James George Frazer

Sir James George Frazer wrote one of the most influential books of the modern era — a book whose influence on literature, anthropology, psychology, and the study of religion has been so pervasive that most people who have been affected by it have never read it. The Golden Bough, which grew from a two-volume study published in 1890 to a twelve-volume encyclopaedia of comparative mythology published between 1906 and 1915, was an attempt to explain a single puzzling ritual at the ancient Italian shrine of Nemi by marshalling evidence from hundreds of cultures across the world, creating in the process a vast panorama of human belief and custom that demonstrated the common patterns underlying apparently unrelated myths, rituals, and religions. The book’s thesis — that all religion originates in fertility magic and the ritual killing of the sacred king — has been largely abandoned by modern anthropology, but its literary influence is permanent: T. S. Eliot acknowledged it in the notes to The Waste Land, Yeats drew on it for his mythological poetry, Robert Graves used it as the foundation of The White Goddess, and its central images — the dying and reviving god, the sacred grove, the scapegoat, the corn spirit — have become part of the common vocabulary of Western culture.

Trinity College

Frazer was born in Glasgow in 1854 and educated at the University of Glasgow and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became a Fellow in 1879 and remained for the rest of his long life. He was a classical scholar by training — his edition and translation of Pausanias’s Description of Greece (6 volumes, 1898) was a major work of classical scholarship — and his approach to anthropology was always literary and philological rather than fieldwork-based. Frazer never conducted fieldwork in the modern sense; he gathered his evidence from books, correspondence, and the reports of missionaries, colonial administrators, and travelers.

This armchair methodology was already controversial in his own time and has been decisively rejected by modern anthropology, which insists on sustained participant observation as the foundation of ethnographic knowledge. But the limitations of Frazer’s method were also its strength: because he was a reader rather than an observer, he could range across the entire world and the entire span of human history in a way that no fieldworker could.

The Golden Bough

The starting point of The Golden Bough was a peculiar ritual at the shrine of Diana at Nemi, near Rome: the priest of the shrine (the Rex Nemorensis, or King of the Wood) held his office by killing his predecessor in single combat, and he himself would eventually be killed by his successor. Frazer asked: why?

His answer unfolded over twelve volumes and involved a comparative analysis of myth, magic, and religion from cultures as diverse as ancient Egypt, Aboriginal Australia, pre-Columbian Mexico, and the peasant communities of modern Europe. The central argument was that the King of the Wood was a manifestation of the “divine king” — a figure found in cultures worldwide who embodies the fertility of the land and must be killed and replaced when his powers wane, ensuring the continuation of the natural cycle.

Frazer argued that this pattern — the dying and reviving god — underlay the myths of Osiris, Adonis, Attis, Dionysus, and, by implication, Christ. He was too cautious (and too Victorian) to draw the Christian parallel explicitly, but it was obvious to every reader, and the book’s implicit challenge to Christianity was one of the reasons for both its fame and its controversy.

Literary Influence

Frazer’s influence on modernist literature was immense. Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land (1922) explicitly cite Frazer as a source for the poem’s mythological framework. Yeats drew on Frazer’s accounts of sacred trees, dying gods, and ritual sacrifice. D. H. Lawrence’s fiction reflects Frazer’s ideas about the relationship between sexuality, nature, and the sacred. Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) was essentially a popularisation of Frazerian comparative mythology.

The reason for this literary influence was simple: Frazer was, above all, a magnificent prose stylist. The Golden Bough was not merely an anthropological treatise; it was a work of English literature, written in a prose of grave, measured beauty that made the myths and rituals it described seem both ancient and immediate.

Collecting Frazer

The Golden Bough (Macmillan, 1890, 2 volumes, first edition) is the primary target and a major Victorian book. The third edition (Macmillan, 1906–1915, 12 volumes) is the full version. The one-volume abridgement (Macmillan, 1922) is the most widely read edition. Pausanias’s Description of Greece (Macmillan, 1898, 6 volumes) is a major classical text. Folk-lore in the Old Testament (Macmillan, 1918, 3 volumes) is also collected. Complete sets of the twelve-volume Golden Bough in good condition are increasingly scarce.