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 was substantial.[1]
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.[2] 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.[2]
J. M. W. Turner'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.[3] 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.[4]
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).[5]
The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion by James George Frazer
The Golden Bough
A Study in Comparative Religion
By
James George Frazer, M.A.
Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge
In Two Volumes.
Vol. I.
New York and London
MacMillan and Co.
1894
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/41082/41082-pdf.pdf
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Sir James George Frazer OM FRS FRSE FBA[1] (/ˈfreɪzər/; 1 January 1854 – 7 May 1941) was a Scottish social anthropologist and folk lorist[2] influential in the early stages of the modern studies of mythology and comparative religion.[3]
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Hathaway, Nancy, 1964─
Friendly guide to mythology / Nancy Hathaway
1. mythology.
BL311 .H38 2000
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p.129
This barbarous ritual ── never mind its questionable veracity ── captured the attention of a shy Scottish antrhopologist and classicist, Sir James George Frazer, and led him to write one of the most influential, unwieldy, and intriguing works of its day. Upon publication in 1890, The Golden Bough: a study in magic and religion was a two-volume work but Frazer accumulated so much data about fertility rites, fire festivals, tree spirits, corn kings, scapegoats, dying-and-reviving gods, taboos, totoems, and human sacrifice that it ripened into 12 volumes. When the first abridged edition appeared in 1922, it still ran to over eight hundred pages, and many abridgments followed (to this day). But Frazer never found his Maxwell Perkins, and the book itself, despite it dramatic, vigorous style and unending parade of weird and fascinating customs, remains an undigestible feast.
James George Frazer, The golden bough: a study in magic and religion, [1890]
12 volumes
p.131
As a member of the myth and ritual school of Cambridge, Frazer believed that the two developed together, with the ritual representing a regular performed action and the myth providing a justification for that action (although myth could also arise to elucidate natural phenomena or as a distortion of historical events). Like other post-Darwinian thinkers, he believed that civilization evolved in stages. The first stage was magic, a world-view based on the supposition that events can be controlled. But magic inevitably disappoints, which leads to the second stage: religion, in which human beings acknowledge their powerlessness and appeal to higher beings for assistance. Eventually that too is rejected, and people turn to science, which Frazer, a committed rationalist, considered a “a golden key that opens many locks in the treasure of nature.”
Although Frazer's book explores strange and thrilling customs from around the world, he led the narrow life of an academic, spending so much time reading that, according to an early biographer, “The facts of Frazer's life consist essentially of a list of books.” He shunned publicity, but his wife Lilly Grove, an energetic widow whom he married in 1896, managed his career (and was given full credit for that by his friends). Frazer and his wife died in 1941 within hours of each other.
Today, Frazer is some times derides as an armchair anthropologist, and much about The Golden Bough has been discounted, including his evolutionary schema and many of his facts (including the sotry of the King of the Wood). None the less, he made sense of primitive myths and rituals, explained the development of religion, and opened up an incredible mine of metaphor and image buried within the recesses of human history. In so doing, he inspired genrations of anthropologists and scores of writers, including T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, who listened to The Golden Bough read aloud while posing for a portrait. More than that, he shook the foundations of established belief, and not just within the academy.
Jane Harrison, another Cambridge ritualist and an acquaintance of Frazer (they took the same Hebrew class), received direct evidence of his influence in a conversation she once had with a local policeman. “I used to believe everything they told me,” he confided. “But, thank God, I read The Golden Bough, and I've been a free-thinker ever since.”
‘’•─“”
Hathaway, Nancy, 1964─
Friendly guide to mythology / Nancy Hathaway
1. mythology.
BL311 .H38 2000
291.1'3──dc21
00─034967
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