The King of the Wood

Moving on from food for the stomach to food for thought...I keep finding juicy little nuggets that have gone out of print from our guidebooks so thought I'd just post them here because I like them. I hope you do, too. This is from our Cadogan guide to Rome and Central Italy.

 

                                                                      The Golden Bough, by J.M.W. Turner (1836)

 In this sacred grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day, and probably far into the night, a grim figure might be seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he kept peering warily about him as if at every instant he expected to be set upon by an enemy. He was a priest and a murderer; and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. 

                                                                                               James Frazer, The Golden Bough
 

Sir James Frazer was the son of a pharmacist from Glasgow who got a law degree because his strait-laced parents wanted him to, and instead of practising law then went off to become a classics fellow at Cambridge. 

 

In 1871 he happened to read about the singular customs of the sacred grove at Lake Nemi, ‘Diana’s Mirror’ in the Alban Hills, where her priest, an escaped slave known as the ‘King of the Wood’, ruled over the grove and its famous temple, until another would come to take his place. The challenge, for the intruder, took the form of chopping the mistletoe from an oak in Diana’s grove; an invitation to a fight that could only be to the death. 

 
 Frazer wondered why, but not in the innocent way that a less scholarly soul might wonder. Possessing some extreme strain of Scottish doggedness, he devoted the next twenty years of his life to finding out, and finally gave the world his answer in the thirteen volumes of The Golden Bough (1890), the foundation of modern anthropology. 

If the cult of Diana goes back to the remotest antiquity, it did not necessarily do so in Italy. As ancient writers attested, it was one of many Latin religious imports from the East. According to legends, Diana’s worship was brought to Italy by the hero Orestes from the Crimea, along with an image of the goddess hidden in a bundle of sticks. 

 
The Crimea, or the Chersonese, as it was known in classical times, was famous for outlandish religious practices, which usually involved blood, knives and horses. But the Latins, by way of the Greeks, would also have known other local variants of this most peculiar and dangerous of all goddesses – from Asia Minor, for example, where as the Ephesian Artemis she was worshipped in the form of an icon sprouting hundreds of breasts; her priests castrated themselves in her honour. 

Diana’s shrine at Nemi may have been the partial superimposition of foreign practices on a cult that already existed among the Latins. For Diana was not alone in her grove. As a classic ancient triple-goddess, she shared it with the crone Hecate and the mysterious nymph Egeria, who may have been the original goddess of the sanctuary. 

 
She was the lover of Rome’s legendary second king, Numa Pompilius, and taught him the laws and religious rituals that the Romans were to follow for centuries; it is entirely possible that Rome’s earliest kings were more sacred rulers than political leaders and, if he did not have to face death at the hands of a usurper, sacrifices of others may have been made in his place – Roman legends and the archaeological records are full of dark hints of human sacrifice, something the Romans suppressed all memory of in more civilized times. 

 
As Rome gained ascendency over the other Latin cities, the Romans took care to bring their gods and sacred places a little closer to home. A spring near the Appian Way was said to be the real home of Egeria, while Diana herself received a new sanctuary in a temple within the city walls.

 

                                                                      

 Lake Nemi  by John Robert Cozens, c. 1777

But perhaps Diana preferred to remain around her beautiful lake, for her worship, along with the strange custom of the grove, survived for centuries more. They were still at it in the enlightened reign of Hadrian, and how long after that no one knows. By this time, everything connected with Diana’s cult had become associated with the lower classes; Diana’s Roman temple was built on the Aventine hill, the working man’s district, and classical writers report that the grove at Nemi was constantly full of beggars, many of them from Rome’s large population of impoverished Jews. 

 
Even so, some of the more louche emperors took a special interest in Nemi, notably Caligula, who built luxurious pleasure barges on the lake, the famous ships that were later raised and displayed in the nearby Museum of Roman Ships before they were destroyed in World War II. It is said that when Caligula tired of one King of the Wood he purposely set a slave to kill him. 

 
Archaeologists entertain the grisly thought that in these later days the murder of the King had been brought out from the woods, and provided a bloody imperial entertainment in the theatre attached to the temple complex. It was not the sensationalism of this ancient rite, however, that set Frazer off on his twenty years of intellectual exploration. 

 

 One thing led to another: taboos, the ‘external soul’ (as the mistletoe, engendered by thunder, was the ‘soul’ of the oak), the ‘corn spirit’, and magical charms and rituals for the good of the crops, the cycle of the year, and its turning-points at the summer and winter solstices.  

 

Why must the King die? 

 

 

                           The Golden Bough, by Wenceslaus Hollar (17th century)

 

The main question was, why must the King die? Frazer tracked down innumerable ill-fated sacred Kings in cultures around the world, from ancient Sweden to the Zulu to the ‘King of Calicut’ on the Malabar coast to the Dinka and Shilluk tribes of the upper Nile. And he made the connection to the myriad gods of the Mediterranean and beyond who died too: Adonis, Attis, Osiris were the most famous, not to mention Jesus Christ, but ancient Greeks also showed visitors the ‘tombs’ of Dionysos and even Zeus, local relics of the days before gods became immortal.

Another question: why mistletoe? Ancient authorities linked the mistletoe to the golden bough plucked by Aeneas before his descent into the underworld; it was sacred to the Celtic Druids, and it formed the weapon that killed the Scandinavian god Balder. That led Frazer into a consideration of sacred trees around the world, which filled a volume or two of his great work.

 

The sacred king, this universal figure who hides at the magical roots of all religion, was in fact the spirit of the year, and he dies with it for the ‘good of the crops’, dies so that the eternal recurrence of death and rebirth in nature might be induced to continue.

This mighty theme, and the fascinating trip through the world’s antiquities and curiosities that illustrates it, made The Golden Bough one of the most popular and influential books of the 19th century; cast in Frazer’s flowing, silvery prose it is also a masterpiece of literature. 

 

The single-volume summation has been in print for over a century. In its wake, people began to look at the epics and myths of the past in a new way, and find the thread of Frazer’s idea running through everything from the Arthurian cycle to the story of Gilgamesh; it had a profound effect on many of the greatest 20th-century poets too, notably Eliot and Yeats.

Lake Nemi and the grove are still there, still beautiful and a bit uncanny, somehow magically preserved from the modern world and the noise of motor traffic (plenty of oaks, no mistletoe, but patches of pale, pretty violets everywhere; voices of women screaming far away, a crumpled pack of ‘Diana’ cigarettes by the roadside). 

 

Something still lives here. As we enter  a new millennium, obsessed with technics and parroting the fashionable rationalism of the day, desperately trying to convince ourselves it’s true, an old ghost waits quietly to tell us something different about our world and ourselves, something deep and strange, something that won’t go away.