The Illustrated Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion

Front Cover
"The Golden Bough" describes our ancestors' primitive methods of worship, sex practices, strange rituals and festivals. Disproving the popular thought that primitive life was simple, this monumental survey shows that savage man was enmeshed in a tangle of magic, taboos, and superstitions. Revealed here is the evolution of man from savagery to civilization, from the modification of his weird and often bloodthirsty customs to the entry of lasting moral, ethical, and spiritual values.

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Contents

Introduction
6
CHAPTER Two Sympathetic Magic
21
CHAPTER THREE Weather Magic
33
Copyright

4 other sections not shown

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About the author (1996)

James George Frazer was a British social anthropologist, folklorist, and classical scholar who taught for most of his life at Trinity College, Cambridge. Greatly influenced by Edward Burnett Tylor's Primitive Culture, published in 1871, he wrote The Golden Bough (1890), a massive reconstruction of the whole of human thought and custom through the successive stages of magic, religion, and science.The Golden Bough is regarded by many today as a much-loved but antiquated relic, but, by making anthropological data and knowledge academically respectable, Frazer made modern comparative anthropology possible.

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