William Carlos Williams refers to it in Book Two, part two, of his extended poem in five books Paterson. Eliot acknowledged indebtedness to Frazer in his first note to his poem The Waste Land. Lovecraft mentions the book in his short story “The Call of Cthulhu”. William Butler Yeats refers to Frazer’s thesis in his poem “Sailing to Byzantium”. The poet Robert Graves adapted Frazer’s concept of the dying king sacrificed for the good of the kingdom to the romantic idea of the poet’s suffering for the sake of his Muse-Goddess, as reflected in his book on poetry, rituals, and myths, The White Goddess (1948). For the third edition, Frazer placed his analysis of the Crucifixion in a speculative appendix the discussion of Christianity was excluded from the single-volume abridged edition.ĭespite the controversy the work generated, and its critical reception amongst other scholars, The Golden Bough inspired the creative literature of the period.
Critics thought this treatment invited an agnostic reading of the Lamb of God as a relic of a pagan religion. The book scandalized the British public when first published, as it included the Christian story of Jesus and the Resurrection in its comparative study. Frazer proposed that mankind progresses from magic through religious belief to scientific thought. Its thesis is that old religions were fertility cults that revolved around the worship and periodic sacrifice of a sacred king. The Golden Bough attempts 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 influence has extended into twentieth-century culture. It was first published in two volumes in 1890 in three volumes in 1900 the third edition, published 1906–15, comprised twelve volumes.The influence of The Golden Bough on contemporary European literature and thought was substantial. 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 (1854–1941).
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