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=                          The_Golden_Bough                          =
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                            Introduction
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'The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion' (retitled 'The
Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion' in its second edition) is
a wide-ranging, comparative study of mythology and religion, written
by the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer. 'The Golden
Bough' was first published in two volumes in 1890; in three volumes in
1900; and in twelve volumes in the third edition, published 1906-1915.
It has also been published in several different one-volume
abridgments. The work was for a wide literate audience raised on tales
as told in such publications as Thomas Bulfinch's 'The Age of Fable,
or Stories of Gods and Heroes' (1855). The influence of 'The Golden
Bough' on contemporary European literature and thought has been
substantial.


                              Summary
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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. 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.

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. 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.

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).


                         Critical reception
======================================================================
'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.

Frazer himself accepted that his theories were speculative and that
the associations he made were circumstantial and usually based only on
resemblance. 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." 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." 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."

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.

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." However,
by the 1920s, Frazer's ideas already "began to belong to the past":
according to Godfrey Lienhardt:


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."
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."


                         Literary influence
======================================================================
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', and Lovecraft mentions the book in his short story "The
Call of Cthulhu". 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'.
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. 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. Campbell later described Frazer's work as "monumental". The
anthropologist Weston La Barre described Frazer as "the last of the
scholastics" in 'The Human Animal' (1955). 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).
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. 'The Golden Bough' influenced
Sigmund Freud's work 'Totem and Taboo' (1913), 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).
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". 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." Paglia has also
commented, however, that the one-volume abridgement of 'The Golden
Bough' is "bland" and should be "avoided like the plague."


Editions
==========
*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'


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


Reprints
==========
*Entire third edition, including 'Aftermath', was reprinted in 13
volumes by the Macmillan Press in 1951, 1955, 1963, 1966, 1976 and
1980.


Abridged editions
===================
*Abridged edition, 1 vol., 1922. This edition excludes Frazer's
references to Christianity.
**1995 Touchstone edition,
**2002 Dover reprint of 1922 edition,
*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'.
*Abridged edition, edited by Robert Fraser for Oxford University
Press, 1994. It restores the material on Christianity purged in the
first abridgement.
*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.


Free Online text
==================
*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


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


                          Further reading
======================================================================
* Ackerman, Robert. 'The Myth and Ritual School: J. G. Frazer and the
Cambridge Ritualists' (Theorists of Myth) 2002. .
* Bitting, Mary Margaret. 'The Golden Bough: An Arrangement of Sir
James George Frazer's The Golden Bough in Play Form' (Vantage Press,
1987).
* Csapo, Eric. 'Theories of Mythology' (Blackwell Publishing, 2005),
pp 36-43, 44-67. .
* 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).


                           External links
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*
* [http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/frazer/index.htm HTML version of
'The Golden Bough'] on the Internet Sacred Text Archive
*
*
[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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