Frazer surveys myth, magic, and ritual across cultures and history, tracing the priest-king of Nemi's sacred grove out into a vast comparative theory of how religion evolves from magic toward science.
Books that mention The Golden Bough (10)
The World Set Free by H. G. Wells: “the proper text-book for kings, Firmin... it is old Fraser's Golden Bough”
The Magus by John Fowles: “Disembowelled corpses? Or Frazer … The Golden Bough?”
Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco: “Because I had read about Saint John's Fire in Frazer's Golden Bough.”
Just Kids by Patti Smith: “One time, when I was sitting in the lobby reading The Golden Bough, Harry noticed I had a beat-up two-volume first edition.”
The Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft: “references to passages in such mythological and anthropological source-books as Frazer's _Golden Bough_ and Miss Murray's _Witch-Cult in Western Europe_.”
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami: “Have you read Frazer's The Golden Bough?” “No, I haven't.””
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein: “the unabridged Golden Bough, The Way, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the sacred writings of a dozen other religions”
Coventry by Rachel Cusk: “She had been reading The Golden Bough and Freud, and found in the concepts of tribalism and taboo a whole language”
The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot: “To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I have used especially the two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris.”