 Cover of the first volume of the 1976 Macmillan Press edition | |
| Author | James George Frazer |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subject | Comparative religion |
| Publisher | Macmillan and Co. |
Publication date | 1890 |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover andPaperback) |
The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (retitledThe Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion in its second edition) is a wide-ranging, comparative study ofmythology andreligion, written by the Scottish anthropologist SirJames George Frazer.The Golden Bough was first published in two volumes in 1890; in three volumes in 1900; and in twelve volumes in the third edition, published 1906–1915. It has also been published in several different one-volume abridgments. The work was for a wide literate audience raised on tales as told in such publications asThomas Bulfinch'sThe Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes (1855). The influence ofThe Golden Bough on contemporaryEuropean literature and thought has been substantial.[1]
Frazer attempted to define the shared elements of religious belief and scientific thought, discussing fertility rites,human sacrifice, thedying god, thescapegoat, and many other symbols and practices whose influences had extended into 20th-century culture.[2] Histhesis is that the most ancient religions werefertility cults that revolved around theworship and periodicsacrifice of asacred king in accordance with the cycle of the seasons. Frazer proposed that mankind's understanding of the natural world progresses frommagic throughreligious belief to scientific thought.[2]
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Frazer's thesis was developed in relation toan episode inVirgil'sAeneid, in whichAeneas and theSibyl present the golden bough taken from a sacred grove to the gatekeeper ofHades to gain admission. The incident was illustrated byJ. M. W. Turner's 1834 paintingThe Golden Bough. Frazer mistakenly states that the painting depicts the lake atNemi, though it is actuallyLake Avernus.[3] The lake of Nemi, also known as "Diana's Mirror", was a place where religious ceremonies and the "fulfillment of vows" of priests and kings were held.[4]
Frazer based his thesis on the pre-Roman priest-kingRex Nemorensis, a priest of Diana at Lake Nemi, who was ritually murdered by his successor. The king was the incarnation of adying and reviving god, asolar deity who underwent a mystic marriage to agoddess of the Earth, died at the harvest and was reincarnated in the spring. Frazer claims that this legend of rebirth was central to almost all of the world's mythologies.
Frazer wrote in a preface to the third edition ofThe Golden Bough that while he had never studiedGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, his friend James Ward, and the philosopherJ. M. E. McTaggart, had both suggested to him that Hegel had anticipated his view of "the nature and historical relations of magic and religion". Frazer saw the resemblance as being that "we both hold that in the mental evolution of humanity an age of magic preceded an age of religion, and that the characteristic difference between magic and religion is that, whereas magic aims at controlling nature directly, religion aims at controlling it indirectly through the mediation of a powerful supernatural being or beings to whom man appeals for help and protection." Frazer included an extract from Hegel'sLectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1832).[5]
The Golden Bough scandalized the British public when first published, as it included the Christian story of theresurrection of Jesus in its comparative study. Critics thought this treatment invited anagnostic reading of theLamb of God as a relic of apagan religion. For the third edition, Frazer placed his analysis of theCrucifixion in a speculative appendix, while discussion ofChristianity was excluded from the single-volume abridged edition.[6][7]
Frazer himself accepted that his theories were speculative and that the associations he made were circumstantial and usually based only on resemblance.[8] He wrote: "Books like mine, merely speculation, will be superseded sooner or later (the sooner the better for the sake of truth) by better induction based on fuller knowledge."[9] In 1922, at the inauguration of theFrazer Lectureship in Anthropology, he said: "It is my earnest wish that the lectureship should be used solely for the disinterested pursuit of truth, and not for the dissemination and propagation of any theories or opinions of mine."[10] Godfrey Lienhardt notes that even during Frazer's lifetime, social anthropologists "had for the most part distanced themselves from his theories and opinions", and that the lasting influence ofThe Golden Bough and Frazer's wider body of work "has been in the literary rather than the academic world."[10]
Robert Ackerman writes that, for British social anthropologists, Frazer is still "an embarrassment" for being "the most famous of them all" even as the field now rejects most of his ideas. WhileThe Golden Bough achieved wide "popular appeal" and exerted a "disproportionate" influence "on so many [20th-century] creative writers", Frazer's ideas played "a much smaller part" in the history of academic social anthropology. Lienhardt himself dismissed Frazer's interpretations of primitive religion as "little more than plausible constructs of [Frazer's] own Victorian rationalism", whileLudwig Wittgenstein, in hisRemarks on Frazer's Golden Bough (published in 1967), wrote: "Frazer is much more savage than most of his 'savages' [since] his explanations of [their] observances are much cruder than the sense of the observances themselves."[10]R. G. Collingwood shared Wittgenstein's criticism.[11]
Initially, the book's influence on the emerging discipline ofanthropology was pervasive. Polish anthropologistBronisław Malinowski said ofThe Golden Bough: "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."[12] However, by the 1920s, Frazer's ideas already "began to belong to the past": according to Godfrey Lienhardt:
The central theme (or, as he thought, theory) ofThe Golden Bough—that all mankind had evolved intellectually and psychologically from a superstitious belief in magicians, through a superstitious belief in priests and gods, to enlightened belief in scientists—had little or no relevance to the conduct of life in anAndamanese camp or aMelanesian village, and the whole, supposedly scientific, basis of Frazer's anthropology was seen as a misapplication of Darwin's theory of biological evolution to human history and psychology.[10]
Edmund Leach, "one of the most impatient critics of Frazer's overblown prose and literary embellishment of his sources for dramatic effect", scathingly criticized what he saw as theartistic license exercised by Frazer inThe Golden Bough: "Frazer used his ethnographic evidence, which he culled from here, there and everywhere, toillustrate propositions which he had arrived at in advance bya priori reasoning, but, to a degree which is often quite startling, whenever the evidence did not fit he simply altered the evidence!"[6][10]
René Girard, a French historian, literary critic, andphilosopher of social science, "grudgingly" praised Frazer for recognising kingly sacrifice as "a key primitive ritual", but described his interpretation of the ritual as "a grave injustice to ethnology."[13][14] Girard's criticisms againstThe Golden Bough were numerous, particularly concerning Frazer's assertion that Christianity was merely a perpetuation of primitive myth-ritualism and that theNew Testament Gospels were "just further myths of the death and resurrection of the king who embodies the god of vegetation."[13] Girard himself considered the Gospels to be "revelatory texts" rather than myths or the remains of "ignorant superstition", and rejected Frazer's idea that the death of Jesus was a sacrifice, "whatever definition we may give for that sacrifice."[13][14][15]
Despite the controversy generated by the work, and its critical reception amongst other scholars,The Golden Bough inspired much of the creative literature of the period. The poetRobert Graves adapted Frazer's concept of the dying king sacrificed for the good of the kingdom to the romantic idea of the poet's suffering for the sake of his Muse-Goddess, as reflected in his book on poetry, rituals, and myths,The White Goddess (1948).William Butler Yeats refers to Frazer's thesis in his poem "Sailing to Byzantium". The horror writerH. P. Lovecraft's understanding of religion was influenced byThe Golden Bough,[16] and Lovecraft mentions the book in his short story "The Call of Cthulhu".[17]T. S. Eliot acknowledged indebtedness to Frazer in his first note to his poemThe Waste Land.William Carlos Williams refers toThe Golden Bough in Book Two, part two, ofPaterson.[18] Frazer also influenced novelistsJames Joyce,[19]Ernest Hemingway,William Gaddis andD. H. Lawrence.[19]
The lyrics of the song "Not to Touch the Earth" bythe Doors were influenced byThe Golden Bough, with the title and opening lines being taken from its table of contents.[20]Francis Ford Coppola's filmApocalypse Now shows the antagonist Kurtz with the book in his lair, and his death is depicted as a ritual sacrifice.
The mythologistJoseph Campbell drew onThe Golden Bough inThe Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), in which he accepted Frazer's view that mythology is a primitive attempt to explain the world of nature, though considering it only one among a number of valid explanations of mythology.[21] Campbell later described Frazer's work as "monumental".[22] The anthropologistWeston La Barre described Frazer as "the last of thescholastics" inThe Human Animal (1955).[23] The philosopherLudwig Wittgenstein's commentaries onThe Golden Bough have been compiled asRemarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, edited by Rush Rhees, originally published in 1967 (the English edition followed in 1979).[24] Robert Ackerman, in hisThe Myth and Ritual School: J. G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists (1991), sets Frazer in the broader context of thehistory of ideas. Themyth and ritual school includes scholarsJane Harrison,Gilbert Murray,F. M. Cornford, andA. B. Cook, who were connecting the new discipline of myth theory and anthropology with traditional literary classics at the end of the 19th century, influencingModernist literature.[citation needed]The Golden Bough influencedSigmund Freud's workTotem and Taboo (1913),[25] as well as the work of Freud's studentCarl Jung.[26]
The criticCamille Paglia has identifiedThe Golden Bough as one of the most important influences on her bookSexual Personae (1990).[26] InSexual Personae, Paglia described Frazer's "most brilliant perception" inThe Golden Bough as his "analogy between Jesus and the dying gods", though she noted that it was "muted by prudence".[27] InSalon, she has described the work as "a model of intriguing specificity wed to speculative imagination." Paglia acknowledged that "many details in Frazer have been contradicted or superseded", but maintained that the work of Frazer's Cambridge school of classical anthropology "will remain inspirational for enterprising students seeking escape from today's sterile academic climate."[28] Paglia has also commented, however, that the one-volume abridgement ofThe Golden Bough is "bland" and should be "avoided like the plague."[19]
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