A Century of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough

Stephanie Lynn Budin is an ancient historian specializing in Greece and the Near East. She has published numerous books and articles on sex, gender, mythology, religion, and iconography, including Freewomen, Patriarchal Authority, and the Accusation of Prostitution (Routledge 2021) and Artemis (Routledge 2016). She considers herself to be the world expert on non-existent prostitution. Caroline J. Tully is an archaeologist and curator. Her research interests include religion and ritual in the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean, Reception of the Ancient World, and Contemporary Paganisms. She is the author of many articles on ancient religion as well as the book The Cultic Life of Trees in the Prehistoric Aegean, Levant, Egypt, and Cyprus, and she is curator of the exhibit “Amor et Mors: Vessels for the Beautiful Body in Life and Death” at the Ian Potter Museum of Art.

Editors’ Introduction; Preliminaries; 1. The Golden Bough: setting the scene – Tim Parkin; 2. Sir James Frazer and The Golden Bough – Ronald Hutton; 3. “Off With His Head!”: Wilhelm Mannhardt’s Wald- und Feldkulte at the Roots of The Golden Bough - Frederico Delgado Rosa; 4. The Golden Bough and the Press – Julia Phillips; 5. Hypothesis as Theory: The Golden Bough and the Obstinate Nostrums in Religious Studies and the Humanities – Ryan C. Chester; Ancient Near East; 6. Ištar’s Sexual Agency in Akkadian Love Literature – Martti Nissinen; 7. Dying and Rising Gods in Ancient Mesopotamian Religion and the Frazerian Paradigm of Fertility Religion – JoAnn Scurlock; 8. The Fads that Drive Us: From Frazer, Freud, and Foucault to Butler and Connell – Stephanie Lynn Budin; 9. The Hebrew Bible Scapegoat: Complicating a Frazerian Typology – Caroline Ward Smith; Aegean and Classical; 10. Embracing the Goddess: Evans and the Minoan feminine divine – Christine Morris; 11. Guess Who’s Back, Back Again? Graeber and Wengrow’s Resurrection of Minoan Matriarchy in ‘The Dawn of Everything’ – Stephen O’Brien; 12. Same same, but different: Frazer’s Sympathetic Law of Similarity and the study of Greco-Roman defixiones – Saskia Moorrees; 13. Reading about Nymphs and Roman Soldiers with and without Frazer – Isabel Köster; Pagan Studies; 14. Surviving Frazerisms: twenty-first century Witchcraft and the eternal return – Helen Cornish; 15. Moon and Huntress: Frazer’s Arician Diana in Italian-American Witchcraft – Caroline J. Tully; 16. Lilith from Demoness to Mother Goddess: a Frazerian legacy in French Luciferian Wicca? – Vanessa Toupin-Lavallée; 17. Contemporary Tree Lore and the Ancient Worship of Trees: The Contributions of James Frazer in the Contemporary Study of Religion and Ecology – Ive Brissman; The Modern World; 18. Derivative and Associative Popular Frazerism: A Cultural Complex at Work in Late Modern Europe – Alessandro Testa; 19. Frazer and the Magical Oath – Fritz Lampe; Coda; 20. Diana’s Mirror: The Reflective Surface of Frazer’s The Golden Bough – Robert Fraser.