When James George Frazer published the first edition of The Golden Bough in 1890, he intended to explain a single curiosity from Roman antiquity: the strange rule by which the priesthood of Diana at Nemi, in the Alban hills south of Rome, passed from man to man by murder. What followed over the next thirty years was one of the most ambitious intellectual undertakings in the history of the human sciences - a twelve-volume comparative study of magic, religion, and kingship drawing on sources from ancient Babylon and classical Greece, from the rain-making ceremonies of sub-Saharan Africa and the harvest customs of rural Bavaria, from the totem rituals of Aboriginal Australia and the divine kingships of ancient Mexico, from the peasant folklore of Sweden, Scotland, and Slavic Europe, and from the mystery religions of the ancient Near East.
The work is organized around a series of interlocking questions, each arising from the last. Why did the priest of Nemi hold office only by killing his predecessor? Why was the sacred king killed? Why was this power magical rather than religious in the modern sense? And why does this pattern - the divine king, the ritual death, the resurrection, the transfer of sacred power - recur so consistently across cultures with no historical contact with each other?
In pursuing these questions Frazer assembled evidence for a pattern of myth and ritual centred on a dying and rising god whose death and resurrection were enacted annually in agricultural ceremonies across the ancient world. Adonis, mourned by the women of Syria and Greece; Attis, the self-castrated consort of Cybele; Osiris, dismembered by Set and reassembled by Isis; Tammuz of Babylon, for whom the women wept at the gate; Dionysus, torn apart and reborn; the corn spirit of European harvest ritual, killed in the last sheaf and reborn in the first shoots of spring - all are shown to be local expressions of the same underlying myth, rooted in the same agricultural anxiety about the death and return of vegetative life.
Vols. I and II establish the theoretical foundations: the two branches of sympathetic magic, the public magician as precursor of the king, and the relationship between magic, religion, and science. Vols. III and IV examine the principles of taboo in their application to sacred kings and priests. Vols. V through VIII are devoted to the spirits of the corn and of the wild - the vast body of European and non-European agricultural ritual centred on the death and resurrection of vegetative spirits. Vols. IX and X examine the scapegoat, the ritual transfer of collective guilt onto a human or animal victim who is then expelled or killed. Vols. XI and XII, Balder the Beautiful, bring the argument back to northern Europe with the Norse myth of Balder's death by mistletoe and the suggestion that the golden bough of the title was itself a piece of mistletoe cut from the sacred oak.
Throughout all twelve volumes Frazer writes not as a specialist addressing specialists but as a scholar addressing the educated general reader - in prose of unusual clarity and occasional splendour, unhurried in its accumulation of evidence. The opening scene of Vol. I, in which he reconstructs the figure of the priest of Nemi pacing his grove on a wild autumn night, a glitter of steel at his shoulder whenever the pale moon peers down through the matted boughs, remains one of the great set pieces of Victorian prose.
This Ex Arche edition presents the twelve volumes of the third edition as facsimiles of the original Macmillan printings, without editorial intervention in the text. Each volume reproduces the original pagination, footnotes, and typography. A new preface introducing the complete series appears in Vol. I only.
