Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/454

 424 The European Sky -god.

adequate answer to our second question : Why was the Delphic victor crowned with laurel, fiot with oak ? We reply with some confidence that the laurel or bay was a recognised substitute for the oak.

One more botanical point, and I have done. In Greece special importance was attached to mistletoe (tfo?) grow- ing on the oak. lon^-'^ the tragedian in his Phoenix or Caeneus called mistletoe, "the sweat of the oak," just as Antiphanes^"^ the comedian in his Aphrodisius called wine " the sweat of the Bromian spring," i.e. of the vine. The implication is perhaps that the mistletoe was the concentrated essence, or life-blood of the oak. This assumption at least enables us to understand the part played by mistletoe in myth and cult. The good ship Argo was not only fitted with a fragment of Dodonaean oak,^-^ but also, according to Alexander Polyhistor,^-^'^ constructed of wood from the " lion "-tree, which he described as a tree like the mistletoe-bearing oak : it could not, he said, be destroyed by water or by fire^^^ any more than the mistletoe can. If, as I have already supposed,^"^" the Argo or Zeus-ship was a mythical expression for the sun, it may be that the mistletoe was credited with special

Sk avTo Kai AijXia. Michel 1 128 (Thessaly) dpxtcavxva^opiiaaQ. Collitz 1329 (Thessaly) Aavxt'ai[ov]. Alcman /ra^. 17 Bergk^ cavxyo. Athen. 45 D. For Ca^neus as the Greek Balder see Class. Rev., xviii., 82.


 * -8 Antiphanes ap. Athen., 449 c.

329 Folk-Lore, xv., 270.

^^ Alexander Polyhistor ap. Plin. itai. hist., 13. 119, Alexander Cornelius arborem leonem (so codd. M. D. : eonem codd. r. v.) appellavit ex qua facta asset Argo, similem robori viscum ferenti, quce neque aqua neque igni possit corrumpi, sicuti nee viscum, nulli alii cognitam, quod equidem sciam.

8^' On mistletoe as a means of extinguishing fire consult Tlin. nat. hist., 33. 94.

=•32 Folk-Lorc, xv., 270.