TRTR(I.3) Let Me Stand Next To Your Fire

[Jed Kelestron]

The Golden Bough's accounts of sacrificial burning of humans and trees
may be the backdrop for Wyatt's dreams and the Christmas tree burning.
Odin's son Baldr dreamed of his own death and was killed by a
mistletoe branch and ceremonially burned:

"In that dream, I just remembered my . . . my hair was on fire. [...]
--But just burning, he whispered, almost wondrously, as she rose to
engage the incredulous tension of his right hand, still murmuring..."
(87.17,23-5)

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>From the Golden Bough:

"IN THE POPULAR customs connected with the fire-festivals of Europe
there are certain features which appear to point to a former practice
of human sacrifice. We have seen reasons for believing that in Europe
living persons have often acted as representatives of the tree-spirit
and corn-spirit and have suffered death as such. There is no reason,
therefore, why they should not have been burned, if any special
advantages were likely to be attained by putting them to death in that
way. The consideration of human suffering is not one which enters into
the calculations of primitive man. Now, in the fire-festivals which we
are discussing, the pretense of burning people is sometimes carried so
far that it seems reasonable to regard it as a mitigated survival of
an older custom of actually burning them."

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"A block ahead, the street was lit up by a blaze where a Christmas
tree burned in the gutter. --It's too warm for snow, he said. [...]
--But that sounded like thunder." (115.32-35)

" [...] she looked at his profile in the fire's light, uneven shocks
of flame as one branch blazed up and another fell glowing, [...]
nothing moved but his hands, taking a closer grip from which she half
twisted." (116.3--34)

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Back to The Golden Bough:

"If there is any truth in this conjecture, the real reason why the
Druids worshiped a mistletoe-bearing oak above all other trees of the
forest was a belief that every such oak had not only been struck by
lightning but bore among its branches a visible emanation of the
celestial fire; so that in cutting the mistletoe with mystic rites
they were securing for themselves all the magical properties of a
thunder-bolt."

"The mistletoe was viewed as the seat of life of the oak, and so long
as it was uninjured nothing could kill or even wound the oak. The
conception of the mistletoe as the seat of life of the oak would
naturally be suggested to primitive people by the observation that
while the oak is deciduous, the mistletoe which grows on it is
evergreen. In winter the sight of its fresh foliage among the bare
branches must have been hailed by the worshipers of the tree as a sign
that the divine life which had ceased to animate the branches yet
survived in the mistletoe, as the heart of a sleeper still beats when
his body is motionless. Hence when the god had to be killed—when the
sacred tree had to be burnt—it was necessary to begin by breaking off
the mistletoe. For so long as the mistletoe remained intact, the oak
(so people might think) was invulnerable; all the blows of their
knives and axes would glance harmless from its surface. But once tear
from the oak its sacred heart—the mistletoe—and the tree nodded to its
fall. And when in later times the spirit of the oak came to be
represented by a living man, it was logically necessary to suppose
that, like the tree he personated, he could neither be killed nor
wounded so long as the mistletoe remained uninjured. The pulling of
the mistletoe was thus at once the signal and the cause of his death."

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"She turned out the light.  --That must mean something. Like your
dream. Your dream isn't hard to understand. Certainly not . . . after
tonight." (119.15-17)