The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 11 of 12)

The idea that the life of the oak was in the mistletoe was probably suggested, as I have said, by the observation that in winter the mistletoe growing on the oak remains green while the oak itself is leafless. But the position of the plant – growing not from the ground but from the trunk or branches of the tree – might confirm this idea. Primitive man might think that, like himself, the oak-spirit had sought to deposit his life in some safe place, and for this purpose had pitched on the mistletoe, which, being in a sense neither on earth nor in heaven, might be supposed to be fairly out of harm's way. In the first chapter we saw that primitive man seeks to preserve the life of his human divinities by keeping them poised between earth and heaven, as the place where they are least likely to be assailed by the dangers that encompass the life of man on earth. We can therefore understand why it has been a rule both of ancient and of modern folk-medicine that the mistletoe should not be allowed to touch the ground; were it to touch the ground, its healing virtue would be gone.679 This may be a survival of the old superstition that the plant in which the life of the sacred tree was concentrated should not be exposed to the risk incurred by contact with the earth. In an Indian legend, which offers a parallel to the Balder myth, Indra swore to the demon Namuci that he would slay him neither by day nor by night, neither with staff nor with bow, neither with the palm of the hand nor with the fist, neither with the wet nor with the dry. But he killed him in the morning twilight by sprinkling over him the foam of the sea.680 The foam of the sea is just such an object as a savage might choose to put his life in, because it occupies that sort of intermediate or nondescript position between earth and sky or sea and sky in which primitive man sees safety. It is therefore not surprising that the foam of the river should be the totem of a clan in India.681

Analogous superstitions attaching to a parasitic rowan.

Again, the view that the mistletoe owes its mystic character partly to its not growing on the ground is confirmed by a parallel superstition about the mountain-ash or rowan-tree. In Jutland a rowan that is found growing out of the top of another tree is esteemed “exceedingly effective against witchcraft: since it does not grow on the ground witches have no power over it; if it is to have its full effect it must be cut on Ascension Day.”682 Hence it is placed over doors to prevent the ingress of witches.683 In Sweden and Norway, also, magical properties are ascribed to a “flying-rowan” (flögrönn), that is to a rowan which is found growing not in the ordinary fashion on the ground but on another tree, or on a roof, or in a cleft of the rock, where it has sprouted from seed scattered by birds. They say that a man who is out in the dark should have a bit of “flying-rowan” with him to chew; else he runs a risk of being bewitched and of being unable to stir from the spot.684 A Norwegian story relates how once on a time a Troll so bewitched some men who were ploughing in a field that they could not drive a straight furrow; only one of the ploughmen was able to resist the enchantment because by good luck his plough was made out of a “flying-rowan.”685 In Sweden, too, the “flying-rowan” is used to make the divining rod, which discovers hidden treasures. This useful art has nowadays unfortunately been almost forgotten, but three hundred years ago it was in full bloom, as we gather from the following contemporary account. “If in the woods or elsewhere, on old walls or on high mountains or rocks you perceive a rowan-tree (runn) which has sprung from a seed that a bird has dropped from its bill, you must either knock or break off that rod or tree in the twilight between the third day and the night after Ladyday. But you must take care that neither iron nor steel touches it and that in carrying it home you do not let it fall on the ground. Then place it under the roof on a spot under which you have laid various metals, and you will soon be surprised to see how that rod under the roof gradually bends in the direction of the metals. When your rod has sat there in the same spot for fourteen days or more, you take a knife or an awl, which has been stroked with a magnet, and with it you slit the bark on all sides, and pour or drop the blood of a cock (best of all the blood from the comb of a cock which is all of one colour) on the said slits in the bark; and when the blood has dried, the rod is ready and will give public proof of the efficacy of its marvellous properties.”686 Just as in Scandinavia the parasitic rowan is deemed a countercharm to sorcery, so in Germany the parasitic mistletoe is still commonly considered a protection against witchcraft, and in Sweden, as we saw, the mistletoe which is gathered on Midsummer Eve is attached to the ceiling of the house, the horse's stall or the cow's crib, in the belief that this renders the Troll powerless to injure man or beast.687

The fate of the Hays believed to be bound up with the mistletoe on Errol's oak.

The view that the mistletoe was not merely the instrument of Balder's death, but that it contained his life, is countenanced by the analogy of a Scottish superstition. Tradition ran that the fate of the Hays of Errol, an estate in Perthshire, near the Firth of Tay, was bound up with the mistletoe that grew on a certain great oak. A member of the Hay family has recorded the old belief as follows: “Among the low country families the badges are now almost generally forgotten; but it appears by an ancient MS. and the tradition of a few old people in Perthshire, that the badge of the Hays was the mistletoe. There was formerly in the neighbourhood of Errol, and not far from the Falcon stone, a vast oak of an unknown age, and upon which grew a profusion of the plant: many charms and legends were considered to be connected with the tree, and the duration of the family of Hay was said to be united with its existence. It was believed that a sprig of the mistletoe cut by a Hay on Allhallowmas eve, with a new dirk, and after surrounding the tree three times sunwise, and pronouncing a certain spell, was a sure charm against all glamour or witchery, and an infallible guard in the day of battle. A spray gathered in the same manner was placed in the cradle of infants, and thought to defend them from being changed for elf-bairns by the fairies. Finally, it was affirmed, that when the root of the oak had perished, ‘the grass should grow in the hearth of Errol, and a raven should sit in the falcon's nest.’ The two most unlucky deeds which could be done by one of the name of Hay were, to kill a white falcon, and to cut down a limb from the oak of Errol. When the old tree was destroyed I could never learn. The estate has been some time sold out of the family of Hay, and of course it is said that the fatal oak was cut down a short time before.”688 The old superstition is recorded in verses which are traditionally ascribed to Thomas the Rhymer: —

“While the mistletoe bats on Errol's aik,And that aik stands fast,The Hays shall flourish, and their good grey hawkShall nocht flinch before the blast.But when the root of the aik decays,And the mistletoe dwines on its withered breast,The grass shall grow on Errol's hearthstane,And the corbie roup in the falcon's nest.”689

The life of the Lachlins and the deer of Finchra.

The idea that the fate of a family, as distinct from the lives of its members, is bound up with a particular plant or tree, is no doubt comparatively modern. The older view may have been that the lives of all the Hays were in this particular mistletoe, just as in the Indian story the lives of all the ogres are in a lemon; to break a twig of the mistletoe would then have been to kill one of the Hays. Similarly in the island of Rum, whose bold mountains the voyager from Oban to Skye observes to seaward, it was thought that if one of the family of Lachlin shot a deer on the mountain of Finchra, he would die suddenly or contract a distemper which would soon prove fatal.690 Probably the life of the Lachlins was bound up with the deer on Finchra, as the life of the Hays was bound up with the mistletoe on Errol's oak, and the life of the Dalhousie family with the Edgewell Tree.

The Golden Bough seems to have been a glorified mistletoe.

It is not a new opinion that the Golden Bough was the mistletoe.691 True, Virgil does not identify but only compares it with 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 holm-oak the leafy gold, so rustled in the gentle breeze the golden leaf.”692 Here Virgil definitely describes the Golden Bough as growing on a holm-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.

If the Golden Bough was the mistletoe, the King of the Wood at Nemi may have personated an oak spirit and perished in an oak fire.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

Now, like fern-seed, the mistletoe is gathered either at Midsummer or Christmas716– 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 sun-down, and when it rests directly over treasure, the rod begins to move as if it were alive.717 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 perhaps kindled the solstitial and other ceremonial fires in part as sun-charms, that is, with the intention of supplying the sun with fresh fire; and as these fires were usually made by the friction or combustion of oak-wood,718 it may 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 may 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 if the life of the oak was conceived to be in the mistletoe, the mistletoe must on that view 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 might 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.719 At Pulverbatch, in Shropshire, it was believed within living memory that the oak-tree blooms on Midsummer Eve and the blossom withers before daylight. A maiden who wishes to know her lot in marriage should spread a white cloth under the tree at night, and in the morning she will find a little dust, which is all that remains of the flower. She should place the pinch of dust under her pillow, and then her future husband will appear to her in her dreams.720 This fleeting bloom of the oak, if I am right, was probably the mistletoe in its character of the Golden Bough. The conjecture is confirmed by the observation that in Wales a real sprig of mistletoe gathered on Midsummer Eve is similarly placed under the pillow to induce prophetic dreams;721 and further the mode of catching the imaginary bloom of the oak in a white cloth is exactly that which was employed by the Druids to catch the real mistletoe when it dropped from the bough of the oak, severed by the golden sickle.722 As Shropshire borders on Wales, the belief that the oak blooms on Midsummer Eve 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,723 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, so little descriptive of its usual appearance on the tree, should have been applied to the seemingly insignificant parasite. Further, we can perhaps see why in antiquity mistletoe was believed to possess the remarkable property of extinguishing fire,724 and why in Sweden it is still kept in houses as a safeguard against conflagration.725 Its fiery nature marks it out, on homoeopathic principles, as the best possible cure or preventive of injury by fire.

Aeneas and the Golden Bough. Orpheus and the willow.

These considerations may partially explain why Virgil makes Aeneas carry a glorified bough of mistletoe with him on his descent into the gloomy subterranean world. The poet describes how at the very gates of hell there stretched a vast and gloomy wood, and how the hero, following the flight of two doves that lured him on, wandered into the depths of the immemorial forest till he saw afar off through the shadows of the trees the flickering light of the Golden Bough illuminating the matted boughs overhead.726 If the mistletoe, as a yellow withered bough in the sad autumn woods, was conceived to contain the seed of fire, what better companion could a forlorn wanderer in the nether shades take with him than a bough that would be a lamp to his feet as well as a rod and staff to his hands? Armed with it he might boldly confront the dreadful spectres that would cross his path on his adventurous journey. Hence when Aeneas, emerging from the forest, comes to the banks of Styx, winding slow with sluggish stream through the infernal marsh, and the surly ferryman refuses him passage in his boat, he has but to draw the Golden Bough from his bosom and hold it up, and straightway the blusterer quails at the sight and meekly receives the hero into his crazy bark, which sinks deep in the water under the unusual weight of the living man.727 Even in recent times, as we have seen, mistletoe has been deemed a protection against witches and trolls,728 and the ancients may well have credited it with the same magical virtue. And if the parasite can, as some of our peasants believe, open all locks,729 why should it not have served as an “open Sesame” in the hands of Aeneas to unlock the gates of death? There is some reason to suppose that when Orpheus in like manner descended alive to hell to rescue the soul of his dead wife Eurydice from the shades, he carried with him a willow bough to serve as a passport on his journey to and from the land of the dead; for in the great frescoes representing the nether world, with which the master hand of Polygnotus adorned the walls of a loggia at Delphi, Orpheus was depicted sitting pensively under a willow, holding his lyre, now silent and useless, in his left hand, while with his right he grasped the drooping boughs of the tree.730 If the willow in the picture had indeed the significance which an ingenious scholar has attributed to it,731 the painter meant to represent the dead musician dreaming wistfully of the time when the willow had carried him safe back across the Stygian ferry to that bright world of love and music which he was now to see no more. Again, on an ancient sarcophagus, which exhibits in sculptured relief the parting of Adonis from Aphrodite, the hapless youth, reclining in the lap of his leman, holds a branch, which has been taken to signify that he, too, by the help of the mystic bough, might yet be brought back from the gates of death to life and love.732