The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 02 of 12)Frazer, James George
Religion
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 02 of 12)
Frazer, James George
Magic; Mythology; Religion; Superstition
Recapitulation: rise of sacred kings endowed with magical or divine
powers; the King of the Wood at Nemi seems to have personified Jupiter
the god of the oak and to have mated with Diana the goddess of the oak;
Dianus (Janus) and Diana originally dialectically different forms of
Jupiter and Juno; Janus (Dianus) not originally a god of doors;
double-headed figure of Janus (Dianus) derived from a custom of placing
him as sentinel at doorways; parallel custom among the negroes of
Surinam; originally the King of the Wood at Nemi represented Dianus
(Janus), a duplicate form of Jupiter, the god of the oak, the thunder,
and the sky.
INDEX Pp. 389-417
CHAPTER VIII
DEPARTMENTAL KINGS OF NATURE
The preceding investigation has proved that the same [Sidenote:
Departmental kings of nature.] union of sacred functions with a royal
title which meets us in the King of the Wood at Nemi, the Sacrificial
King at Rome, and the magistrate called the King at Athens, occurs
frequently outside the limits of classical antiquity and is a common
feature of societies at all stages from barbarism to civilisation.
Further, it appears that the royal priest is often a king, not only in
name but in fact, swaying the sceptre as well as the crosier. All this
confirms the traditional view of the origin of the titular and priestly
kings in the republics of ancient Greece and Italy. At least by shewing
that the combination of spiritual and temporal power, of which
Graeco-Italian tradition preserved the memory, has actually existed in
many places, we have obviated any suspicion of improbability that might
have attached to the tradition. Therefore we may now fairly ask, May not
the King of the Wood have had an origin like that which a probable
tradition assigns to the Sacrificial King of Rome and the titular King
of Athens? In other words, may not his predecessors in office have been
a line of kings whom a republican revolution stripped of their political
power, leaving them only their religious functions and the shadow of a
crown? There are at least two reasons for answering this question in the
negative. One reason is drawn from the abode of the priest of Nemi; the
other from his title, the King of the Wood. If his predecessors had been
kings in the ordinary sense, he would surely have been found residing,
like the fallen kings of Rome and Athens, in the city of which the
sceptre had passed from him. This city must have been Aricia, for there
was none nearer. But Aricia was three miles off from his forest
sanctuary by the lake shore. If he reigned, it was not in the city, but
in the greenwood. Again his title, King of the Wood, hardly allows us to
suppose that he had ever been a king in the common sense of the word.
More likely he was a king of nature, and of a special side of nature,
namely, the woods from which he took his title. If we could find
instances of what we may call departmental kings of nature, that is of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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