FRAZER, James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion. London: Macmillan and Co. 1890.
Two volumes, 8vo. Original dark green cloth, spines lettered in gilt, front board with blocked decoration in gilt, green coated endpapers; pp. I: xii, [2], 409, [1], [2, publisher’s ads], with engraved frontispiece; II: [6], 407, [1]; slight lean to spines, very light wear to boards and extremities; some light toning, occasional spotting but generally very good; contemporary ownership signature “W.H. Murphy 1893” and later signature to front free endpapers and half titles.
First edition of one of the most influential books in the twentieth century.
The Golden Bough, the magnum opus of Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941), is a comparative study of mythology and religion. Frazer portrayed an arcane world shaped by a primitive mindset steeped in magic, totemism, fertility rituals, blood, the sacralisation of death, and the theatricalisation of rites. In The Golden Bough, the transformation of the primitive world emerges as a grand sacred drama common to all early agrarian civilisations. Frazer was among the pioneers of the concept of the “primitive” in European culture and art at the end of the nineteenth century. “Without Frazer’s work, for instance, Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1912-13) – an anthropological exploration by the father of psychoanalysis, who first connected the two emerging disciplines – would be unimaginable” (Guidorizzi, transl.).
Beyond its academic reach, The Golden Bough left a lasting mark on literature and the arts, with figures like T.S. Eliot and James Joyce acknowledging its influence. “Eliot’s The Waste Land, together with its notes, first popularised The Golden Bough with literary audiences. But actually, William Butler Yeats was, so far as can be ascertained, the first modern writer to register his awareness of The Golden Bough as relevant to the symbolic language of literature” (Vickery, p. 179).
The Golden Bough was first published in two volumes in 1890 (the present edition), expanded to three volumes in 1900, and later grew to twelve volumes in its third edition, issued between 1906 and 1915.
See Guidorizzi, Introduction to Dialoghi con Leucò, 2021; Vickery, The Literary Impact of “The Golden Bough”, 1973.
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