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The Golden Bough
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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 first was 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 The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes (1855).
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Encyclopedia
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 first was 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 The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes (1855). It offered a modernist approach to discussing religion, treating it dispassionately as a cultural phenomenon rather than from a theological perspective. The impact of The Golden Bough on contemporary European literature was substantial.
Subject matter
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 revolved 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 murdered ritually 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 by the British artist Joseph Mallord William Turner: Aeneas and the Sibyl present the golden bough to the gatekeeper of Hades in order to gain admission.
Reception
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. The retreat from his initial insights, which were never revisited disappointed many scholars, believing that some of the topics deserved further analysis.
Its influence on the emerging discipline of anthropology was pervasive and undeniable. For example, Bronislaw Malinowski, stricken with tuberculosis shortly after receiving his Ph.D. in physics and mathematics, read Frazer's work in the original English to distract himself from his illness. "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."
Despite whatever controversy the work may have generated, and its critical reception amongst other scholars, The Golden Bough had a tremendous effect on the literature of the period. Robert Graves adapted Frazer's concept of the dying king who is sacrificed for the good of the kingdom to the romantic idea of the poet's necessary suffering for the sake of his Muse-Goddess in his Frazer-esque book on poetry, rituals, and myths, The White Goddess, which was published in 1948. William Butler Yeats makes reference to it in his poem, "Sailing to Byzantium." H. P. 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 references it as well in Book Two, part two, of his extended poem in five books, Paterson. James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, Aleister Crowley, Ezra Pound, Mary Renault, Joseph Campbell, Naomi Mitchison (in her 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.
Critical analysis of The Golden Bough
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, originally published in 1967, with the English edition following in 1971. He writes, "Frazer is much more savage than most of these savages."
Weston LaBarre made the observation that Frazer was "the last of the scholastics", and wrote The Golden Bough "as an extended footnote to a line in Virgil he felt he did not understand."
Some modern criticism sets Frazer in the broader context of the history of ideas, for example, Robert Ackerman in his The Myth and Ritual School: J. G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists. 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 nineteenth century. This school was an important influence on a great deal of Modernist literature.
Quotations
"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 as does gravitation, and may kill him as certainly as a dose of prussic acid." (Chapter 21, "Tabooed Things".)
In popular culture
- The M. R. James short story "Casting The Runes", references The Golden Bough.
- Stephen King has a character refer to The Golden Bough as a demonology text in "The Mangler".
- The book is mentioned in Raymond Chandler's novel The Long Goodbye.
- Aleister Crowley wrote a series of short stories inspired by The Golden Bough, which were collected into a volume called Golden Twigs.
- Umberto Eco makes reference to the book in Foucault's Pendulum.
- William Gaddis quotes directly from The Golden Bough in The Recognitions to describe a sacrificial act to be performed on a barbary ape named Heracles to save the life of the protagonist.
- Thomas Pynchon makes reference to both The Golden Bough and The White Goddess in chapter 3 of V..
- 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.
- The book is mentioned repeatedly in the John Ringo book Kildar, part of the Paladin of Shadows series, as a reference to understand the practices of a lost tribe of pagan warriors.
- The book is mentioned several times in Albert Sanchez Pinol's Cold Skin.
- The book is heavily referred to in the novel The First Verse by Barry McCrea.
- In Grant Morrison's graphic novel Arkham Asylum, psychotherapist Dr. Amadeus Arkham reads The Golden Bough as his mental health deteriorates.
- The Golden Bough is seen in the film Apocalypse Now in 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 The Wicker Man.
- The titular myth forms the basis of Stuart MacRae and Simon Armitage's opera The Assassin Tree, which premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival on 25 August 2006.
- In the Japanese anime series Eureka Seven, the characters Holland and Dewey Novak are seen reading from The Golden Bough, and it is a symbol for one of the anime's fictional organizations. Frazer's theme of the sacrificial king is prominent throughout the series.
- Jim Morrison, frontman of The Doors referenced the works in his song Not to Touch the Earth. The song begins, "Not to touch the earth, not to see the sun..." These are subchapters of the 60th chapter of The Golden Bough by James Frazer. The chapter is called "Between Heaven and Earth", with subchapter 1, "Not to Touch the Earth", and subchapter 2, "Not to See the Sun".
- The book is cited in the GameCube game Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem with the quote "We are overwhelmed by our very human need to weave a web of meaning, where there may be none".
- The book is cited in "The Call of Cthulhu" by 20th Century horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.
- Member of The Doors, Ray Manzarek's album Love Her Madly has a song titled The Golden Bough
See also
Bibliography
Editions of The Golden Bough
- First edition, 2 vols., 1890. (Vol. - )
- Second edition, 3 vols., 1900. (Vol. - - )
- Third edition, 12 vols., 1906-15. The last volume (1915) is an index. (Vol. , , )
- Abridged edition, 1 vol., 1922. This edition abridges Frazer's references to Christianity.
- 1995 Touchstone edition, ISBN 0-684-82630-5
- 2002 Dover reprint of 1922 edition, ISBN 0-486-42492-8
- Aftermath : A supplement to the golden Bough, 1937
- 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
Secondary texts
- Ackerman, Robert. The Myth and Ritual School: J. G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists (Theorists of Myth) 2002. ISBN 0-415-93963-1
- Csapo, Eric. Theories of Mythology (Blackwell Publishing, 2005), pp 36-43, pp 44-67. ISBN-631-23248-6
- 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, page 208-239 (The University of Chicago Press, 1978).
External links
Text copies of the 1922 edition:
- from eBooks @ Adelaide
- A Study Of Magic and Religion
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