Now grounds have been shown for believing that the priest of the
Arician grove--the King of the Wood--personified the tree on which
grew the Golden Bough. Hence if that tree was the oak, the King of
the Wood must have been a personification of the oakspirit. 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. 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, 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.
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