The Golden Bough: Encyclopedia - The Golden Bough

The Golden Bough

The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion is a wide-ranging comparative study of mythology and religion by Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941), first published in 1890. It was aimed at a broad literate audience raised on tales as told in such publications as Bulfinch's Age of Fable. It offered a modernist approach, discussing religion dispassionately as a cultural phenomenon, rather than from a theological perspective. While the final worth of its contribution to anthropology will be newly evaluated by each generation, its impact on contemporary European literature was unquestionably large.

The Golden Bough - Subject matter

The Golden Bough attempts to define what almost all primitive religions share with each other, and with modern religions such as Christianity. Its thesis is that ancient religions were fertility cults that centred around the worship of, and periodic sacrifice of, a sacred king, the incarnation of a dying and reviving god, a solar deity who underwent a mystic marriage to a goddess of the earth, and who died at the harvest and who was reincarnated in the spring. Frazer claims that this legend is central to almost all of the world's mythologies. The germ for Frazer's thesis was the pre-Roman priest-king at the fane of Nemi in a sacred wood, who was ritually murdered by his successor:

The title was taken from an incident in the Aeneid, illustrated in The Golden Bough by the British artist Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851): Aeneas and the Sibyl present the golden bough to the gatekeeper of Hades to gain admission.

The Golden Bough - Reception

The book scandalized the public upon its first publication, because it included the Christian story of Jesus in its comparative study, thus inviting an agnostic reading of the Lamb of God as a relic of a pagan religion. Frazer removed his analysis of the Crucifixion to a speculative appendix for the third edition, and it was entirely missing from the single-volume abridged edition.

Parts of the book, most notably its discussion of the symbolism of magic, and its elucidation of the concept of sympathetic magic, remain well accepted by scholars today. The larger thesis about dying and reviving gods has not fared as well in the world of anthropology and comparative religion; most contemporary anthropologists have concluded that Frazer overinterpreted his evidence to fit it into the system.

Frazer often reveals a confidence in a linear intellectual progress of mankind to a superior position which anthropologists no longer share. As cultural anthropology has expanded and deepened, many individual conclusions of Frazer's have required revision within local and historical cultural contexts. Modern anthropoligists conclude that Frazer placed too much weight on what he called "the essential similarity of man's chief wants everywhere and at all times" (ch. lxix).

William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Robert Graves (see The White Goddess), Ezra Pound, Mary Renault, Joseph Campbell, and Camille Paglia are but a few authors deeply influenced by The Golden Bough. Its literary impact has given it continued life even as its direct influence in anthropology has waned.

The Golden Bough - Quotations

The Golden Bough - Editions of The Golden Bough

• First edition, 2 vols., 1890.
• Second edition, 3 vols., 1900.
• Third edition, 12 vols., 1906-15. The last volume (1915) in an index.
• Abridged edition, 1 vol., 1922. Lady Frazer is thought to have largely compiled this edition, which abridges Frazer's references to Christianity.
• Aftermath : A supplement to the golden Bough, 1937
• New abridged edition, edited by Robert Fraser for Oxford University Press, 1994. It restores the material on Christianity purged in the first abridgement. ISBN 0-19-282934-3

The Golden Bough - Critical analysis of The Golden Bough

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein returned time and again to The Golden Bough, often enough that his commentaries have been compiled as "Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough," edited by Rush Rhees, and originally published in 1967, with the English edition following in 1971. [1].

Some modern criticism sets Frazer in a broader context of the history of ideas:

• Ackerman, Robert. 2002. The Myth and Ritual School: J.G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists (Theorists of Myth) ISBN 0415939631 The myth and ritual school includes scholars Jane Harrison, Gilbert Murray, F.M. Cornford, and A.B. Cook, who were connecting the new discipline of myth theory and anthropology with the traditional literary classics at the end of the 19th century.
• Fraser, Robert. 1990. The Making of The Golden Bough : The Origins and Growth of an Argument (Macmillan, 1990; re-issued Palgrave 2001)

The Golden Bough - References in popular culture

• "The Golden Bough" is referenced in the Nintendo Gamecube game Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem created by Silicon Knights.
• In the anime Eureka 7, one character is repeatedly seen reading The Golden Bough.
• Jim Morrison used the phrases "Not to touch the Earth/Not to see the Sun" (taken from The Golden Bough's table of contents) in his The Doors song "Not to Touch the Earth".
• "The Golden Bough" is seen in the film Apocalypse Now as a book on the stack of reading material for Colonel Kurtz, along with Jessie Weston's "From Ritual to Romance".

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