and in folk survivals show that some such course as this had been pursued by the Celts with regard to their divine kings, as it was also elsewhere.[522] It is not impossible that some at least of the Druids stood in a similar relation to the gods.  Kings and priests were probably at first not differentiated.  In Galatia twelve “tetrarchs” met annually with three hundred assistants at Drunemeton as the great national council.[523] This council at a consecrated place (nemeton), its likeness to the annual Druidic gathering in Gaul, and the possibility that Dru- has some connection with the name “Druid,” point to a religious as well as political aspect of this council.  The “tetrarchs” may have been a kind of priest-kings; they had the kingly prerogative of acting as judges as had the Druids of Gaul.  The wife of one of them was a priestess,[524] the office being hereditary in her family, and it may have been necessary that her husband should also be a priest.  One tetrarch, Deiotarus, “divine bull,” was skilled in augury, and the priest-kingship of Pessinus was conferred on certain Celts in the second century B.C., as if the double office were already a Celtic institution.[525] Mythic Celtic kings consulted the gods without any priestly intervention, and Queen Boudicca had priestly functions.[526] Without giving these hints undue emphasis, we may suppose that the differentiation of the two offices would not be simultaneous over the Celtic area.  But when it did take effect priests would probably lay claim to the prerogatives of the priest-king as incarnate god.  Kings were not likely to give these up, and where they retained them priests would be content with seeing that the tabus and ritual and the slaying of the mock king were duly observed.  Irish kings were perhaps still regarded as gods, though certain Druids may have been divine priests, since they called themselves creators of the universe, and both continental and Irish Druids claimed superiority to kings.  Further, the name [Greek:  semnotheoi], applied along with the name “Druids” to Celtic priests, though its meaning is obscure, points to divine pretensions on their part.[527]

The incarnate god was probably representative of a god or spirit of earth, growth, or vegetation, represented also by a tree.  A symbolic branch of such a tree was borne by kings, and perhaps by Druids, who used oak branches in their rites.[528] King and tree would be connected, the king’s life being bound up with that of the tree, and perhaps at one time both perished together.  But as kings were represented by a substitute, so the sacred tree, regarded as too sacred to be cut down, may also have had its succedaneum.  The Irish bile or sacred tree, connected with the kings, must not be touched by any impious hand, and it was sacrilege to cut it down.[529] Probably before cutting down the tree a branch or something growing upon it, e.g. mistletoe, had to be cut, or the king’s symbolic branch secured before