The Golden Bough

Frazer attempted to define the shared elements of religious belief and scientific thought, discussing fertility rites, human sacrifice, the dying god, the scapegoat, and many other symbols and practices whose influences had extended into 20th-century culture.{{cite book|editor=Hamel, Frazer |title= The Golden Bough|location= London|publisher= Wordsworth|date= 1993}} His thesis is that the most ancient religions were fertility cults that revolved around the worship and periodic sacrifice of a sacred king in accordance with the cycle of the seasons. Frazer proposed that mankind's understanding of the natural world progresses from magic through religious belief to scientific thought.

Image:(Barcelona) The Golden Bough - Joseph Mallord William Turner - Tate Britain.jpg's 1834 painting of the Golden Bough incident in the Aeneid]]

Frazer's thesis was developed in relation to an incident in Virgil's Aeneid, in which Aeneas and the Sibyl present the golden bough taken from a sacred grove to the gatekeeper of Hades to gain admission. The incident was illustrated by J. M. W. Turner's 1834 painting The Golden Bough. Frazer mistakenly states that the painting depicts the lake at Nemi, though it is actually Lake Avernus.{{cite book |last=Frazer |first=J. G. |editor-last=Fraser |editor-first=R. |title=The Golden Bough: A New Abridgement |publisher=Oxford University Press |date=2009 |isbn=9780199538829 |page=809}} The lake of Nemi, also known as "Diana's Mirror", was a place where religious ceremonies and the "fulfillment of vows" of priests and kings were held.{{cite book|author=Frazer, Sir James|title= The Golden Bough|location= London|publisher= Wordsworth|date= 1993}}

Frazer based his thesis on the pre-Roman priest-king Rex Nemorensis, a priest of Diana at Lake Nemi, who was ritually murdered by his successor. The king was the incarnation of a dying and reviving god, a solar deity who underwent a mystic marriage to a goddess of the Earth, died at the harvest and was reincarnated in the spring. Frazer claims that this legend of rebirth was central to almost all of the world's mythologies.

Frazer wrote in a preface to the third edition of The Golden Bough that while he had never studied Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, his friend James Ward, and the philosopher J. M. E. McTaggart, had both suggested to him that Hegel had anticipated his view of "the nature and historical relations of magic and religion". Frazer saw the resemblance as being that "we both hold that in the mental evolution of humanity an age of magic preceded an age of religion, and that the characteristic difference between magic and religion is that, whereas magic aims at controlling nature directly, religion aims at controlling it indirectly through the mediation of a powerful supernatural being or beings to whom man appeals for help and protection." Frazer included an extract from Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1832).{{cite book |author=Frazer, James George |title=The Golden Bough. A Study in Magic and Religion. Part 1: The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings. Vol. 1 |publisher=The Macmillan Press |location=London |year=1976 |pages=ix, 423 |isbn=0-333-01282-8}}

The Golden Bough scandalized the British public when first published, as it included the Christian story of the resurrection of Jesus in its comparative study. Critics thought this treatment invited an agnostic reading of the Lamb of God as a relic of a pagan religion. For the third edition, Frazer placed his analysis of the Crucifixion in a speculative appendix, while discussion of Christianity was excluded from the single-volume abridged edition.{{cite journal |author= Leach, Edmund R. |title= Kingship and divinity: The unpublished Frazer Lecture |location= Oxford |orig-year= 28 October 1982 |journal= HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory |volume=1 |issue=1 |date= 2011 |pages= 279–298 |doi= 10.14318/hau1.1.012 |s2cid= 162404496 }}{{cite journal |author= Smith, Jonathan Z. |title= When the bough breaks |journal = History of Religions |volume=12 |issue=4 |date=1973 |pages= 342–371|doi= 10.1086/462686 |s2cid= 162202089 }}

Frazer himself accepted that his theories were speculative and that the associations he made were circumstantial and usually based only on resemblance.{{Citation|title=Aspects of British Calendar Customs|year=1993|editor-first1=Theresa|editor-last1=Buckland|editor-first2=Juliette|editor-last2=Wood|first=E.C.|last=Cawte|page=38|chapter=It's an Ancient Custom—But How Ancient?|isbn=1850752435|location=Sheffield|publisher=Sheffield Academic Press}} He wrote: "Books like mine, merely speculation, will be superseded sooner or later (the sooner the better for the sake of truth) by better induction based on fuller knowledge."{{Citation|first=R. Angus|last=Downie|title=Frazer and the Golden Bough|location=London|publisher=Victor Gallancz|page=112|isbn=978-0-575-00486-3|year=1970}} In 1922, at the inauguration of the Frazer Lectureship in Anthropology, he said: "It is my earnest wish that the lectureship should be used solely for the disinterested pursuit of truth, and not for the dissemination and propagation of any theories or opinions of mine."{{Citation|issn=0044-8370|volume=24|issue=1|year=1993|first=Godfrey|last=Lienhardt|title=Frazer's anthropology: science and sensibility|pages=1–12|journal=Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford}} Godfrey Lienhardt notes that even during Frazer's lifetime, social anthropologists "had for the most part distanced themselves from his theories and opinions", and that the lasting influence of The Golden Bough and Frazer's wider body of work "has been in the literary rather than the academic world."

File:Mirror Judgement of Paris Louvre Bj1734.jpg—an Etruscan bronze-handled mirror of the fourth or third century BC that relates the myth as interpreted by Frazer, showing the three goddesses giving their apple or pomegranate to the new king, who must kill the old king]]

Robert Ackerman writes that, for British social anthropologists, Frazer is still "an embarrassment" for being "the most famous of them all" even as the field now rejects most of his ideas. While The Golden Bough achieved wide "popular appeal" and exerted a "disproportionate" influence "on so many [20th-century] creative writers", Frazer's ideas played "a much smaller part" in the history of academic social anthropology. Lienhardt himself dismissed Frazer's interpretations of primitive religion as "little more than plausible constructs of [Frazer's] own Victorian rationalism", while Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough (published in 1967), wrote: "Frazer is much more savage than most of his 'savages' [since] his explanations of [their] observances are much cruder than the sense of the observances themselves." R. G. Collingwood shared Wittgenstein's criticism.{{cite book |last1=Collingwood |first1=R. G. |title=The Principles of Art |date=1911 |publisher=Clarendon Press |page=58}}

Initially, the book's influence on the emerging discipline of anthropology was pervasive. Polish anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski said of The Golden Bough: "No sooner had I read this great work than I became immersed in it and enslaved by it. I realized then that anthropology, as presented by Sir James Frazer, is a great science, worthy of as much devotion as any of her elder and more exact studies and I became bound to the service of Frazerian anthropology."{{cite news |author= Hays & L.L. Langness |title= From Ape to Angel: An Informal History of Social Anthropology |pages= 75, 314 |work= The Study of Culture |location= Corte Madera |publisher= Chandler & Sharp |date= 1974}} However, by the 1920s, Frazer's ideas already "began to belong to the past": according to Godfrey Lienhardt:

{{Blockquote|The central theme (or, as he thought, theory) of The Golden Bough—that all mankind had evolved intellectually and psychologically from a superstitious belief in magicians, through a superstitious belief in priests and gods, to enlightened belief in scientists—had little or no relevance to the conduct of life in an Andamanese camp or a Melanesian village, and the whole, supposedly scientific, basis of Frazer's anthropology was seen as a misapplication of Darwin's theory of biological evolution to human history and psychology.|author=|title=|source=}}

Edmund Leach, "one of the most impatient critics of Frazer's overblown prose and literary embellishment of his sources for dramatic effect", scathingly criticized what he saw as the artistic license exercised by Frazer in The Golden Bough: "Frazer used his ethnographic evidence, which he culled from here, there and everywhere, to illustrate propositions which he had arrived at in advance by a priori reasoning, but, to a degree which is often quite startling, whenever the evidence did not fit he simply altered the evidence!"

René Girard, a French historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science, "grudgingly" praised Frazer for recognising kingly sacrifice as "a key primitive ritual", but described his interpretation of the ritual as "a grave injustice to ethnology."{{Cite journal|title=The Frazerian roots of contemporary theories of religion and violence|journal=Religion|first=Robert A.|last=Segal|pages=4–25|issue=1|volume=37|year=2011|doi=10.1016/j.religion.2007.01.006|s2cid=145581051}}{{Cite book|title=The Scapegoat|first=René|last=Girard|author-link=René Girard|year=1986|page=120|isbn=978-0-801-83315-1|publisher=Johns Hopkins University Press}} Girard's criticisms against The Golden Bough were numerous, particularly concerning Frazer's assertion that Christianity was merely a perpetuation of primitive myth-ritualism and that the New Testament Gospels were "just further myths of the death and resurrection of the king who embodies the god of vegetation." Girard himself considered the Gospels to be "revelatory texts" rather than myths or the remains of "ignorant superstition", and rejected Frazer's idea that the death of Jesus was a sacrifice, "whatever definition we may give for that sacrifice."{{Cite book|title=Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World|first=René|last=Girard|author-link=René Girard|year=1978|page=180|isbn=978-0-804-72215-5|publisher=Athlone Press}}

Despite the controversy generated by the work, and its critical reception amongst other scholars, The Golden Bough inspired much of the creative literature of the period. The poet Robert Graves adapted Frazer's concept of the dying king sacrificed for the good of the kingdom to the romantic idea of the poet's suffering for the sake of his Muse-Goddess, as reflected in his book on poetry, rituals, and myths, The White Goddess (1948). William Butler Yeats refers to Frazer's thesis in his poem "Sailing to Byzantium". The horror writer H. P. Lovecraft's understanding of religion was influenced by The Golden Bough,{{cite book |author=Joshi, S. T. |title=H. P. Lovecraft: A Life |publisher=Necronomicon Press |location=West Warwick |year=1996 |page=209 |isbn=0-940884-88-7 }} and Lovecraft mentions the book in his short story "The Call of Cthulhu".{{cite book |author1=Lovecraft, H. P. |author2=Turner, James |title=Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos |publisher=Ballantine Books |location=New York |year=1998 |page=3 |isbn=0-345-42204-X }} T. S. Eliot acknowledged indebtedness to Frazer in his first note to his poem The Waste Land. William Carlos Williams refers to The Golden Bough in Book Two, part two, of Paterson.{{cite web|url=https://archive.org/details/PatersonWCW|title=Paterson – William Carlos Williams|last=William Carlos Williams|date=5 May 1963|access-date=5 May 2018|via=Internet Archive}} Frazer also influenced novelists James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, William Gaddis and D. H. Lawrence.

The lyrics of the song "Not to Touch the Earth" by the Doors were influenced by The Golden Bough, with the title and opening lines being taken from its table of contents.{{cite book |author1=Hopkins, Jerry |author2=Sugarman, Danny |title=No One Here Gets Out Alive |publisher=Warner Books |location=New York |year=1995 |page=179 |isbn=978-0446602280 }} Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now shows the antagonist Kurtz with the book in his lair, and his death is depicted as a ritual sacrifice.

The mythologist Joseph Campbell drew on The Golden Bough in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), in which he accepted Frazer's view that mythology is a primitive attempt to explain the world of nature, though considering it only one among a number of valid explanations of mythology.{{cite book |author=Campbell, Joseph |title=The Hero with a Thousand Faces |publisher=New World Library |year=2008 |isbn=978-1-57731-593-3 |location=Novato, California |pages=330}} Campbell later described Frazer's work as "monumental".{{cite book |author=Campbell, Joseph |title=The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology |publisher=Secker & Warburg |year=1960 |location=London |page=164}} The anthropologist Weston La Barre described Frazer as "the last of the scholastics" in The Human Animal (1955).The Human Animal (Chicago, 1954), cited in Langness, The Study of Culture, pp. 24f The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's commentaries on The Golden Bough have been compiled as Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, edited by Rush Rhees, originally published in 1967 (the English edition followed in 1979).{{cite web|url=http://www.phil.uni-passau.de/dlwg/ws04/21-2-95.txt|title=Phil.uni-passau.de|website=uni-passau.de|access-date=5 May 2018|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120514202203/http://www.phil.uni-passau.de/dlwg/ws04/21-2-95.txt|archive-date=14 May 2012}} Robert Ackerman, in his The Myth and Ritual School: J. G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists (1991), sets Frazer in the broader context of the history of ideas. 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 traditional literary classics at the end of the 19th century, influencing Modernist literature.{{citation needed|date=July 2013}} The Golden Bough influenced Sigmund Freud's work Totem and Taboo (1913),{{cite book |author=Clark, Ronald W. |title=Freud: The Man and the Cause |publisher=Jonathan Cape and Weidenfeld & Nicolson |year=1980 |location=London |page=353}} as well as the work of Freud's student Carl Jung.

The critic Camille Paglia has identified The Golden Bough as one of the most important influences on her book Sexual Personae (1990).{{cite book |author=Paglia, Camille |title=Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays |publisher=Penguin Books |location=London |year=1993 |page=114 |isbn=0-14-017209-2}} In Sexual Personae, Paglia described Frazer's "most brilliant perception" in The Golden Bough as his "analogy between Jesus and the dying gods", though she noted that it was "muted by prudence".{{cite book |author1=Paglia, Camille |title=Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson |publisher=Vintage Books |location=New York |year=1991 |page=[https://archive.org/details/sexualpersonaear00pagl/page/53 53] |isbn=978-0-679-73579-3 |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/sexualpersonaear00pagl/page/53 }} In Salon, she has described the work as "a model of intriguing specificity wed to speculative imagination." Paglia acknowledged that "many details in Frazer have been contradicted or superseded", but maintained that the work of Frazer's Cambridge school of classical anthropology "will remain inspirational for enterprising students seeking escape from today's sterile academic climate."{{cite web | url= http://www.salon.com/2009/11/11/pelosi_7/ | date= 10 November 2009 | title= Pelosi's victory for women | website= Salon.com | first= Camille | last= Paglia | access-date= 22 April 2015 | url-status= live | archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20150501171608/http://www.salon.com/2009/11/11/pelosi_7/ | archive-date= 1 May 2015 }} Paglia has also commented, however, that the one-volume abridgement of The Golden Bough is "bland" and should be "avoided like the plague."{{cite web | url= http://www.salon1999.com/it/col/pagl/1999/03/10pagl.html | date= 10 March 1999 | title= In defense of "The Golden Bough" | website= Salon.com | first= Camille | last= Paglia | access-date= 28 April 2017 | url-status= usurped | archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20160512072038/http://www.salon1999.com/it/col/pagl/1999/03/10pagl.html | archive-date= 12 May 2016 }}

• First edition, 2 vols., 1890. (Vol. [https://archive.org/details/goldenboughstudy01fraz I], [https://archive.org/details/goldenboughstudy02fraz II])
• Second edition, 3 vols., 1900. (Vol. [https://archive.org/details/goldenboughstudy01frazuoft I], [https://archive.org/details/goldenboughstud02frazuoft II], [https://archive.org/details/goldenboughstudy03frazuoft III])
• Third edition, 12 vols., 1906–15.
• [https://archive.org/details/TheGoldenBough-Part1-TheMagicArtAndTheEvolutionOfKingsVol.1 Volume 1 (1911)]: The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings (Part 1)
• [https://archive.org/details/goldenboughstudy02frazuoft Volume 2 (1911)]: The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings (Part 2)
• [https://archive.org/details/goldenboughstud03fraz Volume 3 (1911)]: Taboo and the Perils of the Soul
• [https://archive.org/details/goldenboughstudy04fraz Volume 4 (1911)]: The Dying God
• [https://archive.org/details/goldenboughstudy05frazuoft Volume 5 (1914)]: Adonis, Attis, Osiris (Part 1) – First edition published in 1906 and Second edition in 1907
• [https://archive.org/details/goldenboughstudy06frazuoft Volume 6 (1914)]: Adonis, Attis, Osiris (Part 2) – First edition published in 1906 and Second edition in 1907
• [https://archive.org/details/goldenboughstudy07fraz Volume 7 (1912)]: Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild (Part 1)
• [https://archive.org/details/goldenboughstudy08fraz Volume 8 (1912)]: Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild (Part 2)
• [https://archive.org/details/goldenboughstudy09fraz Volume 9 (1913)]: The Scapegoat
• [https://archive.org/details/1913goldenboughs10fraz Volume 10 (1913)]: Balder the Beautiful (Part 1)
• [https://archive.org/details/goldenboughstudy11fraz Volume 11 (1913)]: Balder the Beautiful (Part 2)
• [https://archive.org/details/goldenboughstudy12fraz Volume 12 (1915)]: Bibliography and General Index

• [https://archive.org/details/aftermathasupple025677mbp 1936]: Aftermath: A Supplement to the Golden Bough

• Entire third edition, including Aftermath, was reprinted in 13 volumes by the Macmillan Press in 1951, 1955, 1963, 1966, 1976 and 1980. {{ISBN|0-333-01282-8}}

• Abridged edition, 1 vol., 1922. This edition excludes Frazer's references to Christianity.
• 1995 Touchstone edition, {{ISBN|0-684-82630-5}}
• 2002 Dover reprint of 1922 edition, {{ISBN|0-486-42492-8}}
• Abridged edition. 1925 print. The Macmillan Company. Available for free.
• Abridged edition, edited by Theodor H. Gaster, 1959, entitled The New Golden Bough: A New Abridgment of the Classic Work.
• Abridged edition, edited by Mary Douglas and abridged by Sabine MacCormack, 1978, entitled The Illustrated Golden Bough. {{ISBN|0-385-14515-2}}
• 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}}
• Abridged edition, abridged by Robert K. G. Temple for Simon & Schuster, 1996, entitled The Illustrated Golden Bough; A Study in Magic and Religion. Another illustrated abridgement. {{ISBN|0-684-81850-7}}

• The 1922 edition of [http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/frazer/ The Golden Bough] on the Internet Sacred Text Archive
• The 1894 version on the Internet Archive
• The 1925 (abridged) version on the Internet Archive

• Archetypal literary criticism
• The Golden Bough (mythology)
• The Mass of Saint-Sécaire
• Need-fire
• Rex Nemorensis
• Seclusion of girls at puberty

{{Reflist|2}}

• Ackerman, Robert. The Myth and Ritual School: J. G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists (Theorists of Myth) 2002. {{ISBN|0-415-93963-1}}.
• Bitting, Mary Margaret. The Golden Bough: An Arrangement of Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough in Play Form (Vantage Press, 1987). {{ISBN|0-533-07040-6}}
• Csapo, Eric. Theories of Mythology (Blackwell Publishing, 2005), pp 36–43, 44–67. {{ISBN|978-0-631-23248-3}}.
• Fraser, Robert. The Making of The Golden Bough: The Origins and Growth of an Argument (Macmillan, 1990; re-issued Palgrave 2001).
• Smith, Jonathan Z. "When the Bough Breaks," in Map is not territory, pp 208–239 (The University of Chicago Press, 1978).

{{Wikisource|The Golden Bough}}

{{Commonscat|The Golden Bough}}

• {{Gutenberg|no=3623|name=The Golden Bough}}
• [http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/frazer/index.htm HTML version of The Golden Bough] on the Internet Sacred Text Archive
• {{librivox book|title=The Golden Bough|author=James Frazer}}
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20080204032921/http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/frazer/james/golden/complete.html The Golden Bough] on eBooks@Adelaide

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