NOTE
I sent the foregoing chapter to my learned man, and he has sent me several pages of notes. I will not give his name for I do not think it right to compromise his scholarship by joining it to such an outlawed doctrine as that of the Race Memory.
(1) The Child and the Tree.
On a certain night in Devonshire, farmers and farm-labourers and their wives and children perform a ceremony at the finest apple-tree in the orchard. Punch is poured out at the roots and bread put among the branches and a boy set among the branches "who is either the tree in boy form or the tree in bird form," and the men fire blank charges at him. All dance round the tree singing some such rhyme as this:
"Here's to thee good apple-tree
To bear and blow apples enow," et cetera.[1]
This boy is clearly Balder "who is shot to death by means of a sprig or arrow of mistletoe."
In my vision the star is shot by an arrow from a bow, and in one of the child's dreams which I have described, God is shot with an arrow, while in another child's dream a star is shot with a gun. "Balder is the tree embodied. His name tells us that. Recent philology has said that the name means or is related to apple-tree, abbal; apfal, et cetera. But that is not true enough. When the first decipherment of Cretan pictographs is published, it will be seen that his name goes back to the Cretan Apollo, who in old Cretan belief was a tree god." It is plain, too, that he is that "child hidden on the scented Dikton near Mount Ida" (Phaen: 32 ff.) of Aratus' lines "When those lines are read in the light of the deciphered old Cretan inscriptions" and that part of his significance is solar. He was believed to be born and grown up in a year (Aratus; Callimachus: Zeus 55 ff., et cetera) and to die once more. Orpheus made much use of these facts. (Lobeck: Aglaophamas, I, 552 f.)
I had used Hebrew names connected with the symbolic Tree
- ↑ Transactions of the Devonshire Association 1876, Whitcombe: Bygone Days in Cornwall.
