Astral Codex Ten

The Golden Bough

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The Golden Bough

Article

The Golden Bough is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between August 19, 2022 and July 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “reminded me strongly of a major theme of The Golden Bough by James Frazer”; “a major theme of The Golden Bough by James Frazer”; “Sir James Frazier’s seminal work on anthropology, The Golden Bough”. It most often appears alongside America, Australia, Aztecs.

Metadata

  • Category: Books
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: August 19, 2022
  • Last seen: July 15, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: 1587, A Year Of No Significance
August 19, 2022 · Original source
This ironic powerlessness of a seemingly supreme monarch, more a pampered prisoner of the Forbidden City than the lord of everything under heaven, reminded me strongly of a major theme of The Golden Bough by James Frazer, a pioneering work in the anthropology of religion which has continually caused controversy since its first publication in 1890. It's no more “scientific” than comparable 19th-century theories from formerly valorized - and now generally discredited - authors like Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, or Mary Baker Eddy. That said, Frazer never claimed his theories were anything more than speculative, and he wasn't wrong about everything. His accounts of widespread ancient belief in sacrificial god-kings seem relevant to Wan-li's story:
My 2024 Presidential Debate
June 27, 2024 · Original source
Biden: Scott, I think about these things through the lens of Sir James Frazier’s seminal work on anthropology, The Golden Bough. Frazier writes that all rituals descend from the same ur-ritual: sacrificing the king to restore the fertility of the soil. As time went on, instead of sacrificing the literal king, societies changed this ritual into more and more figurative forms. In one common instantiation, typified by the Roman festival of Saturnalia, a commoner was chosen as the “mock king” or “king of fools”. He would be feted for a time, given the finest goods and the most delicate foods, and then sacrificed to the gods in place of the true king. I think of cancel culture as an outgrowth of this phenomenon. We take undeserving commoners and promote them to celebrities. For a time they bask in limitless wealth and the adoration of all. Then we destroy them. This may seem harsh to the uninitiated. But without it, the corn would fail in Iowa, the grapes would wilt on the vine in California, and the apple trees of New England would wither and die. Our celebrities know by what bargain they have gained their ephemeral reign. Let none mourn the inevitable consequences.
Book Review: Arguments About Aborigines
July 15, 2025 · Original source
In the nineteenth century, anthropologists - buoyed by the success of Darwin’s theory of evolution - tried to invent grand Theories of Everything about the rise of humankind. These usually looked like “All savages originally did P, then passed through intermediate stages where they did Q, R, and S sequentially, and finally reached the light of civilization where they did T”. We still remember some of these fondly: the classic motif of a caveman clubbing a random woman and dragging her off to be his wife comes from a real theory by anthropologist John McLennan that this was the original marriage ritual of humankind, with advanced cultures eventually adding epicycles like “consent” and “courtship”. There is still dim cultural awareness of James Frazier’s The Golden Bough, which purports to prove that all religion came from an ur-ritual of killing the king to ensure the fertility of the land. Still, observers eventually noticed that “all savages do P” isn’t true for basically any P, and after some delay anthropologists stopped trying to argue that surely some X was actually a distant distorted cultural memory of P which all savages must have done in an even-more-savage past.