The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion

These rules also apply to pubescent girls in many cultures, such as the seclusion of pubescent girls among a number of tribal peoples. From the onset of puberty, girls are kept away from the sunlight and prevented from touching the ground. There is evidence of similar practices in European folk tales. For example, maidens being forbidden from seeing the sun in traditional stories from Denmark, Austria, and Greece.

This seclusion also relates to a fear of menstrual blood, shown in various tribal customs obliging women to isolate themselves during their periods. Frazer cites the warning in Pliny’s Natural History that the touch of a menstruating woman can blight crops, kill seedling plants, and cause pregnant animals to miscarry. He points out that women are secluded for their own protection as well as for the protection of the world around them. They are kept “suspended between heaven and earth” (704), out of the glare of the sun and with their feet off the ground in order that their ethereal power might be both preserved and contained.

This chapter relates the story of the Norse God Balder, son of Odin, who was wise, beautiful, and loved by all the immortals. After Balder had a dream that seemed to foreshadow his death, the goddess Frigg took an oath from all the plants, animals, diseases, and elements of Earth that they would not harm or kill Balder. After this, the gods all amused themselves trying to kill their newly invincible companion. Only Loki was displeased with this situation. Learning from Frigg that the plant mistletoe had not been asked to swear the oath, he collected a sprig of mistletoe and directed the blind god Hother to shoot it at Balder. The branch impaled Balder, and he died. His wife, Nanna, who died of a broken heart on seeing his dead body, and his horse joined him on the funeral pyre on his ship. The Edda prophesies the joyous future resurrection of Balder.

Frazer suggests that the legend of Balder was dramatized in rituals based on its two key elements: the pulling of the mistletoe (i.e., the golden bough) and the death and burning of the god. Burning of the god is also enacted through annual fire festivals. In Catholic countries, these often take place during the Easter period and may involve burning an effigy of Judas. Another example is the Beltane fires in Scotland and Wales, which take place in May.

Fire festivals also occur during the Summer Solstice (which overlaps with the Christian festival of St. John the Baptist). However, Celtic peoples may have divided the year, not by the solstices, but rather by the beginning of summer (the first of May) and the beginning of winter (the first of November). This division derived from the fact that the Celts were mainly a pastoral people and their calendar was determined by the times when the cattle were driven to and from their summer pasture. It placed Halloween, a festival associated with the dead, at the beginning of the year. This occasion, too, is often marked with the lighting of fires.

Midsummer fire festivals were mirrored by Midwinter festivities of a similar nature, symbolically marking “the two great turning points in the sun’s apparent course through the sky” (736). The coincidence of the Christian Christmas with the winter solstice, suggests that the Christian rite sought to “divert” already established patterns of worship from the sun to Christ. For example, the tradition of burning a yule log is a throwback to these earlier fire festivals.

Fire rituals can also be performed at moments of particular crisis or need and especially in periods of epidemic disease. The fires were typically kindled with oak wood. Frazer argues that these festivals originally culminated in a human sacrifice of an individual embodying the tree-spirit or corn-spirit. Specifically, he refers to the pretense of throwing a victim into the Beltane fires and the similar treatment of the “Green Wolf” at the midsummer festival in Normandy. Frazer cites Roman accounts of sacrifices of live men, cattle, and other livestock inside giant wicker statues by Celtic druids during summer festivals. He suggests that the men, women, and animals burned at these events were perhaps deemed to be witches and warlocks. Celtic sacrifices were therefore not so far removed from the practices of the Christian church before the Enlightenment.

This chapter describes the second core element of the Balder myth: the branch of mistletoe. In the first section of the chapter, he cites Pliny to describe how the druids (and, apparently, the Romans) venerated mistletoe together with the oak tree on which it grows. The plant was deemed a universal healer and a cure for infertility. It was believed to be especially powerful if harvested on Midsummer’s Eve when many of the traditional fire festivals in remembrance of Balder also took place.

For this reason, the Balder myth may have been the “sacred text” for an annual magical fertility ritual of human sacrifice. The tree-spirit embodied by the human victim of these fire sacrifices may have been an oak since the oak was “pre-eminently the sacred tree of the Aryans” (753). The evergreen mistletoe was hailed as the “seat of life” (755) of the deciduous oak, with its eternal, divine spirit. It followed that the oak tree could not be sacrificed unless the mistletoe was pulled up.

The second section expands on the idea of the soul being located outside the body by citing various folk stories in which the individual remained invulnerable as long as their external soul remained intact.

Totemic animals, plants or objects with which individuals identify themselves can be seen as depositories for their external souls. In totemic cultures, the passage of the eternal soul to the totem can be enacted through a dramatic representation of death and resurrection as part of coming-of-age rituals. Frazer comments on the concurrence of the transference of the soul to the totem with the onset of puberty.

This chapter considers the apparent contradiction of Balder being killed by the totemic object in which his soul was preserved. The mistletoe, growing at a remove from the earth, is “poised between earth and heaven” (795) in the manner of a deity. When harvested for medicinal purposes, mistletoe was not allowed to touch the ground. In Sweden on Midsummer Eve, mistletoe was used to make divining rods with which to discover gold in the earth. This is deemed at once an emanation of the sun’s golden fire and a means of offering that fire back to the sun.

Frazer identifies the golden bough with the willow bough that Orpheus carried into the Underworld. He further notes that the fact that fire was originally made through the friction of wood on wood may have facilitated the identification of sylvan gods with sun gods.

Reflecting on the fact that oak trees are particularly likely to be struck by lightning, Frazer concludes that the evergreen mistletoe was believed to descend from the sun, like lightning, on Midsummer’s Eve. Balder’s death by a stroke of mistletoe can be read as representing his death by lightning. Frazer therefore concludes that the King of the Wood at Nemi may even have been Jupiter himself.

Frazer concludes by reflecting on the transition from magic to religion to science. Although the scientific theory of the world is currently dominant, it is not necessarily definitive and may yet be supplanted by a newer worldview. He reiterates the fact that science and magic shared a belief in an underlying order and logic behind natural phenomena while religion attributed these events to the will of divine beings.