The Golden Bough
1890
- mythology
- magic
- superstition
- religion
- primitive religion
- magie
- literature and anthropology
- mythologie
- mythology in literature
- folklore
The story
Wikipedia - "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. The work was for a wide 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). The influence of The Golden Bough on contemporary European literature and thought has been substantial."
What it’s like
Dense Victorian prose, lucid and courteous, built from long chains of examples that unspool across rooms of myth, ritual and folklore, with footnotes that multiply like undergrowth. The mood is that of an unhurried armchair scholar in a book-lined study: lamplight on crowded shelves, a fire going low, the rustle of turning pages. Its eeriness is quiet and intellectual rather than lurid. Accounts of sacred kings, dying gods, scapegoats and the lakeside priest who keeps his post by violence are told in a calm, clinical register, so the cruelty, including human sacrifice and ritual killing, is described rather than dramatised, with no gore and little to make a reader flinch beyond a chill. The pacing is slow and accumulative, circling the same few ideas from ever wider angles, so it rewards patient reading in short sittings and suits long winter evenings, slow weekends or a reread with a notebook. Its tone is grave, curious and faintly melancholy about vanished rites. It is for readers who love myth and folklore, students of religion and anthropology, and anyone drawn to the old, strange logic of belief who doesn't mind a book that takes its time.
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