lpetrich
Contributor
The Golden Bough
There are at least two parts of it that one can assess.
The first is his collection of folklore and mythology and magical and religious practice.
The second is his thesis that many societies go through a phase of regularly selecting and then killing sacred kings.
The first one could well be good, while the second one is doubtful at best. My reason for skepticism is the wide range of societies that literate people have discovered and documented, especially over the last half millennium. Societies that range from Paleolithic (small bands of nomads) to Mesolithic / Epipaleolithic (larger sedentary communities) to Early Neolithic (similar-sized communities of farmers) to Late Neolithic (sizable cities), to the Copper Age then the Bronze Age then the Iron Ages, and finally to literate large-scale societies.
So if societies go through some phase of regularly killing sacred kings, then some of them ought to have been caught in the act.
How good is that work?The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (retitled The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion in its second edition) is a wide-ranging, comparative study of mythology and religion, written by the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer. The Golden Bough was first published in two volumes in 1890; in three volumes in 1900; and in twelve volumes in the third edition, published 1906–1915. It has also been published in several different one-volume abridgments.
razer attempted to define the shared elements of religious belief and scientific thought, discussing fertility rites, human sacrifice, the dying god, the scapegoat, and many other symbols and practices whose influences had extended into 20th-century culture. His thesis is that old religions were fertility cults that revolved around the worship and periodic sacrifice of a sacred king. Frazer proposed that mankind progresses from magic through religious belief to scientific thought.
Frazer's thesis was developed in relation to an incident in the Aeneid, in which Aeneas and the Sibyl present the golden bough taken from a sacred grove to the gatekeeper of Hades to gain admission. ... The lake of Nemi, also known as "Diana's Mirror", was a place where religious ceremonies and the "fulfillment of vows" of priests and kings were held.
Frazer based his thesis on the pre-Roman priest-king Rex Nemorensis by the shore of Lake Nemi, who was ritually murdered by his successor. The king was the incarnation of a dying and reviving god, a solar deity who underwent a mystic marriage to a goddess of the Earth. He died at the harvest and was reincarnated in the spring. Frazer claims that this legend of rebirth was central to almost all of the world's mythologies.
There are at least two parts of it that one can assess.
The first is his collection of folklore and mythology and magical and religious practice.
The second is his thesis that many societies go through a phase of regularly selecting and then killing sacred kings.
The first one could well be good, while the second one is doubtful at best. My reason for skepticism is the wide range of societies that literate people have discovered and documented, especially over the last half millennium. Societies that range from Paleolithic (small bands of nomads) to Mesolithic / Epipaleolithic (larger sedentary communities) to Early Neolithic (similar-sized communities of farmers) to Late Neolithic (sizable cities), to the Copper Age then the Bronze Age then the Iron Ages, and finally to literate large-scale societies.
So if societies go through some phase of regularly killing sacred kings, then some of them ought to have been caught in the act.