er and the Greeks Zeus. Whereas I
formerly argued that he was primarily a personification of the sacred
oak and only in the second place a personification of the thundering
sky, I now invert the order of his divine functions and believe that he
was a sky-god before he came to be associated with the oak. In fact, I
revert to the traditional view of Jupiter, recant my heresy, and am
gathered like a lost sheep into the fold of mythological orthodoxy. The
good shepherd who has brought me back is my friend Mr. W. Warde Fowler.
He has removed the stone over which I stumbled in the wilderness by
explaining in a simple and natural way how a god of the thundering sky
might easily come to be afterwards associated with the oak. The
explanation turns on the great frequency with which, as statistics
prove, the oak is struck by lightning beyond any other tree of the wood
in Europe. To our rude forefathers, who dwelt in the gloomy depths of
the primaeval forest, it might well seem that the riven and blackened
oaks must indeed be favourites of the sky-god, who so often descended on
them from the murky cloud in a flash of lightning and a crash of
thunder.

This change of view as to the great Aryan god necessarily affects my
interpretation of the King of the Wood, the priest of Diana at Aricia,
if I may take that discarded puppet out of the box again for a moment.
On my theory the priest represented Jupiter in the flesh, and
accordingly, if Jupiter was primarily a sky-god, his priest cannot have
been a mere incarnation of the sacred oak, but must, like the deity
whose commission he bore, have been invested in the imagination of his
worshippers with the power of overcasting the heaven with clouds and
eliciting storms of thunder and rain from the celestial vault. The
attribution of weather-making powers to kings or priests is very common
in primitive society, and is indeed one of the principal levers by which
such personages raise themselves to a position of superiority above
their fellows. There is therefore no improbability in the supposition
that as a representative of Jupiter the priest of Diana enjoyed this
reputation, though positive evidence of it appears to be lacking.

Lastly, in the present edition I have shewn some grounds for thinking
that the Golden Bough itself, or in common parlance the mistletoe on the
oak, was supposed to have dropped from the sky upon the tree in a flash
of lightning and therefore to contain within itsel