If Virbius was, as I have tried to show, a
tree-spirit, he must have been the spirit of the oak on which grew
the Golden Bough; for tradition represented him as the first of the
Kings of the Wood. As an oak-spirit he must have been supposed
periodically to rekindle the sun's fire, and might therefore easily
be confounded with the sun itself. Similarly we can explain why
Balder, an oak-spirit, was described as "so fair of face and so
shining that a light went forth from him," and why he should have
been so often taken to be the sun. And in general we may say that in
primitive society, when the only known way of making fire is by the
friction of wood, the savage must necessarily conceive of fire as a
property stored away, like sap or juice, in trees, from which he has
laboriously to extract it. The Senal Indians of California "profess
to believe that the whole world was once a globe of fire, whence
that element passed up into the trees, and now comes out whenever
two pieces of wood are rubbed together." Similarly the Maidu Indians
of California hold that "the earth was primarily a globe of molten
matter, and from that the principle of fire ascended through the
roots into the trunk and branches of trees, whence the Indians can
extract it by means of their drill.
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