On this point I consulted two eminent botanical friends, Mr. Murray, of the British Museum, and Prof. Farmer, from whom I have learned that the distribution of _V. album_ is in Europe universal except north of Norway and north of Russia; in India in the temperate Himalayas from Kashmir to Nepaul, altitude 3000 to 7000 feet.
The _Viscum aureum_, otherwise called _Loranthus Europaeus_, is a near relation of the familiar mistletoe, and in Italy grows on the oak almost exclusively. There are fifty species of Loranthus in the Indian flora, but _L. Europaeus_ does not occur.
In the _Viscum aureum_ we have the “golden bough,” the oak-borne _Aurum frondens_ and _Ramus aureus_ of Virgil; and it can easily be imagined that when the Druids reached our shores from a country which had supplied them with the _Viscum aureum_, this would be replaced by the _V. album_ growing chiefly on apple trees and not on oaks; indeed, Mr. Davies, in his “Celtic Researches,” tells us that the apple was the next sacred tree to the oak, and that apple orchards were planted in the vicinity of the sacred groves. The transplanting of the mistletoe from the apple to the oak tree before the mystic ceremonies began was not beyond the resources of priestcraft.
It must not be forgotten that these ceremonies took place at both solstices--once in June, when the oak was in full leaf, and again in December, when the parasitic plant was better visible in the light of the young moon. Mr. Frazer, in his “Golden Bough” (iii. p. 328), points out that at the summer solstice not only was mistletoe gathered, but many other “magic plants, whose evanescent virtue can be secured at this mystic season alone.”
It is the ripening of the berries at the winter solstice which secured for the mistletoe the paramount importance the ceremonials connected with it possessed at that time, when the rest of the vegetable world was dormant.
With regard especially to the particular time of the year chosen for sun-worship and the worship of the gods and solar heroes connected with the years to which I have referred, I may add that the vague year in Egyptian chronology makes it a very difficult matter to determine the exact Gregorian dates for the ancient Egyptian festivals, but, fortunately, there is another way of getting at them. Mr. Roland Mitchell, when compiling his valuable “Egyptian Calendar” (Luzac and Co., 1900), found that the Koptic calendar really presents to us the old Egyptian year, “which has been in use for thousands of years, and has survived all the revolutions.”