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 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.
The book caused a scandal when it was released because it addressed certain beliefs about Jesus the way it addressed beliefs about pagans gods.[citation needed]
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 His speculation about dying god themes and the Year King have fallen into discredit, and his work on totems has been superseded. Although the worth of its contribution to anthropology will be newly evaluated by each generation, its impact on contemporary European literature was substantial.
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[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 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.
[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.
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. 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." T. S. Eliot acknowledged indebtedness to Frazer in his first note to his poem The Waste Land. American Modernist poet William Carlos Williams references "The Golden Bough" 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 (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.[1] He writes, "Frazer is much more savage than most of these savages," (Remarks, p131).
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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- V is seen holding one of the book's volumes while talking to Evey in the movie V for Vendetta.
- 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.
- Jim Morrison used the phrases "Not to touch the Earth/Not to see the Sun" (taken from The Golden Bough table of contents) in The Doors song "Not to Touch the Earth".
- 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 Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, which is based upon H. P. Lovecraft's works, lists an unabridged version of 'The Golden Bough' as one of a number of significant Occult tomes.
[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.
- 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
[edit] Secondary texts
- Ackerman, Robert. 2002. The Myth and Ritual School: J. G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists (Theorists of Myth) ISBN 0-415-93963-1
- Csapo, Eric. 2005. Theories of Mythology (Blackwell Publishing, 2005),pages 36-43. Further discussion of Frazer on pages 44-67. ISBN-631-23248-6
- Fraser, Robert. 1990. The Making of The Golden Bough: The Origins and Growth of an Argument (Macmillan, 1990; re-issued Palgrave 2001)
[edit] External links
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.