58 THE APPLE TREE WASSAtL. 



during the winter and must be aroused in good time if he is to 

 do his work in the coming spring. Elijah's taunt to the 

 prophets of Baal was not merely sarcastic : to those w r ho heard 

 it meant something real. They were used to shouting to wake 

 up their god when they had any particularly heavy work on 

 hand for him to do. So the Wassailers shout to arouse the 

 spirit of the tree. 



The toast in the branches takes us one step further. 

 Toast which is intended to disappear is obviously of no use 

 unless it is consumed by somebody or something, and we 

 have here an instance of the actual offering made to a god or 

 spirit. It is rather interesting to query whether it is 

 given in order that the god may do something in return, or 

 as a bribe to induce him to refrain from doing harm. As a 

 matter of fact in early religion God and the Devil are very 

 much one and the same. It might be noticed in this 

 connection that the vegetation spirit in Syrian mythology is 

 Adonis, and his connection with Aphrodite is a matter of 

 common knowledge. Aphrodite is always accompanied by 

 birds her doves have become a proverb. Is it then too 

 fantastic to suggest that here in Central Somerset we have a 

 direct survival of rites which in the golden days of Greece 

 centred round the worship of the Maiden of the Sea-Foam? 



I have already hinted at what is possibly an explanation of 

 the survival of such rites as tree-cults in Britain. There seems 

 very little doubt that such cults were originally the property 

 of a people who were agriculturists, whose religion was the 

 worship of earth divinities and who buried their dead. We 

 know as a matter of certainty that this was the case in 

 pre-historic times in Greece and other lands around the 

 Mediterranean. 



The early culture of Crete, of Mycenae and of the traditional 

 site of Troy has afforded abundant evidence of the fact that 

 the phenomena which I have just mentioned occurred 

 together. Moreover from the same sources we know that at 

 some time a pastoral people worshipping Olympian deities 

 came down upon the Mediterranean from the North and were 



