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 worth of its contribution to
anthropology will be newly evaluated by each generation, its impact on contemporary European literature was unquestionably large.
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J.M.W. Turner's painting of the Golden Bough incident in the Aeneid |
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::"When I first put pen to paper to write
The Golden Bough I had no conception of the magnitude of the voyage on which I was embarking; I thought only to explain a single rule of an ancient Italian priesthood." (
Aftermath p vi)
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 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 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 anthropologists 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 (in
The Waste Land),
Robert Graves (see
The White Goddess),
Ezra Pound,
Mary Renault,
Joseph Campbell,
Naomi Mitchison (
The Corn King and the Spring Queen )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.
: "If the test of truth lay in a show of hands or a counting of heads, the system of magic might appeal, with far more reason than the Catholic Church, to the proud motto,
Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus ["Always, everywhere, and by all" - ed.], as the sure and certain credential of its own infallibility." (Chapter 4, "
Magic and Religion".)
"The danger, however, is not less real because it is imaginary; imagination acts upon man as really does gravitation, and may kill him as certainly as a dose of prussic acid." (Chapter 21, "
Tabooed Things".)
* First edition, 2 vols., 1890.
* Second edition, 3 vols., 1900.
* Third edition, 12 vols., 1906-15. The last volume (1915) is an index.
* Abridged edition, 1 vol., 1922. This edition 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 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)
*Csapo, Eric. 2005.
Theories of Mythology (Blackwell Pubishing, 2005),pages 36-43. Further discussion on Frazer on pages 44-67. ISBN-631-23248-6
*
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.
*Information from 'The Golden Bough' was used extensively for the 1973 film about pagan sacrifice,
The Wicker Man.
*"The Golden Bough" is referenced in the
Nintendo GameCube game
Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem created by
Silicon Knights.
The Golden Bough is both directly referenced in and a partial framework for the plot structure of the
Diana Wynne Jones novel
Fire and Hemlock.
*20th Century American Modernist poet William Carlos Williams references Frazer's "The Golden Bough" in Book Two, part two, of his extended poem in five books, "Paterson".
*In the
anime Eureka 7, two characters are repeatedly seen reading
The Golden Bough.
* V is seen holding one of the book's volumes while talking to Evey in the movie
V for Vendetta (film).
*
The Hero with a Thousand Faces*
Force-fireText copies of the 1922 edition:
*
The Golden Bough A Study Of Magic and Religion
*
HTML version of The Golden Bough*
Free ebook of The Golden Bough at
Project Gutenberg
