Though I am now less than ever disposed to lay weight
on the analogy between the Italian priest and the Norse god, I have
allowed it to stand because it furnishes me with a pretext for
discussing not only the general question of the external soul in popular
superstition, but also the fire-festivals of Europe, since fire played a
part both in the myth of Balder and in the ritual of the Arician grove.
Thus Balder the Beautiful in my hands is little more than a
stalking-horse to carry two heavy pack-loads of facts. And what is true
of Balder applies equally to the priest of Nemi himself, the nominal
hero of the long tragedy of human folly and suffering which has unrolled
itself before the readers of these volumes, and on which the curtain is
now about to fall. He, too, for all the quaint garb he wears and the
gravity with which he stalks across the stage, is merely a puppet, and
it is time to unmask him before laying him up in the box.
To drop metaphor, while nominally investigating a particular problem of
ancient mythology, I have really been discussing questions of more
general interest which concern the gradual evolution of human thought
from savagery to civilization. The enquiry is beset with difficulties of
many kinds, for the record of man's mental development is even more
imperfect than the record of his physical development, and it is harder
to read, not only by reason of the incomparably more subtle and complex
nature of the subject, but because the reader's eyes are apt to be
dimmed by thick mists of passion and prejudice, which cloud in a far
less degree the fields of comparative anatomy and geology.
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