The Priest Of Nemi

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Title:     The Priest Of Nemi
Author: Henry W. Nevinson [More Titles by Nevinson]

Here it is cool under thick alders, close to the water's edge, where frogs are doing their very best to sing. Hidden in some depth of the sky, the Dog Star rages, and overhead the mid-day sun marches across his blazing barrack-square. Far away the heathen violently rage; the world is full of rumours of war, and the kings of the earth take counsel together against liberty and peace. But here under thick alders it is cool, and the deep water of the lake that lies brooding within the silent crater of these Alban hills, stretches before us an unruffled surface of green and indigo profoundly mingled. Wandering about among overgrown and indistinguishable gardens under the woods, women and girls are gathering strawberries and loading them up in great wicker baskets for the market of Rome. The sound of sawing comes from a few old houses by the lake-side, that once were mills turned by the nymph Egeria's stream, where Ovid drank. Opposite, across the lake, on the top of the old crater's edge, stands a brown village--the church tower, unoccupied "palace," huddled walls and roofs piled up the steep, as Italian villages are made. That is Genzano. On the precipitous crag high above our heads stands a more ancient village, with fortress tower, unoccupied castle, crumbling gates, and the walls and roofs of dwellings huddled around them. That is Nemi, the village of the sacred wood.

Except where the rock is too steep for growth, the slopes of the deep hollow are covered with trees and bushes on every side. But the trees are thickest where the slope falls most gently--so gently that from the foot of the crater to the water's edge the ground for a few hundred yards might almost be called a bit of plain. Under the trees there the best strawberries grow, and there stood the temple of mysterious and blood-stained rites. Prowling continually round and round one of the trees, the ghastly priest was for centuries there to be seen:

"The priest who slew the slayer,
And shall himself be slain."

No one can tell in what prehistoric age the succession of murdering and murdered priests first began that vigil for their lives. It continued with recurrent slaughter through Rome's greatest years. About the time when Virgil was still alive, or perhaps just after Christ himself was born, the geographer Strabo appears actually to have seen that living assassin and victim lurking in the wood; for he vividly describes him "with sword always drawn, turning his eyes on every side, ready to defend himself against an onslaught." Possibly the priest suspected Strabo himself for his outlandish look and tongue, for only a runaway slave might murder and succeed him. Possibly it was that self-same priest whom Caligula, a few years after Christ's death, hired a stalwart ruffian to finish off, because he was growing old and decrepit, having defended himself from onslaughts too long. Upon the lake the Emperor constructed two fine house-boats, devoted to the habits that house-boats generally induce (you may still fish up bits of their splendour from the bottom, if you have luck), and very likely it was annoying to watch the old man still doddering round his tree with drawn sword. One would like to ask whether the crazy tyrant was aware how well he was fulfilling the ancient rite by ordaining the slaughter of decrepitude. And one would like to ask also whether the stalwart ruffian himself took up the line of consecrated and ghastly succession. Someone, at all events, took it up; for in the bland age of the Antonines the priest was still there, pacing with drawn sword, turning his eyes in every direction, lest his successor should spring upon him unawares.

In the opening chapter, which states the central problem, still slowly being worked out in the great series of _The Golden Bough_, Dr. Frazer has drawn the well-known picture of that haunted man. "The dreamy blue," he writes:

"The dreamy blue of Italian skies, the dappled shade of summer woods, and the sparkle of waves in the sun, can have accorded but ill with that stern and sinister figure. Rather we picture to ourselves the scene as it may have been witnessed by a belated wayfarer on one of those wild autumn nights when the dead leaves are falling thick, and the winds seem to sing the dirge of the dying year. It is a sombre picture, set to melancholy music--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."

For the priest himself it can hardly have been a happy life. Thanks to Dr. Frazer, we now partly know how much of man's religious hope and fear that sinister figure represented. But he himself had no conception of all this, nor can we suppose that even if he had possessed Dr. Frazer's own wealth of knowledge, it would have cheered him much. When violent death impends on every moment and lurks in every shade, it is small consolation to reflect that you stand as a holy emblem, protector of a symbolic tree, the mystic mate both of the tree itself and of the goddess of fertility in man and beast and plant. There is no comfort in the knowledge that the slave who waits to kill you, as you killed your predecessor in the office, only obeys the widespread injunction of primitive religion whereby the divine powers incarnate in the priest are maintained active and wholesome with all the fervour and sprightliness of youth. Such knowledge would not relax the perpetual strain of terror, nor could the priest have displayed an intelligent and scientific interest in all the queer mythologies forcibly dragged in and combined to explain his presence there--Orestes fleeing like a runaway from the blood-stained Euxine shore; or Hippolytus, faithful worshipper of the unwedded goddess, rent by wild horses, and by Diana's prayer to the medicine-god subsequently pieced together into life; or Virbius, counterpart of Hippolytus; or perhaps even the two-faced Janus himself, looking before and after. The finest conjectures of research, though illustrated in the person of the priest himself, could have supplied him with no antidote to those terrors of ambushed assassination.

In his investigations among the "sword-dancers" of Northern England, Mr. Cecil Sharp has discovered that at Earsdon, after the usual captain's song, a strange interlude occurs, in which two of the dancers feign a quarrel, and one is killed and carried out for burial amid the lamentations of the "Bessy." A travelled doctor, however, arrives, and calls to the dead man, "Jack! take a drop of my bottle, that'll go down your thrittle-throttle." Whereupon up jumps Jack and shakes his sword, and the dance proceeds amid the rejoicings of Bessy and the rest. So priest slays priest, the British Diana laments her hero slain, the British Aesculapius, in verse inferior to Euripides, tends him back to life, and who in that Northumbrian dance could fail to recognise a rite sprung from the same primitive worship as the myths of Nemi? But if one had been able to stand beside that murderous and apprehensive priest, and to foretell to him that in future centuries, long after his form of religion had died away, far off in Britain, beside the wall of the Empire's frontier, his tragedy would thus be burlesqued by Bessy, Jack, and the doctor, one may doubt if he would have expressed any kind of scientific interest, or have even smiled, as, sword in hand, he prowled around his sacred tree, peering on every side.

Why, then, did he do it? How came it that there was always a candidate for that bloody deed and disquieting existence? It is true that the competition for the post appears to have decreased with years. Originally, the priest's murder seems to have been an annual affair, regular as the "grotter" which we are called upon to remember every August in London streets, or as the Guy Faux, whose fires will in future ages be connected with autumnal myths or with the disappearance of Adonis or Thammuz yearly wounded. The virtues of fertility's god had to be renewed each spring; year by year the priest was slain; and only by a subsequent concession to human weakness was he allowed to retain his life till he could no longer defend it. The change seems to show that, as time went on, the privileges of the office were regarded with less eagerness, and it was more difficult to find one man a year anxious to be killed.

But with what motive, century after century, no matter at what interval of years, did a volunteer always come forward to slay and to be slain? Certainly, the priest had to be a runaway slave; but was Roman slavery so hideous that a life of unending terror by day and night was to be preferred--a life enslaved as a horse's chained to the grinding mill in a brickyard, and without the horse's hours of stabled peace? Hunger will drive to much, but even when the risky encounter with one's predecessor had been successfully accomplished, what enjoyment could there be in meals eaten in bitter haste, with one hand upon the sword? As to money, what should all the wealth of the shrine profit a man compelled, in Bishop Ken's language, to live each day as it were his last? Promise of future and eternal bliss? The religion held out no sure and certain hope of such a state. Joy in the divine service? It is not to vigorous runaway slaves that we look for ecstatic rapture in performing heaven's will. Upon the priest was bestowed the title of "King of the Wood." Can it be that for that barren honour a human being dyed his hands with murder and risked momentary assassination for the remainder of his lifetime? Well, we have heard of the Man who would be King, and empty titles still are sought by political services equally repellent.

But, for ourselves, in that forlorn and hag-ridden figure we more naturally see a symbol of the generations that slay the slayer and shall themselves be slain. It is thus that each generation comes knocking at the door--comes, rather, so suddenly and unannounced, clutching at the Tree of Life, and with the glittering sword of youth beating down its worn-out defenders. New blood, new thoughts and hopes each generation brings to resuscitate the genius of fertility and growth. Often it longs imperiously to summon a stalwart ruffian, who will finish off decrepitude and make an end; but hardly has the younger generation itself assumed the office and taken its stand as the Warder of the Tree, when its life and hopes in turn are threatened, and among the ambuscading woods it hears a footstep coming and sees the gleam of a drawn sword. Let us not think too precisely on such events. But rather let us climb the toilsome track up to the little town, where Cicero once waited to meet the assassin Brutus after the murder of the world's greatest man; and there, in the ancient inn still called "Diana's Looking-glass" from the old name of the beautiful and mysterious lake which lies in profoundly mingled green and indigo below it, let us forget impending doom over a twopenny quart of wine and a plate of little cuttlefish stewed in garlic, after which any priest might confront his successor with equanimity.

[The end]
Henry W. Nevinson's essay: The Priest Of Nemi

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