The Golden Bough
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion was originally (1900) a 13-volume work on the roots of European mythology and religion by British anthropologist Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941). He abridged the work into one 870-page volume, also titled The Golden Bough, in 1922. Later scholars in several fields have built upon the foundation he laid, especially those in comparative religion.The salient point of this seminal book (see The White Goddess) is that "primitive" religions from around the world share a great deal in common with each other and "modern" religions such as Christianity. The thesis of the book is that ancient religions were fertility cults that centred around the worship of, and periodic sacrifice of, a sacred king, the incarnation of a dying and reviving god, a solar deity who underwent a mystic marriage to a goddess of the earth, and who died at the harvest and who was reincarnated in the spring. It claimed that this legend was central to almost all of the world's mythologies. The most controversial claim, not stated plainly but strongly implied, was that Jesus Christ was yet another in the series of dying and reviving gods.
Parts of the book, most notably its discussion of the symbolism of magic, and its elucidation of the concept of "sympathetic magic," remain well accepted by scholars today. The larger thesis about 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 the system.
The book has been even more influential in literature than it has been in anthropology. William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Robert Graves, and Ezra Pound are but a few of the major authors that have been deeply influenced by The Golden Bough. The system has also been borrowed by many fantasy novelists from Mary Renault forward. The literary impact of The Golden Bough has given its thesis a new life even as its influence in anthropology waned.
The title was taken from the painting The Golden Bough by the British artist Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) that showed Aeneas and the Sybil presenting the golden bough to the gatekeeper of Hades to gain admission.
