About Me

Sir James George Frazer - The Golden Bough A Study Of Magic And Religion (2.6 MB)

Cover of Sir James George Frazer's Book The Golden Bough A Study Of Magic And ReligionBook downloads: 516
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion is a wide-ranging, comparative study of mythology and religion, written by Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941). It first was published in two volumes in 1890 the third edition, published 1906-15, comprised twelve volumes. It was aimed at a broad literate audience raised on tales as told in such publications as Thomas Bulfinch's The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes (1855). It offered a modernist approach to discussing religion, treating it ... More >>>Note that, unfortunately, not all my books can be downloaded due to the restrictions of copyright. However, most of the books on this site do not have copyright restrictions. If you find any copyright violation, please contact me at . I am very attentive to the issue of copyright and try to avoid any violations, but on the other hand to help all fans of magic to get access to information.
Download All Books
If you are having difficulty downloading books, or you are looking for a book that is not on the site (but maybe it is in my home library), please write me a email to and I will try to help, I can send the book by e-mail
Donate Cryptocurrency
Bitcoin (BTC) Address:3CyHyov1fMUnJj6J6GRYyB4NV7U1j1FvWb
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) Address:bitcoincash:ppx42986wtem2wsx4dx250csz5vyfhqjay3md07ukj
Etherium (ETH-ERC20) Address:0xbaf043072ee102cb737765d19c97a5fa336df517
Litecoin (LTC) Address:LWZzWgmnyPC6of8breqwxyCWwqgCiFmNvf
Dogecoin (DOGE) Address:D9mHh7TJcY7BAC4i96f3f4GgDEX4MVXDXd
Monero (XMR) Address:4GdoN7NCTi8a5gZug7PrwZNKjvHFmKeV11L6pNJPgj5QNEHsN6eeX3DaAQFwZ1ufD4LYCZKArktt113W7QjWvQ7CW9pjKFNhv1QM62k3MM
ZCash (ZEC) Address:t1Yg6o3vA4rMAVbE8CX26LcH7cwN7k3x8kZ
Dash (DASH) Address:XeAdGAqN1KazEXPspmMGrQWJGuqVBNUPeR

darkbooks.org began in early 2008 I am happy to donate my time to providing you this resource, I would also like to note, that, although I try, I do not always have enough time to deal with the site, including, unfortunately, I do not always have time to answer all letters, because I have to earn money for a living. If you can financially help me, it would free me from the worries of earning money for living, perhaps partially, but ideally completely, then all 100% of my time could be devoted to the site. Also I do pay monthly web server/files storage and hosting costs to keep this site on the air. Please consider making a donation to help me continue this activity and devote more time to it or at least offset the cost of paying for storage/hosting. Even a small contribution helps!

Category 1:  Religion and Mythology
Category 2: 
Category 3: 
Author:      Sir James George Frazer
Format:      eBook
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion is a wide-ranging, comparative study of mythology and religion, written by Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941). It first was published in two volumes in 1890 the third edition, published 1906-15, comprised twelve volumes. It was aimed at a broad literate audience raised on tales as told in such publications as Thomas Bulfinch's The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes (1855). It offered a modernist approach to discussing religion, treating it dispassionately as a cultural phenomenon rather than from a theological perspective. The impact of The Golden Bough on contemporary European literature was substantial.

The book scandalized the British public upon its first publication, because it included the Christian story of Jesus in its comparative study, thus inviting an agnostic reading of the Lamb of God as a relic of a pagan religion. Frazer removed his analysis of the Crucifixion to a speculative appendix for the third edition, and it was entirely missing from the single-volume abridged edition.

Its influence on the emerging discipline of anthropology was pervasive and undeniable. For example, Bronislaw Malinowski, stricken with tuberculosis shortly after receiving his doctorate in physics and mathematics, read Frazer's work in the original English to distract himself from his illness. "No sooner had I read this great work than I became immersed in it and enslaved by it. I realized then that anthropology, as presented by Sir James Frazer, is a great science, worthy of as much devotion as any of her elder and more exact studies and I became bound to the service of Frazerian anthropology."

Despite whatever controversy the work may have generated, and its critical reception amongst other scholars, The Golden Bough had a tremendous effect on the literature of the period. Robert Graves adapted Frazer's concept of the dying king who is sacrificed for the good of the kingdom to the romantic idea of the poet's necessary suffering for the sake of his Muse-Goddess in his Frazer-esque book on poetry, rituals, and myths, The White Goddess, which was published in 1948. William Butler Yeats makes reference to it in his poem, "Sailing to Byzantium." H. P. Lovecraft mentions the book in his short story "The Call of Cthulhu." T. S. Eliot acknowledged indebtedness to Frazer in his first note to his poem The Waste Land. William Carlos Williams references it as well in Book Two, part two, of his extended poem in five books, Paterson. James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, Aleister Crowley, Ezra Pound, Mary Renault, Joseph Campbell, Naomi Mitchison (in her The Corn King and the Spring Queen), and Camille Paglia are but a few authors deeply influenced by The Golden Bough. Its literary impact has given it continued life, even as its direct influence in anthropology has waned.

About Author:

Sir James George Frazer (January 1, 1854, Glasgow, Scotland - May 7, 1941, Cambridge), was a Scottish social anthropologist influential in the early stages of the modern studies of mythology and comparative religion.

His most famous work, The Golden Bough (1890), documents and details similar magical and religious beliefs across the globe. Frazer posited that human belief progressed through three stages: primitive magic, replaced by religion, in turn replaced by science.

Biography

Born in Glasgow, Frazer attended school at Springfield Academy and Larchfield Academy in Helensburgh. He studied at the University of Glasgow and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated with honors in Classics (his dissertation would be published years later as The Growth of Plato's Ideal Theory) and remained a Classics Fellow all his life. He went on from Trinity to study law at the Middle Temple and yet never practised. He was four times elected to Trinity's Title Alpha Fellowship, and was associated with the college for most of his life, except for a year, 1907-1908, spent at the University of Liverpool. He was knighted in 1914 . He was, if not blind, then severely visually impaired from 1930 on. He and his wife, Lily, died within a few hours of each other. They are buried at the Ascension Parish Burial Ground in Cambridge, England.

The study of myth and religion became his areas of expertise. Except for in Italy and Greece, Frazer was not widely traveled. His prime sources of data were ancient histories and questionnaires mailed to missionaries and Imperial officials all over the globe. Frazer's interest in social anthropology was aroused by reading E. B. Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871) and encouraged by his friend, the biblical scholar William Robertson Smith, who was linking the Old Testament with early Hebrew folklore.

Frazer was far from being the first to study religions dispassionately, as a cultural phenomenon rather than from within theology. He was, though, the first to detail the relations between myths and rituals. His theories of totemism were superseded by Claude Levi-Strauss and his vision of the annual sacrifice of the Year King has not been borne out by field studies. His generation's choice of Darwinian evolution as a social paradigm, interpreted by Frazer as three rising stages of human progress -- magic giving rise to religion, then culminating in science -- has not proved valid. Yet The Golden Bough, his study of ancient cults, rites, and myths, including their parallels with early Christianity, arguably his greatest work, is still rifled by modern mythographers for its detailed information. The work's influence spilled well over the conventional bounds of academia, however; the symbolic cycle of life, death and rebirth which Frazer divined behind myths of all pedigrees captivated a whole generation of artists and poets. Perhaps the most notable product of this fascination is T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (1922). More recently it was an influence on the ending of Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now (a copy of The Golden Bough figures in one of the final shots).

The first edition, in two volumes, was published in 1890. The third edition was finished in 1915 and ran to twelve volumes, with a supplemental thirteenth volume added in 1936. He also published a single volume abridgement, largely compiled by his wife Lady Frazer, in 1922, with some controversial material removed from the text.

Jane Ellen Harrison, a respected historian of Greek religion and a Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, gave Frazer's immensely popular work academic credibility, and it has retained the reputation of a middle-brow classic.

Frazer's pioneering work has come under criticism by more recent scholars, following a series of critical, even vituperative articles by Edmund Leach, one of which was selected as the lead article in Anthropology Today, vol. 1 (1985); in part Frazer's Golden Bough was criticised for the breadth of comparisons drawn from widely separated cultures, but the criticism is often based on the abridged edition, which omits the supportive archaeological details. In a positive review of a work narrowly focusing on the cultus in the Hittite city of Nerik, J. D. Hawkins remarked approvingly in 1973, "The whole work is very methodical and sticks closely to the fully quoted documentary evidence in a way that would have been unfamiliar to the late Sir James Frazer." Frazer's six volume commentary on the Greek traveler Pausanias' description of Greece in the mid 2nd c. AD remains one of his most important works although archaeological excavations have added enormously to our knowledge of Grece since his time. There is still much of value in his detailed historical and topographical discussions of different sites and his eyewitness accounts of Greece at the end of the 19th century.
Selected works

* Creation and Evolution in Primitive Cosmogenies, and Other Pieces (1935)
* The Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religion (1933-36)
* Condorcet on the Progress of the Human Mind (1933)
* Garnered Sheaves (1931)
* The Growth of Plato's Ideal Theory (1930)
* Myths of the Origin of Fire (1930)
* Fasti, by Ovid (text, translation and commentary), 5 volumes (1929)
o one-volume abridgement (1931)
+ revised by G. P. Goold (1989, corr. 1996): ISBN 0-674-99279-2
* Devil's Advocate (1928)
* Man, God, and Immortality (1927)
* The Gorgon's Head and other Literary Pieces (1927)
* The Worship of Nature (1926) (from 1923-25 Gifford Lectures,)
* The Library, by Apollodorus (text, translation and notes), 2 volumes (1921): ISBN 0-674-99135-4 (vol. 1); ISBN 0-674-99136-2 (vol. 2)
* Folk-lore in the Old Testament (1918)
* The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, 3 volumes (1913-24)
* The Golden Bough, 3rd edition: 12 volumes (1906-15; 1936)
o 1922 one-volume abridgement: ISBN 0-486-42492-8
* Totemism and Exogamy (1910)
* Psyche's Task (1909)
* The Golden Bough, 2nd edition: expanded to 6 volumes (1900)
* Descriptions of Greece, by Pausanias (translation and commentary) (1897)
* The Golden Bough: a Study in Magic and Religion, 1st edition (1890)
* Totemism (1887)

See also

* Joseph Campbell
* Archetypal literary criticism
* Edward Burnett Tylor
* Life-death-rebirth deity
* Sacred king

References
Text document with red question mark.svg
This article includes a list of references or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (May 2008)

* Jan Harold Brunvard, American Folklore; An Encyclopedia, s.v. "Superstition" (p 692-697)

1. ^ Mary Beard, "Frazer, Leach, and Virgil: The Popularity (and Unpopularity) of the Golden Bough" Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34.2 (April 1992:203-224).
2. ^ Jaques Waardenburg. 1999. Classical Approaches to the Study of Religion. Aims, Methods and Theories of Research. Volume I: Introduction and Anthology. p244. New York : Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 3110163284
3. ^ Frazer, James George in Venn, J. & J. A., Alumni Cantabrigienses, Cambridge University Press, 10 vols, 1922-1958.
4. ^ See social darwinism and human progress.
5. ^ For the history of The Golden Bough see R. Fraser, The Making of The Golden Bough: The Origins and Growth of an Argument (London, 1990).
6. ^ Some non-academioc factors in this middle-brow popularity are the main concern of Mary Beard, op. cit. below.
7. ^ "For those who see Frazer's work as the start of anthropological study in its modern sense, the site and the cult of Nemi must hold a particular place: This colourful but minor backwater of Roman religion marks the source of the discipline of Social Anthropology", remarks Mary Beard, in noting the critical reassment of Frazer's work following Edmund Leach, "Frazer, Leach, and Virgil: The Popularity (and Unpopularity) of the Golden Bough" Comparative Studies in Society and History 34.2 (April 1992:203-224), p. 204.
8. ^ Leach, "Reflections on a visit to Nemi: did Frazer get it wrong?", Anthropology Today 1 (1985)
9. ^ Hawkins, reviewing Volkert Haas, Der Kult von Nerik: ein Beitrag zur hethitischen Religionsgeschichte, in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 36.1 (1973:128).
10. ^ Gifford Lecture Series - Books at www.giffordlectures.org

Source: wikipedia