Understand in about 7 minutes
Frazer starts from one strange Roman rite, the priest at Nemi who held office only until a rival killed him, and builds out a sweeping comparison of myth and ritual to argue that human thought has moved from magic through religion toward science.
Mind Map
Core Message
Frazer opens with the priesthood of Diana at Nemi, where a runaway slave could win the office only by plucking a bough and then killing the priest who held it, before being killed in turn. The aim of the book is to explain that one barbarous custom by gathering parallels from across the world.
Frazer reduces magic to the association of ideas. The Law of Similarity assumes that like produces like, so imitating an effect can cause it. The Law of Contact assumes that things once joined keep acting on each other. Both treat a link between ideas as if it were a link between things.
In many societies the ruler was held to be a god in human form whose strength kept crops, herds, and weather in order. Because his decline threatened all of nature, he was often killed while still vigorous so his soul could pass undamaged to a successor.
Under names such as Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, and Attis, Frazer reads the gods who die and rise again as the yearly death and return of plant life, dramatized in ritual so that worshippers could help nature renew itself.
Frazer's closing claim is that magic gave way to religion when men doubted their own power over nature, and religion in turn yields to science. He calls all three theories of thought, and grants that science too may one day be replaced.
Summary
The Golden Bough begins with a picture and a puzzle. At the woodland lake of Nemi in Italy stood the sanctuary of Diana of the Wood, guarded by a priest who paced the grove with a drawn sword. He held the title of King of the Wood, but he kept it only until a challenger broke a certain bough, fought him, and killed him. Frazer treats this strange and recurring tragedy as a survival from a far older world, and announces that the object of the book is to offer a probable explanation of it by tracing similar customs and the motives behind them across human society.
To explain the rite he first lays out the logic of magic. He argues that magic rests on two principles: that like produces like, and that things once in contact keep acting on each other at a distance. He names these the Law of Similarity and the Law of Contact, and groups the charms built on them as homoeopathic and contagious magic, together making up what he calls sympathetic magic. In his reading magic is a false science, a mistaken extension of the way ideas associate in the mind, which legitimately applied would yield real science instead.
From magic Frazer moves to kingship. The magician who claims to command rain and harvest can rise to become a chief, and then a man-god whose own body is believed to hold the welfare of the tribe. Such a figure is hedged with taboos that guard his precious life, yet the same belief turns lethal: if the course of nature depends on his vigour, his aging endangers everything. So divine kings were often put to death at the first signs of failing strength, sometimes after a set term, sometimes with a temporary substitute taking the blow, so that the indwelling soul could be handed on while still at its prime.
The middle of the book turns to gods who die and return. Frazer reads Osiris in Egypt, Tammuz and Adonis in Western Asia, and Attis in Phrygia as personifications of vegetation, deities who annually died and rose again. Their myths and rites, he argues, act out the decay of the year and its revival, and parallel customs surround the corn-spirit, the slain animal, and the human scapegoat who carries away the accumulated evils of the people. Across these chapters he assembles a vast comparative record of how communities have tried to kill off death and renew the life of the world.
At the end Frazer returns to Nemi to close the circle. He links the bough the challenger had to break with the mistletoe and with the myth of Balder, whose life lay hidden outside his body, so that the King of the Wood could not be slain until the bough was torn from the sacred oak. Stepping back, he offers his largest claim: that higher thought has moved on the whole from magic through religion to science, three threads he pictures woven into one changing web. Science is the best account so far, he writes, but not necessarily the last, and the book ends with the bells of Aricia ringing across the hills above the lake.
Key Concepts
Frazer's name for the whole system of magic, resting on two laws. The Law of Similarity holds that like produces like, so imitating an act can bring it about. The Law of Contact holds that things once joined keep influencing each other. Both assume things act on each other at a distance through a hidden sympathy.
It gives Frazer a single key for sorting an enormous range of customs, and it frames magic as a coherent but mistaken theory of nature rather than mere random superstition.
A recurring figure Frazer finds across Egypt and Western Asia, a god who dies and rises again each year. He reads Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, and Attis as personifications of plant life, their death and resurrection acted out in ritual to mirror and assist the turning seasons.
It is Frazer's bridge from local farming rites to the great religions, and his comparative method here made the book influential and controversial well beyond anthropology.
The ruler conceived as a human god whose own vigour is bound up with the fertility of the land. Surrounded by taboos that protect his life, he is also liable to be killed once his powers begin to fade, so that the soul on which the people depend can pass intact to a strong successor.
It is the idea that ties the puzzle of Nemi to the wider book, showing how reverence for a king and the killing of a king can spring from the same belief about a shared life force.
Mental Models
Treat resemblance as if it were a cause. In homoeopathic magic, doing something to an image or imitation is believed to do the same to the real thing, as when injuring a figure of an enemy is meant to injure the enemy.
It exposes a habit of mind that still appears whenever a symbol is mistaken for the thing it stands for, and it shows how a true association of ideas can be turned into a false rule about the world.
Frazer collects tales and customs in which a person hides his soul in some external object, so that he cannot be harmed until that object is found and destroyed. He uses Balder and the mistletoe to read the bough at Nemi the same way.
It offers a pattern for seeing how a vulnerability can be displaced onto something separate, and shows the method by which Frazer connects scattered folk-tales to a single ritual.
Frazer pictures the history of thought as moving from magic, where man trusts his own power over nature, to religion, where he begs unseen beings to act for him, to science, which returns to the idea of fixed natural order but builds it on observation.
It is a way to place very different beliefs on one developmental line, while reminding the reader that the latest stage is provisional and may itself be superseded.
Selected Quotes
He was a priest and a murderer; and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead.
Legitimately applied they yield science; illegitimately applied they yield magic, the bastard sister of science.
the movement of the higher thought, so far as we can trace it, has on the whole been from magic through religion to science.
Source
Source text: Project Gutenberg edition of The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion by James George Frazer.
HTML text: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3623/pg3623.txt
Project Gutenberg states that this ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever.
The work first appeared in 1890 and grew across later editions. This page follows the author's abridged one-volume edition. Project Gutenberg gives a release date of January 1, 2003 for its etext.