myth
Golden Bough
04/10/2009 09:42
No matter. There’s a woodland lake in Nemi, 18 miles southeast of Rome. The lake is in the crater of an extinct volcano. 1928 lake lowered and two of Caligula’s pleasure-barges discovered on bottom. A few miles away is a larger lake (Albano) in another old crater. (The Turner painting takes place at the gates to the underworld, another crater lake called Avernus, near Naples.)
The lake is called a mirror, but close up, its waters are a warm greenish-blue. The crater is a horseshoe, open at the south end. There’s a flat area to the north – part of the caldera floor that the lake doesn’t cover, and on the eastern and western sides, the hills rise a couple of hundred meters immediately. On their lush green sides two hill-villages are visible overlooking the lake.
Frazer says the lake was called “Diana’s Mirror” by the ancients. Frazer points to a necessary connection, a “subtle link …between the natural beauty of the spot and the dark crimes which under the mask of religion were often perpetrated there.” (1:1) The lake “lies so deep down in the old crater that the calm surface of its clear water is seldom ruffled by the wind.”
The shrine was on the north side, between the lake and the town of Nemi. Diana Nemorensus (“of the Woodland Glade”) had her temple here. “On the north and east it was bounded by great retaining walls which cut into the hillsides and served to support them. Semicircular niches sunk in the walls and faced with columns formed a series of chapels…On the side of the lake the terrace rested on a mighty wall, over seven hundred feet long by thirty feet high, built in triangular buttresses…the temple itself was not large…solidly built of massive blocks of peperino, and adorned with Doric columns…cornices of marble and friezes of terra-cotta…enhanced by tiles of gilt bronze.” (1:3)
There was also a temple of Isis hidden in the woods. (1:5)
“beechwoods and oakwoods…had not yet begun, under the hand of man, to yield to the evergreens of the south, the laurel, the olive, the cypress, and the oleander, still less to those intruders of a later age…the lemon and the orange.” (8)
“In the sacred grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day, and probably far into the night, a grim figure might be seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he kept peering warily around him as if at every 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 for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained the office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier.” (9)
“the background of forest showing black and jagged against a lowering and stormy sky, the sighing of the wind in the branches, the rustle of the withered leaves under foot, the lapping of the cold water on the shore, and in the foreground, pacing to and fro, now in twilight and now in gloom, a dark figure with a glitter of steel at the shoulder whenever the pale moon, riding clear of the cloud-rack, peers down at him through the matted boughs.” (9-10)
“According to the public opinion of the ancients the fateful branch [that the priest was “defending” at the sacred oak] was that Golden Bough which, at the Sibyl’s bidding, Aeneas plucked before he essayed the perilous journey to the world of the dead” (11) (except, again, this happened at Avernus. The Cumaean Sibyl lived 22 miles from Naples, not 18 miles from Rome).
“during her annual festival, held on the thirteenth of August, at the hottest time of the year, her grove shone with a multitude of torches, whose ruddy glare was reflected by the lake,” (12)
This is a great setting, and the event that Frazer describes in the early pages of the Golden Bough is great! I’m thinking of using this in a dream sequence in my new story. I like the idea of pulling a scene from Frazer’s book, if I’m going to write a story that takes place partly in Victorian England, and deals with mythical characters. The Victorians were really into comparative mythology, and it bordered on a whole pile of stuff we now think of as pseudoscience, but which they took pretty seriously. More on that, later...
