Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/398

392 regarded as incarnations of the forest or field divinities. He points out similar cases where king, priest, or even god is slain, so that he should not die a natural death with his powers enfeebled. There can be little doubt that he has proved this part of his case up to the hilt. I am not so convinced, however, of his success with the bough that plays the title rôle to his book. This he considers to be the “external soul” (“Life-Index” was Capt. Temple’s very apt title for it) of the tree, and probably of the grove. So far so good, but why should a would-be successor of the Arician priest have to pluck it before beginning the fight with the present possessor? There can be two or more external souls of a being, answers Mr. Frazer, and both must be slain or annihilated before the soul can pass in fresh to a new external home. The moral of that would seem to be, rather keep one of the external souls vigorous, and all will be well. As one of Mr. Stevenson’s characters remarks, “It’s not much use killing a man if he’s got another life.” The Golden Bough may be the mistletoe, and the external soul of the oak, but why it had to be plucked before the combat in the grove of Nemi, is, I confess, to me a mystery still.

So much for the nominal subject of the book, which, after all, is but one of the curiosities of custom that are interesting to solve indeed, but yet seem by-paths in the search after mythological truth. But those who remember Mr. Frazer’s first and still most brilliant piece of work in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute, for 1885, on Burial Customs, will know that it is his way to tack on to such seeming trivialities an enormous mass of well-digested facts bearing on his nominal subject, but really of more interest than it. He has pursued the same course on the present occasion. He has incorporated in this book the greater part of Mannhardt’s researches on agricultural customs and their significance, with additions from his own unrivalled collections. The most remarkable of these is that deduced from Harvest Home games, which would