Now grounds have been shewn for believing that the priest of the Arician grove—the King of the Wood—personified the tree on which grew the Golden Bough.[693] 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.[694] The perpetual fire which burned in the grove, like the perpetual [pg 286] fire which burned in the temple of Vesta at Rome and under the oak at Romove,[695] 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.
A similar tragedy may have been enacted over the human representative of Balder in Norway.
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.[696]
The name of the Golden Bough may have been applied to the mistletoe on account of the golden tinge which the plant assumes in withering.
It only remains to ask, Why was the mistletoe called the Golden Bough?[697] 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.[698] 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 [pg 287] 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.[699] 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,[700] probably against witchcraft.
The yellow hue of withered mistletoe may partly explain why the plant is thought to disclose yellow gold in the earth. Similarly fern-seed is thought to bloom like gold or fire and to reveal buried treasures on Midsummer Eve. Sometimes fern-seed is thought to bloom on Christmas night. The wicked weaver of Rotenburg.
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;[701] 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 or fern-bloom. We saw that fern-seed is popularly supposed to bloom like gold or fire on Midsummer Eve.[702] Thus in Bohemia it is said that “on St. John's Day fern-seed blooms with golden blossoms that gleam like fire.”[703] 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.[704] In Russia they say that if you [pg 288] 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.[705] 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 ground where they think a treasure is concealed.[706] 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.[707] 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.[708] 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.[709] And in the Tyrol and Bohemia if you place fern-seed among money, the money will never decrease, however much of it you spend.[710] Sometimes the [pg 289] fern-seed is supposed to bloom on Christmas night, and whoever catches it will become very rich.[711] In Styria they say that by gathering fern-seed on Christmas night you can force the devil to bring you a bag of money.[712] In Swabia likewise you can, by taking the proper precautions, compel Satan himself to fetch you a packet of fern-seed on Christmas night. But for four weeks previously, and during the whole of the Advent season, you must be very careful never to pray, never to go to church, and never to use holy water; you must busy yourself all day long with devilish thoughts, and cherish an ardent wish that the devil would help you to get money. Thus prepared you take your stand, between eleven and twelve on Christmas night, at the meeting of two roads, over both of which corpses have been carried to the churchyard. Here many people meet you, some of them dead and buried long ago, it may be your parents or grandparents, or old friends and acquaintances, and they stop and greet you, and ask, “What are you doing here?” And tiny little goblins hop and dance about and try to make you laugh. But if you smile or utter a single word, the devil will tear you to shreds and tatters on the spot. If, however, you stand glum and silent and solemn, there will come, after all the ghostly train has passed by, a man dressed as a hunter, and that is the devil. He will hand you a paper cornet full of fern-seed, which you must keep and carry about with you as long as you live. It will give you the power of doing as much work at your trade in a day as twenty or thirty ordinary men could do in the same time. So you will grow very rich. But few people have the courage to go through with the ordeal. The people of Rotenburg tell of a weaver of their town, who lived some two hundred and fifty years ago and performed prodigies of weaving by a simple application of fern-seed which he had been so fortunate as to obtain, no doubt from the devil, though that is not expressly alleged [pg 290] by tradition. Rich in the possession of this treasure, the lazy rascal worked only on Saturdays and spent all the rest of the week playing and drinking; yet in one day he wove far more cloth than any other skilled weaver who sat at his loom from morning to night every day of the week. Naturally he kept his own counsel, and nobody might ever have known how he did it, if it had not been for what, humanly speaking, you might call an accident, though for my part I cannot but regard it as the manifest finger of Providence. One day—it was the octave of a festival—the fellow had woven a web no less than a hundred ells long, and his mistress resolved to deliver it to her customer the same evening. So she put the cloth in a basket and away she trudged with it. Her way led her past a church, and as she passed the sacred edifice, she heard the tinkle of the holy bell which announced the elevation of the Host. Being a good woman she put her basket down, knelt beside it, and there, with the shadows gathering round her, committed herself to the care of God and his good angels and received, along with the kneeling congregation in the lighted church, the evening benediction, which kept her and them from all the perils and dangers of the night. Then rising refreshed she took up her basket. But what was her astonishment on looking into it to find the whole web reduced to a heap of yarn! The blessed words of the priest at the altar had undone the cursed spell of the Enemy of Mankind.[713]
The golden or fiery fern-seed appears to be an emanation of the sun's fire.
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.[714] 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 [pg 291] 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.[715] 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.
Like fern-seed the mistletoe is gathered at the solstices (Midsummer and Christmas) and is supposed to reveal treasures in the earth; perhaps, therefore, it too is deemed an emanation of the sun's golden fire. The bloom of the oak on Midsummer Eve.