e
great evil against which the fire at the festivals appears to be
directed is witchcraft, 342; among the evils for which the
fire-festivals are deemed remedies the foremost is cattle-disease, and
cattle-disease is often supposed to be an effect of witchcraft, 343
_sq._; again, the bonfires are thought to avert hail, thunder,
lightning, and various maladies, all of which are attributed to the
maleficent arts of witches, 344 _sq._; the burning wheels rolled down
hill and the burning discs thrown into the air may be intended to burn
the invisible witches, 345 _sq._; on this view the fertility supposed to
follow the use of fire results indirectly from breaking the spells of
witches, 346; on the whole the theory of the purificatory or destructive
intention of the fire-festivals seems the more probable, 346.

[Transcriber's Note: The brief descriptions often found enclosed in
square brackets are "sidenotes", which appeared in the original book in
the margins of the paragraph following the "sidenote." Footnotes were
originally at the bottoms of the printed pages.]

CHAPTER I

BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH

Sec. 1. _Not to touch the Earth_

[The priest of Aricia and the Golden Bough]

We have travelled far since we turned our backs on Nemi and set forth in
quest of the secret of the Golden Bough. With the present volume we
enter on the last stage of our long journey. The reader who has had the
patience to follow the enquiry thus far may remember that at the outset
two questions were proposed for answer: Why had the priest of Aricia to
slay his predecessor? And why, before doing so, had he to pluck the
Golden Bough?[1] Of these two questions the first has now been answered.
The priest of Aricia, if I am right, was one of those sacred kings or
human divinities on whose life the welfare of the community and even the
course of nature in general are believed to be intimately dependent. It
does not appear that the subjects or worshippers of such a spiritual
potentate form to themselves any very clear notion of the exact
relationship in which they stand to him; probably their ideas on the
point are vague and fluctuating, and we should err if we attempted to
define the relationship with logical precision. All that the people
know, or rather imagine, is that somehow they themselves, their cattle,
and their crops are mysteriously bound up with their divine king, so
that according as he is well or ill the community is healthy