"A vestige of the practice of putting the king to death at the end of a year's reign appears to have survived in the festival called Macahity, which used to be celebrated in Hawaii during the last month of the year. About a hundred years ago a Russian voyager described the custom as follows: 'The taboo Macahity is not unlike to our festival of Christmas. It continues a whole month, during which the people amuse themselves with dances, plays, and sham-fights of every kind. The king must open this festival wherever he is. On this occasion his majesty dresses himself in his richest cloak and helmet, and is paddled in a canoe along the shore, followed sometimes by many of his subjects. He embarks early, and must finish his excursion at sunrise.

The strongest and most expert of the warriors is chosen to receive him on his landing. The warrior watches the canoe along the beach; and as soon as the king lands, and has thrown off his cloak, he darts his spear at him, from a distance of about thirty paces, and the king must either catch the spear in his hand, or suffer from it: there is no jesting in the business.

Having caught it, he carries it under his arm, with the sharp end downwards, into the temple or heavoo. On his entrance, the assembled multitude begin their sham-fights, and immediately the air is obscured by clouds of spears, made for the occasion with blunted ends. Hamamea (the king) has been frequently advised to abolish this ridiculous ceremony, in which he risks his life every year; but to no effect. His answer always is, that he is as able to catch a spear as any one on the island is to throw it at him. During the Macahity, all punishments are remitted throughout the country; and no person can leave the place in which he commences these holidays, let the affair be ever so important.'" (Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough. A Study in Magic and Religion.)

The great theme of The Golden Bough was how to explain the peculiar customs of the sacred oak at Nemi:

"To conclude these enquiries we may say that if Balder was indeed, as I have conjectured, a personification of a mistletoe-bearing oak, his death by a blow of the mistletoe might on the new theory be explained as a death by a stroke of lightning.

So long as the mistletoe, in which the flame of the lightning smouldered, was suffered to remain among the boughs, so long no harm could befall the good and kindly god of the oak, who kept his life stowed away for safety between earth and heaven in the mysterious parasite; but when once that seat of his life, or of his death, was torn from the branch and hurled at the trunk, the tree fell - the god died - smitten by a thunderbolt.

And what we have said of Balder in the oak forests of Scandinavia may perhaps, with all due diffidence in a question so obscure and uncertain, be applied to the priest of Diana, the King of the Wood, at Aricia in the oak forests of Italy. He may have personated in flesh and blood the great Italian god of the sky, Jupiter, who had kindly come down from heaven in the lightning flash to dwell among men in the mistletoe - the thunder-besom - the Golden Bough - growing on the sacred oak in the dells of Nemi. If that was so, we need not wonder that the priest guarded with drawn sword the mystic bough which contained the god's life and his own. The goddess whom he served and married was herself, if I am right, no other than the Queen of Heaven, the true wife of the sky-god.

For she, too, loved the solitude of the woods and the lonely hills, and sailing overhead on clear nights in the likeness of the silver moon looked down with pleasure on her own fair image reflected on the calm, the burnished surface of the lake, Diana's Mirror."

When the Hawaiian king at the end of the year caught the spear hurled at him it meant he survived, the tree which he personified would live on for another cycle.

King

Tree

Thursday

Jupiter

Father Light

Lightning

My table exemplifies a group of correspondences, which - I suggest - once ruled the thoughts all over the world. Also myths on Easter Island connected the king with a tree:

... The king arose from his sleeping mat and said to all the people: 'Let us go to Orongo so that I can announce my death!' The king climbed on the rock and gazed in the direction of Hiva, the direction in which he had travelled (across the ocean). The king said: 'Here I am and I am speaking for the last time.' The people (mahingo) listened as he spoke. The king called out to his guardian spirits (akuaku), Kuihi and Kuaha, in a loud voice: 'Let the voice of the rooster of Ariana crow softly. The stem with many roots (i.e., the king) is entering!' The king fell down, and Hotu A Matua died ...

Which is rather remarkable because there were no longer any trees standing tall on Easter Island. Neither does Manuscript E say anything about the last days and the death of the king. And neither was there any month named Vero as on Hawaii and Marquesas:

Vero

To throw, to hurl (a lance, a spear). This word was also used with the particle kua preposed: koía kua vero i te matá, he is the one who threw the obsidian [weapon]. Verovero, to throw, to hurl repeatedly, quickly (iterative of vero). Vanaga.

1. Arrow, dart, harpoon, lance, spear, nail, to lacerate, to transpierce (veo). P Mgv.: vero, to dart, to throw a lance, the tail; verovero, ray, beam, tentacle. Mq.: veó, dart, lance, harpoon, tail, horn. Ta.: vero, dart, lance. 2. To turn over face down. 3. Ta.: verovero, to twinkle like the stars. Ha.: welowelo, the light of a firebrand thrown into the air. 4. Mq.: veo, tenth month of the lunar year. Ha.: welo, a month (about April). Churchill.

Sa.: velo, to cast a spear or dart, to spear. To.: velo, to dart. Fu.: velo, velosi, to lance. Uvea: velo, to cast; impulse, incitement. Niuē: velo, to throw a spear or dart. Ma.: wero, to stab, to pierce, to spear. Ta.: vero, to dart or throw a spear. Mg.: vero, to pierce, to lance. Mgv.: vero, to lance, to throw a spear. Mq.: veo, to lance, to throw a spear. Churchill 2.

WELO, v. Haw., to float or stream in the wind; to flutter or shake in the wind, s. the setting of the sun, or the appearance of it floating on the ocean; welo-welo, colours or cloth streaming in the wind, a tail, as of a kite, light streaming from a brand of fire thrown into the air in the dark; hoku-welo-welo, a comet, a meteor; ko-welo, to drag behind, as the trail of a garment, to stream, as a flag or pennant.

Sam., Tong., welo, to dart, cast a spear of dart. Tah., wero, to dart, throw a spear; a storm, tempest, fig. great rage; wero-wero, to twinkle, as the stars. Marqu., weo, a tail. Mangar., wero, a lance, spear. Fornander.

My rule of thumb, which says a repetition entails the opposite, holds true here too. Vero indicates death as from a spear, while verovero means the life connected with stars that twinkle, colours, rays, and beams, notably also the light streaming from a brand of fire thrown into the air.