The case of the Two Trees as Ndembu symbols is no isolated instance of motival linkage between narrative and cult. In view of that fact, it is hard to understand how Turner and others like him have thought they could succeed in their analyses of cult and ritual without making an equally careful study of the oral traditional story-telling among their subject peoples. No doubt part of the explanation lies in their reaction to an earlier school of ritual studies which went so far in comparing myth and ritual that it recognized hardly any distinction at all between them. The doyen of that school was an eminent precursor of Victor Turner in British anthropology, James George Frazer, who also preceded Turner in writing on the subject of trees and their meanings in cult. Frazer incorporated much of what he had to say about tree motifs in his monumental (and latterly much maligned) compilation of quaint cultural oddities entitled The Golden Bough. His scholarship was very different from Turner’s, and many of Turner’s contemporaries attacked Frazer’s work for all manner of good reasons. But J. G. Frazer remained nonetheless a more prominent authority on trees in cult than any of his detractors, or any later writer of the twentieth century for that matter.
Frazer wrote most of The Golden Bough between 1890 and 1915; in its final form it occupied thirteen large volumes. He called this colossus of late Victorian learning “a general work on primitive superstition and religion,” but it was first and last a study of trees and the other motifs clustered around them in story and in cult. The very title of the work bespeaks Frazer’s concern with tree motifs; the title is a Virgilian gloss on an arboreal detail of ritual from the ancient Latin cult of Diana at Aricia in the Alban hills, the birthplace of Caesar Augustus. Frazer began the study which grew into The Golden Bough with discussion of a forbidden tree in Diana’s sanctuary at Nemi, and ended twelve volumes and twenty-five years later with the sacred oaks of sky-gods in Indo-European mythology. In the vast intervening space, Frazer made passing reference to myriad other trees - too many, indeed, and with too fleeting scrutiny of them for his study to be of much value today except as a lumber-yard of references. But he was a more poetical than analytical writer, and one cannot fault his poetic appreciation of the dangerous wild tree as a nexus of motifs that is crucial alike to narrative and to cult. Imitating classical authorities (Ovid, Strabo, and Servius), Frazer commenced The Golden Bough with his own literary sketch of a bloody ritual scene under a dangerous tree that belonged to the Latin goddess of the wild, Diana:
In the sacred grove (of Diana Nemorensis) 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 about 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 office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier.36
...Within the sanctuary at Nemi grew a certain tree of which no branch might be broken. Only a runaway slave was allowed to break off, if he could, one of its boughs. Success in the attempt entitled him to fight the priest in single combat, and if he slew him he reigned in his stead with the title King of the Wood (Rex Nemorensis).37
The Darwinian overtones ring loud and clear in this lurid description of a gladiatorial moment in the supposed Arician cult of Diana. But popular understanding of the then-fashionable doctrine of the survival of the fittest encouraged worse intellectual abuses than this in Victorian England. A more important weakness of Frazer’s portrayal is the probability that even in his classical sources the account of the ritual combat at Nemi was only a piece of local legend and not the description of a real ritual contest actually reenacted from time to time in the Arician grove. It was quite common for Greeks and Romans alike to attach just such bits of fable to sacred localities like the Arician grove, and not even Frazer supposed that any of his three classical authors except possibly Strabo had in fact ever seen the Rex Nemorensis, not to mention the bizarre duel to the death with a runaway slave, which of course no ancient writer had seen, not even Strabo. Nor will anyone who has had much practical experience as an arborist of taking healthy branches from live trees think that that is a very probable act with which to begin a mortal combat with a vigilant foe, unless the challenger meant simultaneously to fell both Diana’s hierophant and the branch from her tree with one stroke of a pruning-bill. The very parallel between tearing the branch from the goddess’s tree and tearing the life out of her priest makes the whole scene more plausible as fable than as rite. Frazer himself wrote that “the strange rule of this priesthood has no parallel in classical antiquity, and cannot be explained from it.” Indeed it cannot, because it was probably not the rule of any real priesthood, but only another instance of fable masquerading as reality.
Frazer characteristically took no notice of that difficulty, although he proceeded immediately after recreating the scene of ritual murder at Nemi to quote a number of other ancient legends about Nemi which he treated strictly as tales. The fact is that he was not clear in his own mind on the difference between fable and cult when he began to write The Golden Bough, and he never firmly grasped the difference at any time during the three decades of his continued work on the subsequent volumes of it. He preferred to avoid the issue, because he had no interest in narrative apart from those tales which he could somehow connect with cult, and he declared early in his writing what he thought of such tales. He had only the strictest Pauline contempt for them:
It needs no elaborate demonstration to convince us that the stories told to account for Diana’s worship at Nemi are unhistorical. Clearly they belong to that large class of myths which are made up to explain the origin of a religious ritual and have no other foundation than the resemblance, real or imaginary, which may be traced between it and some foreign ritual.38
Frazer neglected to say who he thought might have “made up” such myths, or whence their imagery might have come, although he tried to make it appear by such grand and resolute words as “origin” and “foundation” that he had some opinion on that subject which he would reveal in due time. But after all a “resemblance” is not the same thing as a source, and “foundation” is not origin. In fact he had no understanding and proposed no theory of fable; the only opinion of fable which he ever revealed was disdain. To the extent that his sentiment allowed him to notice narrative, he noticed it only in its bearing on cult. And that had unfortunate consequences for his understanding of cult.
The difficulty was not really of Frazer’s own making. He no less than countless other Western men of learning was a victim of the Pauline doctrine. The historic power of the Pauline doctrine concerning fable can hardly be overestimated. Possibly no doctrine in Christianity has deprived peoples in the West and in the Western sphere of cultural influence of more of their inherited culture, and to less purpose, than has this destructive bit of Christian moralism. The source of the trouble is a passage in the New Testament, in Paul’s First Epistle to Timothy. Paul’s evident concern in that Epistle was to keep Christian cult and the sectarian organization which supports it free from influences that might change them. Among those possible influences he particularly feared fable. The anathematic setting for his condemnation of fable is at least as damning as what he actually wrote against story or myth itself. Clearly it was the intellectual stimulation of fable and its power to alter ideas that Paul feared most (Timothy 1, 3-11):
When I was starting for Macedonia, I urged you to stay on at Ephesus. You were to command certain persons to give up teaching erroneous doctrines and studying those interminable myths and genealogies, which issue in mere speculation and cannot make known God’s plan for us, which works through faith.39
The aim and object of this command is the love which springs from a clean heart, and from a good conscience, and from faith that is genuine. Through falling short of these, some people have gone astray into a wilderness of words. They set out to be teachers of the moral law, without understanding either the words they use or the subjects about which they are so dogmatic.
We all know that the law is an excellent thing, provided we treat it as law, recognizing that it is not aimed at good citizens, but at the lawless and unruly, the impious and sinful, the irreligious and worldly; at parricides and matricides, murderers and fornicators, perverts, kidnappers, liars, perjurers—in fact all whose behaviour flouts the wholesome teaching which conforms with the gospel entrusted to me, the gospel which tells of the glory of God in his eternal felicity.40
Set in a context of such terrific rhetoric of denunciation, the brief mention of myth or fable takes on by association a religious horror out of all proportion to the brevity of the reference. Moreover, Paul is still at it three chapters later, where he makes the unquenchable human interest in fable not only irreligious but also degrading to manhood, in an old-womanly metaphor that is itself borrowed straight from fable (Timothy IV, 7):
But refuse profane and old wives’ fables, and exercise thyself rather unto godliness.41
Even in the twentieth century there were still fellows and praeceptors of great English-speaking universities to whom the Pauline doctrine about fable or myth was an unquestioned, if not often conscious, tenet of morality and of permissibility in intellectual pursuits. It matters not at all what St. Paul really meant by his strictures on fable; the point is that throughout Christian history he was believed to have condemned just such fiction as is the subject of this study. No wonder then that in the Cambridge University of W. Robertson Smith’s day with its decided theological prepossessions, the study of religion even in the form of pagan cults might be permissible, while only contempt could be accorded to any uncanonical narrative matter, no matter how nonsensical the study of the cults might be without a parallel attention to, and understanding of, fable. No wonder either that Smith’s disciple, James Frazer, who was a poetic but not a notably analytic mind, should neither know nor want to know anything he could avoid knowing about “old wives’ fables.” And even the most analytically minded anti-Frazerian successors of Frazer in British anthropology have not done much to disabuse their science of the Pauline doctrine’s lingering effect.
Victor Turner’s information about tree-cult among the Ndembu showed how the two trees of narrative tradition were separated and distributed apart from each other in different Ndembu rituals. The mudyi “presided” at Nkang'a, and the mukula at Nkula; but neither the mukula nor any (hewn) equivalent of it figured in Nkang'a, and neither the milk-tree nor any other wild food-tree had any place in Nkula. That same separation of the two fabulous trees into different ritual contexts was common also in the classical world. Now Frazer saw all cults everywhere as the primitive, evolutionary antecedents of ancient Greek and Roman cults; again he was indebted to Darwin for the idea of evolution, which he no doubt used too loosely and too much in his cultural studies. Yet partly on account of his evolutionary bias, he fully recognized the importance of trees as cultic motifs in the classical world, even though he thought they were archaic and somewhat barbarous elements in the advanced civilization of the Greeks and Romans, and he was perfectly willing to extend the same recognition to other trees in both cult and narrative elsewhere. But he gave cult an absolute priority over narrative, and viewed all cult from the peculiar vantage of a classicist, which does not in any case give a very full or unobstructed prospect of either cult or fable.
Had Frazer given to narrative anything like the attention which he lavished on cult and religion, he might sometime have realized that there were two irreconcilably different types of trees in classical cults as elsewhere. But he did not. Instead, he tried to reduce all tree-cults (and the tales which he found associated with them) to a single type. Because the two trees were often segregated from each other in ancient cults just as they were in Turner’s modern Ndembu rituals, the same confusion has somewhat afflicted other classicists too, but none has ever tried so hard as Frazer did to reduce the irreducible differences between the two types of trees. Other writers’ lesser insistence on the homogeneity of tree motifs has therefore saved them from the kind of muddle which Frazer made in the second volume of The Golden Bough, where he wrote in Chapters IX and X about “The Worship of Trees” and “Relics of Tree-Worship in Modern Europe.”42
As Frazer himself acknowledged, much of his information about tree-cults came from the work of a German scholar, Wilhelm Mannhardt’s Der Baumhultus der Germanen und ihrer Nachbarstämme; mythologische Untersuchungen (Berlin, 1875). But Frazer, not Mannhardt, became the world’s leading authority on the subject. Despite numerous inconsistencies, his opinion of trees in cult and story was more widely received and more influential during the century after he published them than any other scholar’s during that time. That fact is due not only to the failure of later scholars to develop better alternatives to Frazer’s views, but also to Frazer’s revealing treatment of the trees as parts of a larger array of motifs that belong together by virtue of an ancient and universal tradition. He confused the two trees, but he was aware of their persistent concatenation with certain other motifs in a traditional motival cluster. He maintained, moreover, that the cluster is no mere aimless group of images; it is in effect a system of ideas. No matter how much one disagrees with his formulation of that ideological system, his general thesis that it is a system continues to deserve attention.
Even though he confused narrative with cult, and looked upon both from the strange vantage of a classicist seeking an evolutionary explanation for an ancient Latin rite which probably did not exist, Frazer was able by the very magnitude of his enquiry to approximate many features of the narrative pattern. Ancient legend did not tell whether Diana’s tree in the Arician glade bore fruit, but Frazer knew of ancient engraved gems which he thought portrayed Diana herself as a bearer of fruiting branches. He knew that preternatural persons frequent green trees and may harm ordinary men who meet them there; he called them tree-spirits, supposing (after Mannhardt) that in belief they dwell in the green wood itself. He cited examples of the trees’ ritual association with marriage, and examples of hewn wood used to defeat the malevolence of preternaturals. He knew of many instances in ritual when men behaved as guests in the presence of trees, and when they donated or forfeited property or life to the spiritual owners of trees. Most of all, he perceived that the combat between Diana’s incumbent and aspirant priest-kings in the imagined rite at Nemi was a contest in which a man who had hitherto enjoyed the favor of a preterhuman person might unexpectedly lose that favor, and in losing it, die. If only Frazer had respected narrative more than he did, he might also have discovered how like Eden the vale of Nemi was, and how much the Rex Nemorensis resembled Adam, or Moses, or Samson, or Mandu, and all the other innumerable equivalents of this cosmotactic* character-type in oral fable.
While Frazer appreciated that all these motifs belonged together, the many examples of them from the researches of other men which he recited to support his own theory were mostly ritual, and none of those examples exemplified more than one or two of the motifs. He was unwilling ever to think that the supposititious ritual of priesthood at Nemi was unique—the whole argument of The Golden Bough was to the contrary—yet he never found evidence of any real parallel to the rites of Nemi as a whole, only individual bits and pieces which severally paralleled the particular elements of Diana’s cult. In the end, he pieced together a reasonable facsimile of the narrative pattern, but it took him thirty years to do it, and even then he had still not found any specific, concrete case of the whole pattern in any one ritual anywhere except the alleged ritual at Aricia. Unwittingly, he gave clear and exhaustive proof of how little of the narrative patterning is ever employed in any ritual.
James Frazer’s ignorance of the ways of narrative and his mistakes in distinguishing narrative from cult set a bad precedent for later British anthropology. None have been so keenly aware of Frazer’s mistakes as later British anthropologists, who, like Victor Turner, have adopted methods calculated to help them avoid errors of the kind Frazer made. Frazer took the whole of primitive cultural manifestations everywhere for his province, and relied for his information entirely on other scholars, be they ancient or modern; he was a stay-at-home with no inclination to field-work. In contrast, Turner relied in the only manner acceptable to his generation upon no one but the Ndembu themselves for his data, and confined his study of tree-cult to them alone. Frazer was concerned with the historical development of what he thought was a very archaic pattern in cult; Turner’s later enquiry was strictly first-hand and synchronous.
One practical benefit of that procedure to Turner was that he could not confuse the two trees as Frazer had; indeed, he could not even think of confusing them because the Ndembu themselves made such a sharp distinction between them. By the same policy, Turner also avoided confusion of cult and story; the Ndembu did not narrate while they celebrated their rites connected with trees, nor did they go out of their way to point out the links between their rites and their tradition of fable. By obedience to that Ndembu separation of narrative and ritual performances, Turner avoided all notice of their story-telling while he was studying their rites, and thus avoided any such confusion of ritual and fable as Frazer experienced.
But as it happened, that way too led to imperfect results, because Turner’s Ndembu tree-cults were no more capable of explanation without knowledge of fable than were Frazer’s hypothetical rites of Diana at Nemi. Whereas Frazer had, however inadequately, taken at least some notice of fable, Turner took none. Later British anthropology has surmounted numerous bad procedural precedents set by James George Frazer, but his crippling ignorance of the nature of traditional narrative endured among his successors and his supplanters alike.
* Later in this study (in the chapter “Up, Down, All Around, and Who Made the World”) I describe a kind of character in traditional fable who is systematically an instrument in the creation of the world, or the maker of some outstanding feature of the universe. Because he is thus an agent of cosmogony, I call that character-type a “cosmogonic hero,” or simply a cosmogone. I consider, however, that there is an important distinction to be recognized between the cosmogonic hero and his adventures on the one hand, and another kind of character who does not make or create anything in the fabulous cosmos, but who rather reorganizes, delimits, amplifies, or otherwises arranges things that are depicted as already existing in the world, or who discovers the necessity of their arrangement in ways more useful or more suitable to himself and subsequent generations. Sometimes called by others a changer or transformer, this type of character is still not unambiguously distinguished from the cosmogone by those names, and so I prefer to call him a cosmotact, forming this new term on the analogy of cosmogone by a neologistic combination of my own invention from the two Greek words kosmos, ‘world, universe; arrangement’ and tasso, ‘marshal, appoint, place in order, assign, ordain, settle,’ hence: cosmotact (n.), cosmotactic (adj.), ‘who or that orders or arranges the world.’