort, vive le roi!