Observations placeholder
W.Y. Evans-Wentz - The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries - Mistletoe and the Silver bough
Identifier
014055
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Showing that the mistletoe was used in the Mysteries as a symbol of the two possible routes one could take after initiation - after rebirth had taken place.
The mistletoe stem always branches into two and each stem has two leaves.
The white bough is the apple - Celtic symbol of wisdom and in this case purity.
A description of the experience
The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, by W.Y. Evans-Wentz, [1911]
Let us … make a few comparisons between the Silver Branch of the Celts and the Golden Bough of the Ancients, expecting the two symbols naturally to differ in their functions, though not fundamentally.
It is evident at the outset that the Golden Bough was as much the property of the queen of that underworld called Hades as the Silver Branch was the gift of the Celtic fairy queen, and like the Silver Bough it seems to have been the symbolic bond between that world and this, offered as a tribute to Proserpine by all initiates, who made the mystic voyage in full human consciousness. And, as we suspect, there may be even in the ancient Celtic legends of mortals who make that strange voyage to the Western Otherworld and return to this world again, an echo of initiatory rites--perhaps druidic--similar to those of Proserpine as shown in the journey of Aeneas, which, as Virgil records it, is undoubtedly a poetical rendering of an actual psychic experience of a great initiate.
The Rites of Proserpine as conducted in the Mysteries of Antiquity furnish us with the means; and in what Servius has written we have the material ready.
Taking the letter Υ, which Pythagoras said is like life with its dividing ways of good and evil, as the mystic symbol of the branch which all initiates like Aeneas offered to Proserpine in the subjective world while there out of the physical body, he says of the initiatory rites:-
'He (the poet) could not join the Rites of Proserpine without having the branch to hold up. And by "going to the shades" he (the poet) means celebrating the Rites of Proserpine.'