The Golden Bough (abridged edition)

Summary

The Golden Bough sets out to explain one strange rule. In the sacred grove of Diana at Nemi, in the Alban Hills near Rome, the priest, called the King of the Wood, held office until a runaway slave broke a bough from a certain tree and killed him in single combat, becoming priest in turn. Why should a priest have to slay his predecessor, and why must he first pluck the bough? Frazer's answer grows into a survey of magic and religion across the world, drawn from classical authors, folklorists, and reports by missionaries, travellers and officials. The first edition (1890) had two volumes; the third (1906-1915) had twelve. In 1922 Frazer issued this one-volume abridgment, keeping his argument and much of his evidence but dropping the notes; it is the library's complete text, in sixty-nine chapters. The early chapters define sympathetic magic and its two branches: homoeopathic magic, based on the principle that like produces like, and contagious magic, based on the idea that things once in contact continue to act on each other. Frazer distinguishes magic, which tries to compel nature by fixed laws, from religion, which seeks to please or conciliate higher powers, and he proposes that an age of magic preceded an age of religion. He then shows magicians becoming kings, kings regarded as gods, and sacred kings hedged with taboos to protect the divine life within them: tabooed acts, persons, things and words, and the perils of the soul. From there he argues that peoples who believed the health of nature depended on the vigour of a divine king would kill him before he weakened, and he gathers examples of temporary kings, substitutes and the killing of the tree-spirit in European folk custom. The central chapters treat Adonis, Attis, Osiris and Dionysus as gods of vegetation who die and revive with the year, and Demeter and the corn-spirit in harvest customs from Greece to Scotland. Later chapters study eating the god, the killing of sacred animals, the transference of evil to objects, animals and scapegoats, the Mexican sacrifice of a man who represented a god, the fire festivals of Europe, and the Norse myth of Balder, slain by mistletoe. Frazer concludes that the King of the Wood personified the oak-spirit whose life was lodged in the mistletoe, identifies the golden bough of Virgil's Aeneid with the mistletoe, and in Farewell to Nemi describes human thought as moving from magic through religion to science, a web of black, red and white threads, before ending with the Angelus bells of Aricia. The book shaped modernist literature and early anthropology. Later anthropologists, including Bronisław Malinowski and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, valued its range but questioned its armchair comparative method, and Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote critical remarks on it; other scholars have defended parts of its evidence.

Top Lessons

• The two laws of magic

  Frazer analyzes magic into two principles: like produces like, and things once in contact continue to act on each other. He calls magic a false science because it applies real habits of association to the wrong connections. The analysis is still a standard starting point for describing magical thinking.

• A question that grows

  The book begins with one local puzzle at Nemi and ends twelve volumes and one abridgment later with a theory of human thought. Frazer admits in Farewell to Nemi that answering one question raised many more. His method shows both the power and the risk of following a comparison wherever it leads.

• Magic, religion, science

  Frazer proposes that human thought moved from magic through religion to science, and he pictures it as a web of black, red and white threads. He also allows that science itself may be superseded. Many later scholars rejected this scheme of stages, and Christian readers have answered his treatment of religion as a passing phase.

• The scapegoat

  Frazer collects customs in which a community's evils are transferred to an animal, an object or a person and driven out. The chapters on public scapegoats and human scapegoats in antiquity gave the word much of its later currency in literature and social thought.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The Golden Bough is a large archive of magical healing and of beliefs about disease. Homoeopathic magic includes the Vedic jaundice rite, Pliny's jaundice bird and stones, and the remedies of Marcellus of Bordeaux, court physician to Theodosius; contagious magic covers cures worked through hair, nails, blood and wounds; and the chapters on the transference and public expulsion of evils describe sickness sent into objects, animals and human scapegoats, and communities driving out epidemics. Frazer presents the public magician as the forerunner of the physician and surgeon, who had to gain real knowledge to survive his clients' expectations. The killing of the divine king when his strength failed reads as a social response to aging and decline. Frazer's evolutionary scheme from magic to science shaped early 20th-century histories of medicine; later historians have preferred to study healing practices in their own settings rather than as stages on a single path.

• Chapter III, section 2

  Homoeopathic cures for jaundice and other illnesses from Vedic India, Pliny and Marcellus of Bordeaux.

• Chapter V, section 1

  The public magician's precarious office and Frazer's claim that such men were the predecessors of physicians and surgeons.

• Chapter XXIV

  Kings put to death when sickness or age threatened their strength, lest nature decline with them.

• Chapters LV-LVI

  The transference of illness to objects and animals, and public expulsions of evils, including measures against epidemics.