The Golden Bough
Frazer began with a strange Roman custom, a priest who killed his predecessor, and expanded it into a comparative study of magic, religion and myth across the ancient world. The book is enormous, and the abridged edition is the one most readers use.
Its methods have been criticised: it compares practices from different cultures without enough attention to context, and some of its conclusions have not held up. But its influence on twentieth-century literature was immense, and its central question, why people believe what they believe, remains interesting. Read the abridged version.
Public-domain status
First published in 1890. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; James George Frazer died in 1941, so this work has been free to republish there since 2012.
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- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 3623 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
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