James George Frazer

The Golden Bough opens with a puzzle rather than a thesis. At Nemi, in the Alban hills south of Rome, the priest of Diana held his office by having killed his predecessor, and held it until someone killed him. He was called the king of the wood, and a challenger had first to break a bough from a particular tree. Frazer asks why, and takes twelve volumes to answer.

The answer assembles a theory out of thousands of reported customs. Kings are identified with the fertility of the land and are killed before their vigour fails, so that the power passes on undiminished. Behind that stands the dying and reviving god, Osiris, Adonis, Attis, Tammuz, whose death and return are the seasons. Behind that stands magic, which Frazer divides into the homeopathic, where like affects like, and the contagious, where things once in contact remain connected. And over the whole he lays a sequence: humanity works by magic, finds it fails, turns to religion, finds that fails too, and arrives at science.

The first edition of 1890 was two volumes. The third, published between 1906 and 1915, was twelve, with a supplementary volume in 1936. The one-volume abridgement of 1922 is what most people have actually read, and it leaves out most of the qualifications.

Frazer never did fieldwork. He sent questionnaires to missionaries and colonial officials, read enormously, and worked from Trinity College, Cambridge, for sixty years. The method, taking a custom out of the society that practised it and setting it beside a similar-looking custom from the other side of the world, was the standard comparative procedure of his generation, and it was abandoned by the next one. Malinowski, who acknowledged that The Golden Bough had drawn him into the subject at all, built a discipline on the opposite principle, that a practice means what it means within one working society. By the 1950s Evans-Pritchard could treat Frazer as a period curiosity.

The influence elsewhere was enormous and outlived the anthropology entirely. The Waste Land acknowledges him in its notes; Yeats, Lawrence, Joyce, Graves and a long line after them worked with his material; ritual theories of the origin of drama came out of him. And the modern Pagan and Wiccan revival took up the dying and reviving god, the sacrificed king and the seasonal cycle as a description of an old religion, at a point when anthropology had already discarded the framework that produced them.

That last part is worth stating carefully. It is a case of a scholarly theory becoming a living tradition after it had stopped being scholarship, and the tradition is not answerable for the defects of the theory.