A STRANGE PRIESTHOOD.

Waikato Times, Volume 98, Issue 15341, 15 September 1923, Page 11 (Supplement)

A STRANGE PRIESTHOOD.

GUARDING THE GOLDEN BOUGH.

(By "Darius.")

No. 3

How one theme leads into another. All our thoughts appear as correlated and the most carcrul and painstaking essayist can never quite exhaust his subject or make his essay, like a sonnet, into a self-contained and perfect sphere. The thought of the thrush proved to be a branched candlestick, holding up not one light but seven, and this is the third now shining, though the last that I shall bring to your view. Diana the Goddess.

Diana, as everyone acquainted with Mythology knows (and few there be who know much of it), was goddess of hunting and of chasity. She was the sister of Apollo and daughter of Jupiter and Latona. She was known amongst the Greeks as Diana or Phoebe and was honoured as a triform goddess. As a celestial divinity she was called Luna; as a terrestrial, Diana or Dictynna; and in the infernal regions as Hecate. However, it is with Diana as a terrestrial goddess that we have to do, and with her guardian priesthood of the Golden Bough, which gave to Turner the inspiration for one of his most famous pictures. His divine imagination appears to have steeped itself in the natural landscape, and in the wonderful history of that enchanted grove oi "fromi, until it transfigured the scene, suffusing it with a dreamlike beauty that only the greatest genius could portray. The little woodland lake of Nemi, Diana's mirror of the ancients, lies calmly in a green hollow of the Alban hills, and there, as Arnold wrote of the Illyrian hills. "The sunshine in the happy glades is fair." Two characteristic Italian villages are stretched slumbcrously along the lake shore, while an equally Italian palace, whose terraced steps descend steeply to the water hardly breaks the stillness or invades the solitariness of the scene. Diana herself might still linger by this lovely shore, still haunt these woodlands wild and fair. A Strange Tragedy.

In antiquity this sylvan landscape was the scene of a strange and recurring tragedy. On the northern shore of the lake, right under the precipitous cliffs on which the modern village of Nemi is perched, stood the sacred grove and sanctuary of Diana of the Wood. The lake and grove were sometimes known as the lake and grove of Aricia. The lake itself is a crater-like hollow on the side of Alban Mount.

In the sacred grove grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day and far into the night a grim figure might be seen to prowl. In his hsnd he carried a drawn sword and he kept peering warily about him as if at any instant he expected to be set upon by an enemy. He was a priest and a murderer,, and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate to the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him he retained office until he himself was slain by a stronger'or a craftier. The post he held by this precarious tenure carried with it the title of King to the lonely watcher keeping his vigil in fair and foul weather. Sleep might be taken only at the peril of his life while the thought of age haunted him like a night-born terror. The sight of him to pilgrims at the shrine cast a gloom over the landscape dappled with summer woods under those dreamy Italian skies, .while the sparkle of the little sportive waves accorded ill with, the grim and sinister figure.

Succession of the Sword

You may imagine the scene as witnessed by some belated wayfarer. It is a wild autumn night. Withered leaves arc falling, and inconsolable winds are moaning over the dying year. In the background the forest stands up black and jagged against a lowering sky, tossing its giant branches hither and thither like blind tentacles of the storm. There is a babble of vexed and confused waters. In the foreground moves the fearful silhouette of the priest, now in twilight and now in gloom with a glimmer of steel showing as the moon rides clear, of the cloud-rack and flashes momentarily through the tortured boughs. It is Rex Nemorensis, King of the Woods, whose task it was to guard the Tree of the Golden Bougli with his life, so that neither branch nor twig should be taken from it. A runaway slave, were he successful in breaking a branch from off the bough, was entitled to fight the high priest in single combat, and if he succeeded in slaying him he reigned in his stead. This succession of the sword was observed right down to Imperial times, for it was said of the freakish Caligula that, considering one priest of Nemi had held office long, he hired a stalwart and bloody ruffian to murder him. So even at Nemi, in times not very remote, there was the sacred tree, the violation of which meant death to the high priest who was its sworded guardian. And the thrushes sang there in Nemi the song they sang la Paradise. One wonders how mortal man could aspire to hold such an office as high priest in Diana's grove. and yet in more recent years Kingship and Priesthood were very precarious businesses. Even yesterday one of the most pitiable scenes of mortal history was enacted when a royal family was exterminated with barbaric cruelty in the pestilent gloom of a cellar, turned in one moment of time into a shambles. A Great Message.

And here one falls to wonder«ng on the mad revolutionary spirit, the first intention of which is insensate destruction, and also to wondering upon that other healing revolutionary spirit whose mission is regeneration. The two mighty spirits of earth, or of earth and hell if you please, are still contending as Milton's great armies warred in Titanic'conflict for dominion ii' Heaven.

Yes; one wonders, hailing, and thcr. with gladness remembers' there is also a. tree in the paradise of the Apocalypse and "The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations." I think, for to-night, we had belter lei them remain under the shade of that tree. I am one who has lost a very dear friend, and I have appointed |o meet him this Sabbath night under the stars.

The wind is stirring the leaves. They have a great message,