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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 will be newly evaluated by each generation, its impact on contemporary European literature was substantial.

Contents 1 Subject matter 2 Reception 3 Quotations 4 Editions of The Golden Bough 5 Critical analysis of The Golden Bough 6 References in popular culture 7 See also 8 External links

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 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.

William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, 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 as does gravitation, and may kill him as certainly as a dose of prussic acid." (Chapter 21, "Tabooed Things".)

• 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.
  • 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

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]. He writes, "Frazer is much more savage than most of these savages," (Remarks, p131).

Some modern criticism sets Frazer in a broader context of the history of ideas:

• Ackerman, Robert. 2002. The Myth and Ritual School: J.G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists (Theorists of Myth) ISBN 0-415-93963-1 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 the traditional literary classics at the end of the 19th century.
• Fraser, Robert. 1990. The Making of The Golden Bough: The Origins and Growth of an Argument (Macmillan, 1990; re-issued Palgrave 2001)
• Csapo, Eric. 2005. Theories of Mythology (Blackwell Publishing, 2005),pages 36-43. Further discussion of Frazer on pages 44-67. ISBN-631-23248-6

• 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 (1948). Graves borrowed heavily from Frazer, as did other modernists, such as DH Lawrence.
• William Butler Yeats makes a reference to The Golden Bough in his poem, "Sailing to Byzantium".
• H. P. Lovecraft mentions the book in his short story "The Call of Cthulhu". The Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, which is based upon Lovecraft's works, lists an unabridged version of 'The Golden Bough' as one of a number of significant Occult tomes.
• The M. R. James short story "Casting The Runes", references The Golden Bough.
• Stephen King has a character refer to The Golden Bough seemingly as a demonology text in "The Mangler".
• In the graphic novel Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, written by Grant Morrison and drawn by Dave McKean, which deals with the fall of psychotherapist Dr. Amadeus Arkham into insanity, mentions that Amadeus Arkham read The Golden Bough as his mental health deteriorates.
• Jim Morrison used the phrases "Not to touch the Earth/Not to see the Sun" (taken from The Golden Bough's table of contents) in his The Doors song "Not to Touch the Earth".
• The Golden Bough is seen in the film Apocalypse Now as a book on the stack of reading material for Colonel Kurtz, along with Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance
• T.S. Eliot acknowledged indebtedness to both Frazer and Weston's books in his first note to his poem The Waste Land.
• Information from The Golden Bough was used extensively for the 1973 film The Wicker Man.
• 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. It is used 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
• Umberto Eco makes reference to the book in Foucault's Pendulum
• Thomas Pynchon makes reference to both The Golden Bough and The White Goddess in chapter 3 of V.
• 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 cartoon's fictional organizations. Frazer's theme of the sacrificial king is prominent throughout the series.
• "The Golden Bough" is referenced in a narrated cutscene within the Nintendo GameCube game Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem created by Silicon Knights.
• 20th Century American Modernist poet William Carlos Williams references Frazer's "The Golden Bough" in Book Two, part two, of his extended poem in five books, "Paterson".
• V is seen holding one of the book's volumes while talking to Evey in the movie V for Vendetta.
• The book is mentioned in Raymond Chandler's novel The Long Goodbye.
• 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 the 25th of August 2006.
• The book is heavily referred to in the novel "The First Verse" by Barry McCrea.

• The Hero with a Thousand Faces
• Force-fire
• Archetypal literary criticism

Text copies of the 1922 edition:

• The Golden Bough from eBooks @ Adelaide
• The Golden Bough A Study Of Magic and Religion
• HTML version of The Golden Bough
• The Golden Bough, available at Project Gutenberg.