Author: James George Frazer
Translator: Gyeong-deok Lee
Publisher: Kkachi
429 pages.
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| >>>This book is written in Korean only. |
About This Book
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion is a broad comparative
cultural study of mythology and religion by Scottish anthropologist Sir
James George Frazer (1854-1941). Aimed at a broad literate audience
raised on tales as told in Bulfinch's Age of Fable, Frazer's book joined
the modernists in discussing religion dispassionately as a cultural
phenomenon, rather than from within the field of theology itself. Though
the final worth of its contribution to anthropology will be newly summed
by each generation, its impact on contemporary European literature was
unquestionably grand.
This seminal book attempts to define what almost all primitive religions
share with each other?and with "modern" religions such as Christianity.
Its thesis is that ancient religions were fertility cults that centred
around the worship of, and periodic sacrifice of, a sacred king, the
incarnation of a dying and reviving god, a solar deity who underwent a
mystic marriage to a goddess of the earth, and who died at the harvest
and who was reincarnated in the spring. It claimed that this legend was
central to almost all of the world's mythologies. It was the scandal of
the book from the first date of sale to the innocent public that Frazer
included the Christian story of Jesus in his book, thus inviting an
agnostic lese majeste against the Lamb of God. 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.
"If the test of truth lay in a show of hands or a counting of heads, the
system of magic might appeal, with far more reason than the Catholic
Church, to the proud motto, Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus
["Always, everywhere, and by all" - ed.], as the sure and certain
credential of its own infallibility." (Chapter 4, "Magic and Religion".)
Parts of the book, most notably its discussion of the symbolism of
magic, and its elucidation of the concept of sympathetic magic, remain
well accepted by scholars today. The larger thesis about dying and
reviving gods has not fared as well in the world of anthropology and
comparative religion; most contemporary anthropologists have concluded
that Frazer overinterpreted his evidence to fit it into the system.
Frazer often reveals a confidence in a linear intellectual progress of
mankind to a superior position which anthropologists no longer share. As
cultural anthropology has expanded and deepened, many individual
conclusions of Frazer's have required revision within local and
historical cultural contexts. Modern anthropoligists conclude that
Frazer placed too much weight on what he called "the essential
similarity of man's chief wants everywhere and at all times" (ch. lxix).
William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Robert
Graves, Ezra Pound, Mary Renault and Joseph Campbell 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.
The title was taken from an incident in the Aeneid, illustrated in this
painting The Golden Bough by the British artist Joseph Mallord William
Turner (1775-1851): Aeneas and the Sibyl present the golden bough to the
gatekeeper of Hades to gain admission.
This is a Korean translation of the abridged
edition Mary Douglas with 170 illustration that enormously helps better
understand this truly captivating discussion.
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