Golden Bough

Golden Bough In Virgil's Aeneid, book 6, Aeneas is told by the Cumaean Sibyl that he must find and pluck a ‘golden bough’ for Proserpine before he can enter the Underworld. This idea seems to be an invention of Virgil's own; Servius, the fourth-century commentator on Virgil, associated it with the cult of the goddess Diana at Aricia, where there was a sacred tree from which a branch had first to be broken off by the runaway slave who wished to kill the priest and take his place. This legend of ritual killing can be paralleled in other societies, and from this starting-point Sir James Frazer developed his great work on the evolution of religious beliefs and institutions, the Golden Bough (1890–1915).