The Golden Bough: a Study in Magic and Religion

Abstract

WITHIN recent years few books have exercised more influence on the study of comparative retigion than Mr. Frazer's “Golden Bough,” the first edition of which appeared in 1890. Working in the main on the lines laid down by Prof. E. B. Tylor, he applied the results obtained from a prolonged study of the beliefs and practices of primitive races to explain the meaning and origin of a strange rule of an ancient Italian priesthood. Near the lake of Nemi in the Alban hills, at some distance from the ancient town of Aricia, stood a grove and sanctuary sacred to Diana, and the strange rule of the priesthood attached to the grove finds no parallel in classical antiquity. The priest, who bore the title of “King of the Wood,” watched night and day with a drawn sword, always ready to defend his life against the attack of a possible assailant. A candidate for the priesthood had first to break off a bough from a certain tree in the wood, and, if successful, he was entitled to fight the priest in single combat; should he slay the priest he reigned in his stead until he in his turn was slain. Mr. Frazer's book takes its title from the tradition that the branch guarded by the priest was the Golden Bough which Eneas plucked before he attempted his journey to the realm of the dead. Put briefly, Mr. Frazer's explanation of the rule amounts to this: the King of the Wood was an incarnation of the tree-spirit, or spirit of vegetation, which was also inherent in the Golden Bough, or mistletoe, growing on the tree, probably an oak, in the Arician grove. The only way of preserving the tree-spirit from decay necessitated the priest's violent death; the divine life by this means was transferred to a suitable successor —that is to say, to the stronger man who should slay him. But in his character of a tree-spirit, the priest's life was bound up with that of the mistletoe on the tree; hence it was necessary for the slayer first to break the Golden Bough. The exposition of this theory furnished the thread on which Mr. Frazer skilfully arranged a series of exhaustive essays dealing with many phases of primitive superstition and belief.

The Golden Bough: a Study in Magic and Religion.

By J. G. Frazer Second Edition. Revised and enlarged. Three volumes. Vol. i., pp. x,cviii + 467; vol. ii., pp. x + 467; vol. iii., pp. x + 490. (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1900.) Price 30s. net.