to which I refer is contained in Mr. J. G. Frazer's learned and ingenious
work, "The Golden Bough." While mythologists of the schools of Mr. Max
Muller and Kuhn have usually resolved most Gods and heroes into Sun, Sky,
Dawn, Twilight; or, again, into elemental powers of Thunder, Tempest,
Lightning, and Night, Mr. Frazer is apt to see in them the Spirit of
Vegetation. Osiris is a Tree Spirit or a Corn Spirit (Mannhardt, the
founder of the system, however, took Osiris to be the Sun). Balder is
the Spirit of the Oak. The oak, "we may certainly conclude, was one of
the chief, if not the very chief divinity of the Aryans before the
dispersion." {61} If so, the Aryans before the dispersion were on an
infinitely lower religious level than those Australian tribes, whose
chief divinity is not a gum-tree, but a being named "Our Father,"
dwelling beyond the visible heavens. When we remember the vast numbers
of gods of sky or heaven among many scattered races, and the obvious
connection of Zeus with the sky (_sub Jove frigido_), and the usually
assigned sense of the name of Zeus, it is not easy to suppose that he was
originally an oak. But Mr. Frazer considers the etymological connection
of Zeus with the Sanscrit word for sky, an insufficient reason for
regarding Zeus as, in origin, a sky-god. He prefers, it seems, to
believe that, as being the wood out of which fire was kindled by some
Aryan-speaking peoples, the oak may have come to be called "The Bright or
Shining One" (Zeus, Jove), by the ancient Greeks and Italians. {62} The
Greeks, in fact, used the laurel (_daphne_) for making fire, not, as far
as I am aware, the oak. Though the oak was the tree of Zeus, the heavens
were certainly his province, and, despite the oak of Dodona, and the oak
on the Capitol, he is much more generally connected with the sky than
with the tree. In fact this reduction of Zeus, in origin, to an oak,
rather suggests that the spirit of system is too powerful with Mr.
Frazer.