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The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion is a wide-ranging comparative study of mythology and religion, written by Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941). It was first published in two volumes in 1890; the third edition, published 1906–15, comprised twelve volumes. It was aimed at a broad literate audience raised on tales as told in such publications as Thomas Bulfinch's Age of Fable. It offered a modernist approach to discussing religion, treating it dispassionately as a cultural phenomenon rather than from a theological perspective. Although the worth of its contribution to anthropology is arguably negligible, its impact on contemporary European literature was substantial.
The Golden Bough attempts to define the shared elements of religious belief, ranging from ancient belief systems to relatively modern religions such as Christianity. Its thesis is that old religions were fertility cults that centered around the worship of, and periodic sacrifice of, a sacred king. This king was the incarnation of a dying and reviving god, a solar deity who underwent a mystic marriage to a goddess of the earth, who died at the harvest, and 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, 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 book's 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 in order to gain admission.
The book scandalized the British 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 theme of 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 his system.
Frazer often reveals a confidence in a linear intellectual progress of mankind, moving from primitivism to a superior position. This is a thesis which anthropologists no longer share. As cultural anthropology has expanded and deepened, many of Frazer's individual conclusions 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). In his over-confidence in modern man's superiority, he is rather pejorative in his treatment of magical traditions, calling them "false and barren," "fallacious," "mistaken," "in error," and "deceitful." He is uninterested in understanding the religious practices of "savages" from their own point of view, but rather concerns himself with simply describing (through the eyes of a Western European) their practices and, ever so often, making derogatory remarks about them.
William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot (in The Waste Land), Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune (see The Mystical Qabalah), Ludwig Wittgenstein, 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"], 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".)
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:
Text copies of the 1922 edition: