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James George Frazer: The Golden Bough 1890.
This was the first of the modern, anthropological, attempts to explain the origin of myth, legend and religion. These subjects have played an important role in our attempts to discover the origins of story- telling, the evolution of creation myths, religions and other pre-literary, prehistoric or primordial storytelling. Frazer's essential argument was that there was a kind of progression from magic through religion to scientific reasoning. He believed that the old, primitive religions evolved around fertility cults, and the worship and periodic sacrifice of a sacred king. There have been a wealth of insights on these topics and his hypothesis, since Frazer presented his thesis in 1890 - these include briefly: Vladimir Propp: The Morphology of the Folk Tale (1928); Bruno Bettelheim: The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales; Robert Graves: The White Goddess (1948), and Joseph Campbell’s masterly tetralogy The Masks of God (from 1964), There are plenty of other insights on these topics of course, but these personally impacted on me as a student. Frazer - like others later, attempted to define the shared elements or tropes of myth, including the dying and reviving king or god, a solar deity and its mystical relationship with an Earth mother or goddess. The themes permeate many world religions and Frazer’s predominately Christian readership were horrified that their religion was treated alongside more ‘primitive’ religions on equal terms. After the revelations of Charles Darwin, this was another blow to the Christian orthodoxy. The best book on Fairy Tale by the way, is Marina Warner: Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale (2014)
Frazer’s inspiration for the title of his book(s) came from the subject of Joseph Mallord William Turner’s painting : The Golden Bough (c1834), described by the Tate as “This subject comes from Virgil’s poem, the Aeneid. The Trojan hero, Aeneas, has come to Cumae to consult the Sibyl, a prophetess. She tells him he can only enter the Underworld to meet the ghost of his father if he offers Proserpine a golden bough cut from a sacred tree.
Turner shows the Sibyl holding a sickle and the freshly cut bough, in front of Lake Avernus, the legendary gateway to the Underworld. The dancing figures are the Fates. Like the snake in the foreground, they hint at death and the mysteries of the Underworld, amidst the beauty of the landscape.The ‘golden bough’ was of course the magical Mistletoe that grew symbiotically on the ancient Oak tree - it is associated with ancient fertility rituals, and with the annual renewals of the midwinter festivals, like Christmas.