Balder the Beautiful, Volume I A Study in Magic and Religion: the Golden Bough, Part VII | Page 3

which ideas radiate into the surrounding darkness,
kindled by the friction of mind with mind in the crowded haunts of men;
and it is natural that at these beacons of intellectual light all should
partake in some measure of the general illumination. No doubt the
mental ferment and unrest of great cities have their dark as well as their
bright side; but among the evils to be apprehended from them the
chances of a pagan revival need hardly be reckoned.
Another point on which I have changed my mind is the nature of the
great Aryan god whom the Romans called Jupiter and the Greeks Zeus.
Whereas I formerly argued that he was primarily a personification of
the sacred oak and only in the second place a personification of the
thundering sky, I now invert the order of his divine functions and
believe that he was a sky-god before he came to be associated with the
oak. In fact, I revert to the traditional view of Jupiter, recant my heresy,
and am gathered like a lost sheep into the fold of mythological
orthodoxy. The good shepherd who has brought me back is my friend
Mr. W. Warde Fowler. He has removed the stone over which I
stumbled in the wilderness by explaining in a simple and natural way
how a god of the thundering sky might easily come to be afterwards
associated with the oak. The explanation turns on the great frequency
with which, as statistics prove, the oak is struck by lightning beyond
any other tree of the wood in Europe. To our rude forefathers, who
dwelt in the gloomy depths of the primaeval forest, it might well seem
that the riven and blackened oaks must indeed be favourites of the
sky-god, who so often descended on them from the murky cloud in a
flash of lightning and a crash of thunder.
This change of view as to the great Aryan god necessarily affects my
interpretation of the King of the Wood, the priest of Diana at Aricia, if I

may take that discarded puppet out of the box again for a moment. On
my theory the priest represented Jupiter in the flesh, and accordingly, if
Jupiter was primarily a sky-god, his priest cannot have been a mere
incarnation of the sacred oak, but must, like the deity whose
commission he bore, have been invested in the imagination of his
worshippers with the power of overcasting the heaven with clouds and
eliciting storms of thunder and rain from the celestial vault. The
attribution of weather-making powers to kings or priests is very
common in primitive society, and is indeed one of the principal levers
by which such personages raise themselves to a position of superiority
above their fellows. There is therefore no improbability in the
supposition that as a representative of Jupiter the priest of Diana
enjoyed this reputation, though positive evidence of it appears to be
lacking.
Lastly, in the present edition I have shewn some grounds for thinking
that the Golden Bough itself, or in common parlance the mistletoe on
the oak, was supposed to have dropped from the sky upon the tree in a
flash of lightning and therefore to contain within itself the seed of
celestial fire, a sort of smouldering thunderbolt. This view of the priest
and of the bough which he guarded at the peril of his life has the
advantage of accounting for the importance which the sanctuary at
Nemi acquired and the treasure which it amassed through the offerings
of the faithful; for the shrine would seem to have been to ancient what
Loreto has been to modern Italy, a place of pilgrimage, where princes
and nobles as well as commoners poured wealth into the coffers of
Diana in her green recess among the Alban hills, just as in modern
times kings and queens vied with each other in enriching the black
Virgin who from her Holy House on the hillside at Loreto looks out on
the blue Adriatic and the purple Apennines. Such pious prodigality
becomes more intelligible if the greatest of the gods was indeed
believed to dwell in human shape with his wife among the woods of
Nemi.
These are the principal points on which I have altered my opinion since
the last edition of my book was published. The mere admission of such
changes may suffice to indicate the doubt and uncertainty which attend

enquiries of this nature. The whole fabric of ancient mythology is so
foreign to our modern ways of thought, and the evidence concerning it
is for the most part so fragmentary, obscure, and conflicting that in our
attempts to piece together and interpret it we can hardly hope to reach
conclusions that will completely satisfy either ourselves or others. In
this as in other branches