XXVIII. The Killing of the Tree-Spirit
1. The Whitsuntide Mummers
IT remains to ask what light the custom of killing the divine king
or priest sheds upon the special subject to our enquiry. In an
earlier part of this work we saw reason to suppose that the King of
the Wood at Nemi was regarded as an incarnation of a tree-spirit or
of the spirit of vegetation, and that as such he would be endowed,
in the belief of his worshippers, with a magical power of making the
trees to bear fruit, the crops to grow, and so on. His life must
therefore have been held very precious by his worshippers, and was
probably hedged in by a system of elaborate precautions or taboos
like those by which, in so many places, the life of the man-god has
been guarded against the malignant influence of demons and
sorcerers. But we have seen that the very value attached to the life
of the man-god necessitates his violent death as the only means of
preserving it from the inevitable decay of age. The same reasoning
would apply to the King of the Wood; he, too, had to be killed in
order that the divine spirit, incarnate in him, might be transferred
in its integrity to his successor.
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