The Golden Bough

Bad anthropology that produced great literature — rejected by the field it founded, and responsible for most of what the twentieth century thought myth was.

What it is

James George Frazer's comparative study of magic, myth and religion — published in two volumes in 1890, expanded to twelve between 1906 and 1915, and abridged into the single volume most people have read in 1922.

It opens with a puzzle. At Nemi, near Rome, there was a sacred grove in which a priest served as king, and held the office only until a challenger killed him. Frazer asks why, and takes several thousand pages to answer, ranging across every culture he could find a source for.

Where it came from

Frazer was a Cambridge classicist who never did fieldwork and, by a famous anecdote, when asked whether he had ever met any of the peoples he wrote about, replied that God forbid.

His method was armchair comparativism: assemble examples from missionary reports, travellers' accounts and classical sources, strip them of context, and arrange them to reveal a pattern.

The patterns he produced:

Sympathetic magic, divided into the law of similarity and the law of contact — the taxonomy treated under its own article, and the part of his work that has genuinely lasted.

The dying and reviving god — Osiris, Adonis, Attis, Tammuz and others, understood as personifications of vegetation whose death and return mirror the agricultural year.

The three-stage evolution of thought — magic gives way to religion, which gives way to science — which is the book's organising thesis and is the part most thoroughly rejected.

How it is read

By anthropologists, as a founding embarrassment. The field Frazer helped create abandoned his method almost immediately. Malinowski's fieldwork revolution made armchair comparison untenable; the evolutionary scheme has no support; and the practice of extracting rituals from their contexts to build universal types is now regarded as the characteristic error of Victorian comparative religion. The "dying and rising god" category itself was dismantled by Jonathan Z. Smith, who showed that the examples do not share the pattern Frazer assigned them.

By literary scholars, as one of the most influential books of the century. T.S. Eliot cited it in the notes to The Waste Land and said it had influenced his generation profoundly. Yeats, Lawrence, Joyce, Conrad and Graves all drew on it. Freud built Totem and Taboo on it. Joseph Campbell's monomyth is downstream. The modern popular idea that all myths are versions of a few underlying patterns is substantially Frazer's, arriving through literature rather than through anthropology.

And it made an argument about Christianity without ever quite making it. By treating Osiris, Adonis and Attis as dying and reviving gods, Frazer left the implication about the crucifixion and resurrection unstated and unmistakable. He was cautious — material touching Christianity was moved to an appendix in later editions — but the implication did its work, and a great deal of subsequent popular claim that Christianity is a recycled mystery cult descends from him rather than from evidence.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the anthropology does not stand. The method, the evolutionary scheme and the major categories have all been rejected by the discipline, and this is not a controversial position.

We can say the taxonomy of sympathetic magic survives as a useful description of a real cognitive tendency, as the psychological work described in that article demonstrates.

We can say the literary influence is enormous and largely unacknowledged by readers who have absorbed it second-hand. The assumption that beneath the surface variety of world myth lies a small set of universal patterns is the perennialist position discussed under perennialism and constructivism, and Frazer did more than anyone to install it in the general culture.

We can say the book demonstrates something this site keeps encountering: that a comparative method which strips context will find similarity, because it removed the differences first. The same criticism applies to Eliade on shamanism and to a great deal of popular writing about world religion.

We cannot deny that it is a remarkable object. Twelve volumes, prodigious learning, and prose of real quality, in the service of a thesis that was wrong. It is worth reading as literature and as the record of what an intelligent Victorian could believe about everyone else.

What it is

Where it came from

How it is read

What we can and cannot say

Further reading