The Golden Bough

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J. M. W. Turner's painting of the Golden Bough incident in the Aeneid
J. M. W. Turner's painting of the Golden Bough incident in the Aeneid

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 [1] as a cultural phenomenon rather than from a theological perspective.

Some of the work, especially descriptions of magic, are still held as valid today. His speculation about dying god themes and the Year King have fallen into discredit[citation needed], and his work on totems has been superseded [2]. Although the worth of its contribution to anthropology will be newly evaluated by each generation, its impact on contemporary European literature was substantial.

Contents

[edit] 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 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 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.

[edit] 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.

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 [3]. .

Despite whatever controversy the work may have generated, and its critical reception amongst other scholars, The Golden Bough had a tremendous impact 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, 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.

[edit] 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.[4] He writes, "Frazer is much more savage than most of these savages."[5]

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 19th century. This school was an important influence on a great deal of Modernist literature.

[edit] 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".)

[edit] References in popular culture

[edit] See also

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Editions of The Golden Bough

  • First edition, 2 vols., 1890.
  • Second edition, 3 vols., 1900.
  • Third edition, 12 vols., 1906-15. The last volume (1915) is an index.
  • Abridged edition, 1 vol., 1922. This edition abridges Frazer's references to Christianity.
  • 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

[edit] 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)

[edit] References

  1. ^ Chapter 4., Magic and Religion: 'The dispassionate observer, whose studies have led him to plumb its depths, can hardly regard it otherwise than as a standing menace to civilisation.'
  2. ^ Levi-Strauss, Claude; Rodney Needham (1971). Totemism. Beacon Press. ISBN 10080704671X. 
  3. ^ Levi-Strauss, Claude; Rodney Needham (1971). Totemism. Beacon Press. ISBN 10080704671X. 
  4. ^ http://www.phil.uni-passau.de/dlwg/ws04/21-2-95.txt
  5. ^ Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 131

[edit] External links

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