The Golden Bough

This is a great and fascinating work, steeped in detail and careful scholarship, and very well-written.

The pity is that the underlying assumption of the work, that the customs it details are evidence of a primitive, pan-European, primitive culture was not in fact well founded. There is evidence enough that many of Frazier's pagan survivals were in fact developments of the high middle ages, perhaps immemorial but not antique.

It's still a wonderful and compelling book, as long as one keeps in mind that the patterns it documents are more widely spread in time, and less primitive, than Frazier thought.

So this is the condensed version, only about a thousand pages, but still full of fascinating tidbits of folklore and culture, and some very incisive theorizing about human belief patterns and theories of culture to link it all together. Very much a product of its times, but if you can get past the (generally mild) period imperialism, the meat of the book is still good.

It's very obviously condensed, though, and therefore I find it best dipped into in small portions. I've no idea how the 12-volume version compares - even the one up in Preject Gutenberg is the condensed edition, as far as I can tell - but I'd like to put down the book's tendency to list a bunch of apparently unrelated facts, then a bald theory, then some more random facts, show more to the abridging process. Unfortunately it's a style that was picked up by a lot of less rigorous researchers into the liminal spaces (erikvondaniken *cough*), with unfortunate results.

But if you're at all interested in magic or folklore or myth or culture, this is a classic, the basis of a lot of fiction and all later theoretical work (even the works that have partially overturned it) and, for all my caveats, still suprisingly readable - a great bedtime book. show less

So far, while it does a lot of mythological name-dropping, and the very thin veil of a theme seems accurate, I'm tempted to say that this book is a real mess. Goddesses with mixed up attributes, bald-faced assumptions about ancient societies, and rampant misspellings almost turn me off. And yet, I have stamina. I have fortitude. I shall endure another escaped slave trying to murder me so he can break off the branch of my sacred tree and so take my place.

Some random, albeit unfortunate, quotes:

"And they were forced to lay upon some erections."

"And she was given the gift of a cock."


Seriously enough, I've been very impressed by the work. Ok, so on my ebook reader, it only runs up to a little under 1500 pages, and there are at least a dozen show more accounts as proof of each point. I cannot, in good faith, find fault with much of his conclusions. I was astonished to realize how many assumptions I had held about Osiris were completely balderdash. At least I've been put to rights about the real reason he was worshiped. Hint: it wasn't because they never found his penis.

Overall, the main themes are drilled into our skulls so thoroughly that there's no way we could ever forget them, even if we tried. The best and the worst that I can say for this work is that it is very thorough. I can honestly say I've heard discussions of the many themes, as I'm sure most of us have; fertility deities, all manifestations thereof.

What I was most astonished to feel, after reading this work, was a great sadness. I look back at all of the thousands of cultures that have independently worshiped the same principles over time and see how they were systematically wiped out as "poppycock", and I wonder about the now-lost depth of understanding that is now lost to time and chronos... and I wonder if Uranus ever did find his penis. show less

Thank you for the abridged edition, Sir James. Even the abridgment contains a confounding amount of information and examples. Like any attempt to shoehorn a large portion of human behavior into one theory, the book has its problems. While a classic of its time it is no longer considered authoritative in the field. I wouldn't consider it a "must read" but it certainly illustrates the amazing complexity of magical and religious customs around the world.

The Foreword compares Frazer and Golden Bough in its impact to such revolutionary thinkers of the 19th Century as Darwin, Marx, and Freud. This seminal work of anthropology and comparative religion first published in 1890 was in fact a great influence on Freud and Jung as well as T.S. Eliot and Yeats and the modern Neopagan movement. Frazer's influence on Joseph Campbell is obvious--he's the original. Frazer tries to argue for the monomyth--the idea that religion and myth can be reduced to a few universal principles and symbols such as sacrifice, scapegoats, the soul and totem and taboo. Taking an ancient Roman custom involving the "King of the Wood" at Nemi as his launching pad, Frazer examined myths and folktales from every part of show more the world and drew connections to explain, as the subtitle on the cover of my copy put it, "the roots of religion and folklore." His argument seems to be that the origins of religion can be found in a crude science, an attempt to influence the world through sympathetic magic. Although he never attacked Christianity directly in this original edition, I could see how the idea of Jesus as entirely myth could come out of this book. Frazer's examination of vegetation deities, cycles of sowing and reaping and kingly sacrifice and his examination of the myths of Ishtar and Thammuz, Isis and Osiris, Aphrodite and Adonis and spring fertility rites is certainly suggestive.

I often found this book tedious, primarily because of Frazer's exhaustive examples--and the edition I read is the original two-volume work--before he, as the Foreword put it, "overburdened the book with volumes of illustrative examples which tended to hide the thread of his argument." (Twelve volumes in fact.) In his pile-on it reminded me of my recent read of the original edition of Darwin's Origin of Species. This was a time when science wasn't yet so technical and specialized as to be unduly esoteric to the layman. So as with Darwin, I think Frazer was aiming his book at both his scientific brethren as well as the layman--thus the exhaustive examples in an effort to prove his theories. However, unlike the case with Darwin, I believe Frazer's examples do more to hide--nay, bury--his argument rather than illustrate it, even in this original more compact edition. More and more I found myself skimming. There is an abridged edition from the author, but my understanding from reviews is that it excised a lot of the more controversial and interesting parts found in the expanded versions, such as a chapter on "The Crucifixion of Christ." Also as with Darwin, who didn't at the time have the advantages of our advances in genetics and geology, I suspect much of the anthropology in Golden Bough is outdated. Especially given that unlike Darwin, who famously conducted many observations in the field and experiments of his own, Frazer seemed to entirely rely on second-hand accounts, mostly by travelers and missionaries. Nor do I entirely buy Frazer's contention that modern peasant customs and folklore represented a continuity with a pagan past.

Some may be put off by Frazer's characterization of peoples as "rude" and "savages." To his credit though, Frazer doesn't exempt Europe or Britain in his examples of primitive rituals and superstitions. Given that and the context of the times, I don't as some reviewers do see this book as essentially racist. Frazer notes, "when all is said and done our resemblances to the savage are still far more numerous than our differences from him." This book reminded me, of all things, of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. That novel is famous as a denunciation of colonialism. But one of the things I took away from Achebe's book was that the Christian missionaries gained adherents because they freed their converts from frightening and oppressive superstitions that propagated slavery, infanticide and human sacrifice. As much as I can see the ugly side of the history of modern monotheistic creeds such as Christianity, I think we forget that much of the legacy of polytheistic pagan beliefs isn't as pretty as many of its New Age adherents would have it. This book--for all I suspected the accuracy of many details--was a salutary reminder of that with its tales of scapegoating, sacrifices and taboos. Ironically, Frazer's successors, such as Joseph Campbell, have formed a new myth of the "noble savage," of a pagan and pre-historic past as egalitarian and in harmony with nature. We seem to have few fans of civilization and reason these days. It's ironic that a book that tried to explain the spiritual scientifically might have contributed to that. Ultimately I'm glad I read it, and I'm keeping it on my shelves, at least for now, as a rather thorough reference book of beliefs and rites across cultures and ages--or at least as far as was known over a century ago. show less

Remarkable in scope, arrogant and close to fascistic in its adoration of social hierarchy, still, a guide for the ages on the meaning of rites, rituals and folklore.

Nostalgia for bygone primitive days irks me. People in cold climates look the life of Western Samoans and sigh for simple ways. Looking with longing to hunt-gat days, people nowadays may think a man’s life was hunting, fishing, making and maintaining tools, fighting over territory against strangers. For 30 or so years, not a life hard to take…. In fact, hunter-gatherers were hemmed in by magic, taboos and superstitions that filled life with nonsense and fear. James Frazer’s classic "The Golden Bough" (1890) is still worth reading because it shows our endless, though often misguided and bizarre, ingenuity at attempting to explain how the world works.

Frazer includes amazing descriptions of religious rites and ceremonies and offers show more interpretations from the “savage�€? point of view. Frazer’s thesis is that there is a universal progression from magic to religion to science: Primitive people first attempt to understand, predict, and control nature through magic. When they realize they shouldn’t put all their eggs in the magic basket, they turn to rituals meant to appease supernatural forces. It's good reading though the state of knowledge has gone beyond Frazer. show less