of oak wood burned day and night in his honour; and if ever it went out the attendants paid for their negligence with their lives. Perun seems, like Zeus and Jupiter, to have been the chief god of his people; for Procopius tells us that the Slavs "believe that one god, the maker of lightning, is alone lord of all things, and they sacrifice to him oxen and every victim."
The chief deity of the Lithuanians was Perkunas or Perkuns, the god of thunder and lightning, whose resemblance to Zeus and Jupiter has often been pointed out. Oaks were sacred to him, and when they were cut down by the Christian missionaries, the people loudly complained that their sylvan deities were destroyed. Perpetual fires, kindled with the wood of certain oak-trees, were kept up
in honour of Perkunas; if such a fire went out, it was lighted again by friction of the sacred wood. Men sacrificed to oak-trees for good crops, while women did the same to lime-trees; from which we may infer that they regarded oaks as male and lime-trees as female. And in time of drought, when they wanted rain, they used to sacrifice a black heifer, a black he-goat, and a black cock to the thunder god in the depths of the woods. On such occasions the people assembled in great numbers from the country round about, ate and drank, and called upon Perkunas. They carried a bowl of beer thrice round the fire, then poured the liquor on the flames, while they prayed to the god to send showers. Thus the chief Lithuanian deity presents a close resemblance to Zeus and Jupiter,
since he was the god of the oak, the thunder, and the rain.
From the foregoing survey it appears that a god of the oak, the thunder, and the rain was worshipped of old by all the main branch-
es of the Aryan stock in Europe, and was indeed the chief deity of their pantheon.
XVI. Dianus and Diana
IN THIS CHAPTER I propose to recapitulate the conclusions to which the enquiry has thus far led us, and drawing together the scattered rays of light, to turn them on the dark figure of the priest of Nemi.
We have found that at an early stage of society men, ignorant of the secret processes of nature and of the narrow limits within which it is in our power to control and direct them, have commonly arrogated to themselves functions which in the present state of knowledge we should deem superhuman or divine. The illusion has been fostered and maintained by the same causes which begot it, namely, the marvellous order and uniformity with which nature conducts her operations, the wheels of her great machine revolving with a smoothness and precision which enable the patient observer to anticipate in general the season, if not the very hour, when
they will bring round the fulfilment of his hopes or the accomplishment of his fears. The regularly recurring events of this great
cycle, or rather series of cycles, soon stamp themselves even on the dull mind of the savage. He foresees them, and foreseeing them
mistakes the desired recurrence for an effect of his own will, and the dreaded recurrence for an effect of the will of his enemies.
Thus the springs which set the vast machine in motion, though they lie far beyond our ken, shrouded in a mystery which we can
never hope to penetrate, appear to ignorant man to lie within his reach: he fancies he can touch them and so work by magic art all
manner of good to himself and evil to his foes. In time the fallacy of this belief becomes apparent to him: he discovers that there
are things he cannot do, pleasures which he is unable of himself to procure, pains which even the most potent magician is powerless
to avoid. The unattainable good, the inevitable ill, are now ascribed by him to the action of invisible powers, whose favour is joy and
life, whose anger is misery and death. Thus magic tends to be displaced by religion, and the sorcerer by the priest. At this stage of
thought the ultimate causes of things are conceived to be personal beings, many in number and often discordant in character, who
partake of the nature and even of the frailty of man, though their might is greater than his, and their life far exceeds the span of his
ephemeral existence. Their sharply-marked individualities, their clear-cut outlines have not yet begun, under the powerful solvent of
philosophy, to melt and coalesce into that single unknown substratum of phenomena which, according to the qualities with which
our imagination invests it, goes by one or other of the high-sounding names which the wit of man has devised to hide his ignorance.
Accordingly, so long as men look on their gods as beings akin to themselves and not raised to an unapproachable height above them,
they believe it to be possible for those of their own number who surpass their fellows to attain to the divine rank after death or even
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in life. Incarnate human deities of this latter sort may be said to halt midway between the age of magic and the age of religion. If they bear the names and display the pomp of deities, the powers which they are supposed to wield are commonly those of their
predecessor the magician. Like him, they are expected to guard their people against hostile enchantments, to heal them in sickness, to
bless them with offspring, and to provide them with an abundant supply of food by regulating the weather and performing the other
ceremonies which are deemed necessary to ensure the fertility of the earth and the multiplication of animals. Men who are credited
with powers so lofty and far-reaching naturally hold the highest place in the land, and while the rift between the spiritual and the
temporal spheres has not yet widened too far, they are supreme in civil as well as religious matters: in a word, they are kings as well as
gods. Thus the divinity which hedges a king has its roots deep down in human history, and long ages pass before these are sapped by
a profounder view of nature and man.
In the classical period of Greek and Latin antiquity the reign of kings was for the most part a thing of the past; yet the stories of their lineage, titles, and pretensions suffice to prove that they too claimed to rule by divine right and to exercise superhuman powers. Hence we may without undue temerity assume that the King of the Wood at Nemi, though shorn in later times of his glory and fallen on evil days, represented a long line of sacred kings who had once received not only the homage but the adoration of their subjects in return for the manifold blessings which they were supposed to dispense. What little we know of the functions of Diana
in the Arician grove seems to prove that she was here conceived as a goddess of fertility, and particularly as a divinity of childbirth. It is reasonable, therefore, to suppose that in the discharge of these important duties she was assisted by her priest, the two figuring as King and Queen of the Wood in a solemn marriage, which was intended to make the earth gay with the blossoms of spring and the fruits of autumn, and to gladden the hearts of men and women with healthful offspring.
If the priest of Nemi posed not merely as a king, but as a god of the grove, we have still to ask, What deity in particular did he personate? The answer of antiquity is that he represented Virbius, the consort or lover of Diana. But this does not help us much, for of Virbius we know little more than the name. A clue to the mystery is perhaps supplied by the Vestal fire which burned in the grove. For the perpetual holy fires of the Aryans in Europe appear to have been commonly kindled and fed with oakwood, and
in Rome itself, not many miles from Nemi, the fuel of the Vestal fire consisted of oaken sticks or logs, as has been proved by a microscopic analysis of the charred embers of the Vestal fire, which were discovered by Commendatore G. Boni in the course of the memorable excavations which he conducted in the Roman forum at the end of the nineteenth century. But the ritual of the various Latin towns seems to have been marked by great uniformity; hence it is reasonable to conclude that wherever in Latium a Vestal fire was maintained, it was fed, as at Rome, with wood of the sacred oak. If this was so at Nemi, it becomes probable that the hallowed grove there consisted of a natural oakwood, and that therefore the tree which the King of the Wood had to guard at the peril of