The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion

This chapter is divided into four sections. Frazer begins by stating that many tribes resort to killing their human gods as soon as they show any signs of decrepitude to prevent them from weakening through age. This custom stems the belief that the soul weakens with the dying body. If a community depends on the man-god for its prosperity and survival, disaster can be averted by “killing the man-god and transferring his soul, while yet in its prime, to a vigorous successor” (229).

The second section describes provides the ritual deaths of the Shilluk kings. If the king became unable to sexually satisfy his many wives, the wives could report this to the local chiefs. The ailing king would be walled into a hut with a “nubile virgin” (235) and left to die of “hunger and suffocation” (235). The king’s successors might also attack him, at which point he would be compelled to engage in mortal combat. By day, the king was surrounded by guards, but by night, he was unprotected and vigilant. Frazer underlines the parallels between these divine kings and the Kings of the Wood in Nemi.

The third section examines cultures such as Greece and Sparta in which the divine king is killed or expected to die by suicide at an appointed time in the prime of his life. In some cases, a proxy, such as the king’s son, was put to death in the king’s stead.

This chapter provides more examples of temporary or proxy kings. These kings are not put to death at the end of their reigns although they are sometimes concluded with a mock execution, suggesting that this might have been their original fate. In all of the examples provided, the temporary king is imbued with some of the true king’s divine functions, being expected to influence the weather and improve crop yield.

In many cultures, the king’s son was chosen as a proxy sacrifice for the divine king, since the son was deemed to share in the divinity of the father.

Frazer begins with the example of Aun, the King of Sweden, who prolonged his life by sacrificing nine of his sons to Odin. He then describes the ancient Greek legend of King Athamus and his children. King Athamus’s second wife was jealous of his children from his first marriage, Phrixus and Helle, so she sabotaged the harvest then bribed a messenger to the oracle of Delphi to tell the King that the two children should be sacrificed to Zeus. The children were warned by a ram with a golden fleece, and they fled to Colchis on the animal’s back. Helle drowned during the journey, and when Phrixus arrived in Colchis, he sacrificed the ram to Zeus. The golden fleece was hung from a tree in a sacred grove.

Meanwhile, the oracle decreed that Athamus himself should be sacrificed. Athamus was rescued but went mad and attempted, unsuccessfully, to kill both of his sons by his second wife. Because Athamus escaped his fate, it was decreed that the oldest male heir of each generation of his family should be sacrificed, should they ever set foot in the town hall. As a result, many of Athamus’s descendants fled overseas. Those who returned, even many years later, were ritually sacrificed.

The Old Testament provides examples of the sacrifice of children and, in particular, of the first-born. This includes the origins of the Passover festival during the plagues of Egypt and the story of Abraham and Isaac. Frazer concludes that, prior to the Passover tradition, which introduces a proxy animal sacrifice, the Jewish people had a tradition of killing their first-born. This idea is speculative and has no grounding in fact.

Frazer next examines similar customs to suggest that the practice was widespread globally. He proposes two explanations. In some cultures, the child dies in his father’s stead, giving him a new lease of life in the process. In others, the first-born is killed because he is seen as a threat to the father “by absorbing his spiritual essence or vital energy” (271). In yet other cultures, Frazer suggests that this belief stemmed from the doctrine of reincarnation, which sometimes suggests that the father is reborn in (and effectively replaced by) the embryo.

As an incarnation of a tree-spirit, the King of the Woods at Nemi was put to death in his prime so that his divine spirit might pass to his successor. The king’s death by combat likely replaced an earlier custom of ritual sacrifice. Frazer cites various northern European Spring rituals, which enact the sacrifice of a tree or other nature spirit. Several of these rituals feature the flight of the king or another means of survival, suggesting that, as in Nemi, the king’s death can be postponed through mental alertness, physical agility, and strength.

The second section demonstrates how the custom of killing a god and the belief in his resurrection had its origins in the “hunting and pastoral” (280) stage of society, during which the sacrificed god was an animal. This practice was carried forward to the “agricultural stage” (280), during which the slain deity was either the corn itself or a human proxy for the corn. This includes springtime European folk festivals, such as in Italy and France, which feature symbolic killings of kings and the execution of Death himself. In the third section Frazer moves on to the second group of rituals: namely, “carrying out death” (285). These typically occur in mid-Lent and are accompanied by an announcement of spring and new life.

The fourth section of the chapter describes ceremonies in which the “return of Spring, Summer, or Life” (288) is plainly enacted after the banishment of death. The new life and season is symbolized through a tree or branch, which is decorated and carried home after death has been dispatched.

In the fifth section, Frazer considers the ritual funerals held for “certain mythic figures” in Russia (292), considering that these rites serve the same basic function as the German and Austrian traditions of carrying out death. He closes the section by pondering why these ceremonies often combine sorrow and affection with hatred, dread, and rejoicing.

The sixth section describes a performed by young girls in the Kanagrs district of India, in which the girls first symbolically marry then drown and mourn clay images of Shiva and Parvati. This reflects magical thinking and the belief that natural phenomena can be produced and influenced through reenactment. In Europe, over the years, these magical rituals diminished to pageantry and then, finally, to “the idle sport of children” (297). Their decline might provoke nostalgia because they are “picturesque” and remind people of childhood. It also marks the passing of superstition and the embracing of rational thinking.

The first section discusses how sorcery was thought to control the changing seasons. With the dawn of religion, these changes came to be attributed to the “waxing and waning strength of divine beings” (300). During this period, the religious theory on the origins of events was blended with the magical practice of seeking to influence the world through symbolic mimicry and reenactment.

When seasons change, the most obvious transformations are observed in plants and trees. Hence, “magical dramas” focus primarily on natural life. These rites tended to conflate animals with plants, considering vegetative growth as being at one with animal and human fertility.

Frazer next comments on the Eastern Mediterranean worship of the god variously known as Adonis, Osiris, Tammuz, and Attis, who was believed to undergo death and resurrection annually.

The Greek Adonis derived from the Babylonian Tammuz, a deity originally worshipped by the Sumerians. Tammuz was the lover of Ishtar, the mother goddess who embodied the world’s reproductive energies. Upon his death and descent into the Underworld, Ishtar set out to rescue him, and the world became infertile. A messenger was sent to rescue Tammuz and Ishtar from Allatu, Queen of the Underworld, and they were sprinkled with the water of life, which allowed them to return to the world. As a baby, Adonis was loved by Aphrodite, goddess of love, who hid him in a chest that she gave to Persephone for safe keeping, but Persephone fell in love with the child and refused to give him back. Eventually it was decreed that Adonis should spend the warm months of the year with Aphrodite and the cold with Persephone. Adonis continued in that way until he was killed hunting a wild boar, which was actually the jealous god of war, Ares, in disguise.

The second section examines how the persona of Adonis was adopted by the kings of Byblus in Phoenicia and by the Canaanite kings of Jerusalem. David chose Jerusalem as the capital for the new kingdom of Israel in the hope of inheriting the “ghostly repute” (306) and authority traditionally held by the kings there. Frazer suggests that the Hebrew kings and their offspring, like other semi-divine rulers, were held accountable for natural phenomena.

The third section speculates that the worship of Aphrodite in Paphos, Cyprus, may have carried forward customs from the worship of a more ancient fertility goddess on the same site. These customs can still be traced in the traditions of Marian worship still practiced in the area.

Examining evidence that women were expected to serve as sexual consorts at the temple in Cyprus before marriage is a further example of imitation of the goddess, who was believed to mate year by year with a series of lovers. This custom was said to have been introduced by King Cinyras of Cyprus, who fathered Adonis by his own daughter, Myrrha. Alluding to the myth of Pygmalion, father-in-law of Cinyras, who “married” an image of Aphrodite, Frazer suggests that the practice of young women serving as sexual proxies enabled the kings of Cyprus to produce divine heirs, who embodied the spirit of Adonis, by procreating with women enacting the part of his divine mother.

The chapter’s first section describes the practice in the Tamil temples in India and in West Africa, whereby young women are married to the Python god in a ritual designed to guarantee the fertility of the soil. It also discusses that sacred men and women in West Africa and the Tshi peoples of the Gold Coast are believed to be possessed by the spirit of the deity and may suffer fits of frenzy during periods of worship.

In the second section, Frazer observes that this possession exempts priestesses, priests, oracles, and female proxies from the judgments of conventional society, explaining why their untraditional sexual activity is not frowned upon. Such customs originated from the belief that men and women were the offspring of gods.

The chapter concludes with a series of examples from classical antiquity of heroes being begotten by serpents. It cites Aelian’s account in Natura Animalium of a snake becoming enamored of a Judaean girl under Herod’s rule, speculating that this might be a “distorted” (330) reference to the parentage of Christ.

The opening section provides an overview of the rituals of Adonis in Greece and Western Asia, concluding that this sequence of marriage, funeral, mourning, and rebirth was enacted in the summer months. While accepting the theory that amongst agricultural peoples, Adonis probably represented the corn, nurtured, destroyed, harvested, and re-sown. Frazer argues that the figure would have had a different significance among the herdsmen and hunters of earlier ages. He suggests that this may have fused with broader rituals of respect for death and the dead. He cites the spring commemoration of the dead in Athens, which was called the Festival of Flowers, noting that roses and anemones were believed to have sprung from the blood of Adonis. The Greek custom of planting gardens in honor of Adonis was part of the celebrations. These gardens consisted of various crops, such as wheat, fennel, and barley, grown in shallow pots and tended for eight days before being thrown into the sea. This practice bears similarities to the folk practice of throwing water on the last corn of the harvest observed in Germany, France, England, and Scotland

The rites of Adonis bear further similarities to Greek Orthodox Easter rituals. Saint Jerome’s references to a grove of Adonis near Christ’s birthplace in Bethlehem shows parallels between Jesus’s self-definition as the “bread of life” (344) and Adonis’s identity as a corn god. Evidence also suggests that the festival of Adonis usually began with the appearance of the morning star, associated with Venus in the East, and this star may have set the precedent for the Star of Bethlehem, which guided the three kings to the infant Christ.