|In Europe St. George seems to have displaced an old Aryan god of the spring, such as the Lithuanian Pergrubius.| But we cannot suppose that the worship of Tammuz has been transplanted to Europe and struck its roots deep among the Slavs and other peoples in the eastern part of our continent. Rather amongst them we must look for a native Aryan deity who now masquerades in the costume of the Cappadocian saint and martyr St. George. Perhaps we may find him in the Pergrubius of the Lithuanians, a people who retained their heathen religion later than any other branch of the Aryan stock in Europe. This Pergrubius is described as “the god of the spring,” as “he who makes leaves and grass to grow,” or more fully as “the god of flowers, plants, and all buds.” On St. George’s Day, the twenty-third of April, the heathen Prussians and Lithuanians offered a sacrifice to Pergrubius. A priest, who bore the title of Wurschait, held in his hand a mug of beer, while he thus addressed the deity: “Thou drivest away the winter; thou bringest back the pleasant spring. By thee the fields and gardens are green, by thee the groves and the woods put forth leaves.” According to another version, the prayer ran as follows: “Thou drivest the winter away, and givest in all lands leaves and grass. We pray thee that thou wouldst make our corn to grow and wouldst put down all weeds.” After praying thus, the priest drank the beer, holding the mug with his teeth, but not touching it with his hands. Then without handling it he threw the mug backward over his head. Afterwards it was picked up and filled again, and all present drank out of it. They also sang a hymn in praise of Pergrubius, and then spent the whole day in feasting and dancing.[[1110]] Thus it appears that Pergrubius was a Lithuanian god of the spring, who caused the grass and the corn to grow and the trees to burst into leaf. In this he resembles Green George, the embodiment of the fresh vegetation of spring, whose leaf-clad representative still plays his pranks on the very same day in some parts of Eastern Europe. Nothing, indeed, is said of the relation of Pergrubius to cattle, and so far the analogy between him and St. George breaks down. But our accounts of the old Lithuanian mythology are few and scanty; if we knew more about Pergrubius we might find that as a god or personification of spring he, like St. George, was believed to exert all the quickening powers of that genial season—in other words, that his beneficent activity was not confined to clothing the bare earth with verdure, but extended to the care of the teeming flocks and herds, as well as to the propagation of mankind. Certainly it is not easy to draw a sharp line of division between the god who attends to cattle and the god who provides the food on which they subsist.
|The Roman equivalent of St. George was Pales, who may have been personated by the king at the Parilia.| Thus Pergrubius may perhaps have been the northern equivalent of the pastoral god Pales, who was worshipped by the Romans only two days earlier at the spring festival of the Parilia. It will be remembered that the Roman shepherds prayed to Pales for grass and leaves, the very things which it was the part of Pergrubius to supply. Is it too bold to conjecture that in rural districts of Italy Pales may have been personated by a leaf-clad man, and that in the early age of Rome the duty of thus representing the god may have been one of the sacred functions of the king? The conjecture at least suggests a reason for the tradition that Numa, the typical priestly king of Rome, was born on the day of the Parilia.
CHAPTER XX
THE WORSHIP OF THE OAK
§ 1. The Diffusion of the Oak in Europe
|The Latin kings represented Jupiter, the god of the oak, the sky, the thunder, and the rain.| In a preceding chapter some reasons were given for thinking that the early Latin kings posed as living representatives of Jupiter, the god of the oak, the sky, the rain, and the thunder, and that in this capacity they attempted to exercise the fertilising functions which were ascribed to the god. The probability of this view will be strengthened if it can be proved that the same god was worshipped under other names by other branches of the Aryan stock in Europe, and that the Latin kings were not alone in arrogating to themselves his powers and attributes. In this chapter I propose briefly to put together a few of the principal facts which point to this conclusion.
|Why should the god of the oak be also the god of the sky, the thunder, and the rain?| But at the outset a difficulty presents itself. To us the oak, the sky, the rain, and the thunder appear things totally distinct from each other. How did our forefathers come to group them together and imagine them as attributes of one and the same god? A connexion may be seen between the sky, the rain, and the thunder; but what has any of them to do with the oak? Yet one of these apparently disparate elements was probably the original nucleus round which in time the others gathered and crystallised into the composite conception of Jupiter. Accordingly we must ask, Which of them was the original centre of attraction? If men started with the idea of an oak-god, how came they to enlarge his kingdom by annexing to it the province of the sky, the rain, and the thunder? If, on the other hand, they set out with the notion of a god of the sky, the rain, and the thunder, or any one of them, why should they have added the oak to his attributes? The oak is terrestrial; the sky, the thunder, and the rain are celestial or aerial. What is the bridge between the two?
|In the composite character of Jupiter the oak is probably primary, the sky, the rain, and the thunder secondary and derivative.| In the sequel I shall endeavour to shew that on the principle of primitive thought the evolution of a sky-god from an oak-god is more easily conceivable than the converse; and if I succeed, it becomes probable that in the composite character of Jupiter the oak is primary and original, the sky, the rain, and the thunder secondary and derivative.
|Europe covered with vast oak forests in prehistoric times.| We have seen that long before the dawn of history Europe was covered with vast primaeval woods, which must have exercised a profound influence on the thought as well as on the life of our rude ancestors who dwelt dispersed under the gloomy shadow or in the open glades and clearings of the forest.[[1111]] Now, of all the trees which composed these woods the oak appears to have been both the commonest and the most useful. The proof of this is drawn partly from the statements of classical writers, partly from the remains of ancient villages built on piles in lakes and marshes, and partly from the oak forests which have been found embedded in peat-bogs.
|Remains of oak forests found in peat-bogs.| These bogs, which attain their greatest development in Northern Europe, but are met with also in the central and southern parts of the Continent, have preserved as in a museum the trees and plants which sprang up and flourished after the end of the glacial epoch. Thus in Scotland the peat, which occupies wide areas both in the highlands and lowlands, almost everywhere covers the remains of forests, among which the commoner trees are pine, oak, and birch. The oaks are of great size, and are found at heights above the sea such as the tree would not now naturally attain to. Equally remarkable for their size are the pines, but though they also had a wider distribution than at present, they appear not to have formed any extensive forests at the lowest levels of the country. Still, remains of them have been dug up in many lowland peat-mosses, where the bulk of the buried timber is oak.[[1112]] When Hatfield Moss in Yorkshire was drained, there were found in it trunks of oak a hundred feet long and as black as ebony. One giant actually measured a hundred and twenty feet in length, with a diameter of twelve feet at the root and six feet at the top. No such tree now exists in Europe.[[1113]] Sunken forests and peat occur at many places on the coasts of England, especially on low shelving shores where the land falls away with a gentle slope to the sea. These submerged areas were once mud flats which, as the sea retreated from them, gradually became clothed with dense forests, chiefly of oak and Scotch fir, though ash, yew, alder, and other trees sooner or later mingled with them.[[1114]] The great peat-bogs of Ireland shew that there was a time when vast woods of oak and yew covered the country, the oak growing on the hills up to a height of four hundred feet or thereabout above the sea, while at higher levels deal was the prevailing timber. Human relics have often been discovered in these Irish bogs, and ancient roadways made of oak have also come to light.[[1115]] In the peat-bog near Abbeville, in the valley of the Somme, trunks of oak have been dug up fourteen feet thick, a diameter rarely met with outside the tropics in the old Continent.[[1116]]
|Former oak woods of Denmark and Scandinavia.| At present the woods of Denmark consist for the most part of magnificent beeches, which flourish here as luxuriantly as anywhere in the world. Oaks are much rarer and appear to be on the decline. Yet the evidence of the peat-bogs proves that before the advent of the beech the country was overspread with dense forests of tall and stately oaks. It was during the ascendency of the oak in the woods that bronze seems to have become known in Denmark; for swords and shields of that metal, now in the museum of Copenhagen, have been taken out of peat in which oaks abound. Yet at a still earlier period the oak had been preceded by the pine or Scotch fir in the Danish forests; and the discovery of neolithic implements in the peat-bogs shews that savages of the Stone Age had their homes in these old pine woods as well as in the later forests of oak. Some antiquaries are of opinion that the Iron Age in Denmark began with the coming of the beech, but of this there is no evidence; for aught we know to the contrary the beautiful beech forests may date back to the Age of Bronze.[[1117]] The peat-bogs of Norway abound in buried timber; and in many of them the trees occur in two distinct layers. The lower of these layers consists chiefly of oak, hazel, ash, and other deciduous trees; the upper is composed of Scotch firs and birches. In the bogs of Sweden also the oak forests underlie the pine forests.[[1118]] However, it appears to be doubtful whether Scandinavia was inhabited in the age of the oak woods. Neolithic tools have indeed been found in the peat, but generally not deeper down than two feet or so; hence one antiquary infers that in these bogs not more than two feet of peat has formed within historical times.[[1119]] But negative evidence on such a point goes for little, as only a small portion of the bogs can have been explored.