This change of view as to the great Aryan god necessarily affects my
interpretation of the King of the Wood, the priest of Diana at Aricia,
if I may take that discarded puppet out of the box again for a moment.
On my theory the priest represented Jupiter in the flesh, and
accordingly, if Jupiter was primarily a sky-god, his priest cannot have
been a mere incarnation of the sacred oak, but must, like the deity
whose commission he bore, have been invested in the imagination of his
worshippers with the power of overcasting the heaven with clouds and
eliciting storms of thunder and rain from the celestial vault. The
attribution of weather-making powers to kings or priests is very common
in primitive society, and is indeed one of the principal levers by which
such personages raise themselves to a position of superiority above
their fellows. There is therefore no improbability in the supposition
that as a representative of Jupiter the priest of Diana enjoyed this
reputation, though positive evidence of it appears to be lacking.

Lastly, in the present edition I have shewn some grounds for thinking
that the Golden Bough itself, or in common parlance the mistletoe on the
oak, was supposed to have dropped from the sky upon the tree in a flash
of lightning and therefore to contain within itself the seed of
celestial fire, a sort of smouldering thunderbolt. This view of the
priest and of the bough which he guarded at the peril of his life has
the advantage of accounting for the importance which the sanctuary at
Nemi acquired and the treasure which it amassed through the offerings of
the faithful; for the shrine would seem to have been to ancient what
Loreto has been to modern Italy, a place of pilgrimage, where princes
and nobles as well as commoners poured wealth into the coffers of Diana
in her green recess among the Alban hills, just as in modern times kings
and queens vied with each other in enriching the black Virgin who from
her Holy House on the hillside at Loreto looks out on the blue Adriatic