It is not a new opinion that the Golden Bough was the mistletoe.
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." 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.
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