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.1 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 either at Midsummer or Christmas—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 mistletoc, or of four different kinds of wood one of which must be mistletoe. The treasure-seeker places the rod on the ground after sun-down, and when it rests directly over treasure, the rod begins to move as if it were alive.3 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 old Aryans probably kindled the midsummer bonfires as sun-charms, that is, with the intention of supplying the

1 L. Bechstein, Deutsches Sagenbuch (Leipsic, 1853), p. 430, No. 500; id., Thüringer Sagenbuch (Leipsic, 1885), ii. p. 17 sq., No. 161.

2 For gathering it at midsummer, see above, pp. 343, 344. The custom of gathering it at Christmas still survives among ourselves. At York "on the eve of Christmas Day they carry mistletoe to the high altar of the cathedral, and proclaim a public and universal liberty, pardon, and freedom to all sorts of inferior and even wicked people at the gates of the city, towards the four quarters of heaven" (Stukeley, Medallic History of Carausius, quoted by Brand, Popular Antiquities, i. 525). This last custom, which is now doubt

less obsolete, may have been a relic of an annual period of license like the Saturnalia. The traditional privilege associated with the mistletoe is probably another relic of the same

sort.

3 Afzelius, Volkssagen und Volkslieder aus Schwedens älterer und neuerer Zeit, i. 41 sq.; Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie,iii. 289: L. Lloyd, Pasant Life in Sweden, p. 266 sq. In the Tyrol they say that if mistletoe grows on a hazel-tree, there must be a treasure under the tree (Von Alpenburg, Mythen und Sagen Tirols, p. 398). We have seen that the divining-rod which reveals treasures is commonly cut from a hazel (above, p. 342).

1

Isun with fresh fire. But as this fire was always elicited by the friction of oak-wood, it must have appeared to the ancient 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 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.2 At Pulverbatch, in Shropshire, it was believed within living memory that the oak-tree blooms on Midsummer Eve and the blossom withers before daylight. 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, 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, perhaps, 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.

1 Above, p. 348.

2 Fern-seed is supposed to bloom at Easter as well as at midsummer and Christmas (Ralston, Songs of the Russian People, p. 98 sq.); and Easter, as we have seen, is one of the times when sun-fires are kindled.

3 Burne and Jackson, Shropshire Folk-lore, p. 242.

+ P. 343.

The reason why Virgil represents Aeneas as taking the mistletoe with him to Hades is perhaps that the mistletoe was supposed to repel evil spirits

1

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 rerepresented 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," 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. The Senel Indians of California "profess to believe that the whole world was once a globe of fire, whence that element passed up into the trees, and now comes out whenever two pieces of wood are rubbed together." 2 In the Vedic hymns the fire-god Agni "is spoken of as born in wood, as the embryo of plants, or as distributed in plants. He is also said to have entered into all plants or to strive after them. When he is called the embryo

of trees, or of trees as well as plants, there may be a sideglance at the fire produced in forests by the friction of the boughs of trees."3 In some Australian languages the words for wood and fire are the same.* Thus all trees, or at least the particular sorts of trees whose wood he employs in fire-making, must be regarded by the savage as reservoirs of hidden fire, and it is natural that he should describe them by epithets like golden, shining, or bright.

(see above, pp. 344, 448). Hence when Charon is disposed to bluster at Aeneas, the sight of the Golden Bough quiets him (Aen. vi. 406 sq.). Perhaps also the power ascribed to the mistletoe of laying bare the secrets of the earth may have suggested its use as a kind of 66 open Sesame" to the lower world. Compare Aen. vi. 140 sq.—

"Sed non ante datur telluris operta subire,

May not this have been the

Auricomos quam qui decerpserit arbore jetus."

1 Die Edda, übersetzt von K. Simrock, p. 264.

S. Powers, Tribes of California,

P. 171.

3 A. A. Macdonell, Vedic Mythology, p. 91 sq.; cp. H. Oldenberg, Die Religion des Veda, p. 120.

E. M. Curr, The Australian Race, i. 9, 18.

origin of the name, "the Bright or Shining One" (Zeus, Jove), by which the ancient Greeks and Italians designated their supreme god?1 It is at least highly significant that, amongst 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 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.

We are at the end of our inquiry, but as often happens in the search after truth, if we have answered one question, we have raised many more; if we have followed one track home, we have had to pass by others that opened off it and led, or seemed to lead, to far other goals than the sacred grove at Nemi. Some of these paths we have followed a little way; others, if fortune should be kind, the writer and the reader may one day pursue together. For the present we have journeyed far enough together, and it is time to part. Yet before we do so, we may well ask ourselves whether there is not some more general conclusion, some lesson, if possible, of hope and encouragement, to be drawn from the melancholy record of human error and folly which has engaged our attention in these volumes.

If then we consider, on the one hand, the essential similarity of man's chief wants everywhere and at all times, and on the other hand, the wide difference between the means he has adopted to satisfy them in different ages, we shall perhaps be disposed to conclude that the movement of the higher thought, so far as we can trace it, has on the whole been from magic through religion to science. In magic man depends on his own strength to meet the difficulties and dangers that beset him on every side. He believes in a certain established order of nature on which he can surely count, and which he can manipulate for his own ends. When he discovers his mistake; when he recognises sadly that both the order of nature which he had assumed and the control which he had believed himself to exercise over it were purely imaginary, he ceases to rely on his own intelligence and his own unaided efforts, and throws himself humbly on the mercy of certain great invisible beings behind the veil of nature, to whom he now ascribes all those far-reaching powers which he once arrogated to himself. Thus in the acuter minds magic is gradually superseded by religion, which explains the succession of natural phenomena as regulated by the will, the passion, or the caprice of spiritual beings like man in kind, though vastly superior to him in power.

But as time goes on this explanation in its turn