Page:Frazer (1890) The Golden Bough (IA goldenboughstudy01fraz).djvu/128

106 in their stalls and while they strayed in the forest. Lastly, in the sacred spring which bubbled, and the perpetual fire which seems to have burned in the Arician grove, we may perhaps detect traces of other attributes of forest gods, the power, namely, to make the rain to fall and the sun to shine. This last attribute perhaps explains why Virbius, the companion deity of Diana at Nemi, was by some believed to be the sun.

Thus the cult of the Arician grove was essentially that of a tree-spirit or wood deity. But our examination of European folk-custom demonstrated that a tree-spirit is frequently represented by a living person, who is regarded as an embodiment of the tree-spirit and possessed of its fertilising powers; and our previous survey of primitive belief proved that this conception of a god incarnate in a living man is common among rude races. Further we have seen that the living person who is believed to embody in himself the tree-spirit is often called a king, in which respect, again, he strictly represents the tree-spirit. For the sacred cedar of the Gilgit tribes is called, as we have seen, “the Dreadful King”; and the chief forest god of the Finns, by name Tapio, represented as an old man with a brown beard, a high hat of fir-cones and a coat of tree-moss, was styled the Wood King, Lord of the Woodland, Golden King of the Wood. May not then the King of the Wood in the Arician grove have been, like the King of May, the Grass King, and the like, an incarnation of the tree-spirit or spirit of vegetation? His title, his sacred