Golden Bough

noun

Classical Mythology.

1. a branch of mistletoe, sacred to Proserpina, that served Aeneas as a pass to the underworld.

Example Sentences

Syncretism like this has a long history that includes the archetypes theory of Carl Jung and Sir James George Frazer’s “The Golden Bough,” but academic anthropology now frowns on its habit of bulldozing the particularities of specific cultures.

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When anthropologists, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, referred to “spirit animals” — as James Frazer did in “The Golden Bough” — they were as likely to be referring to practices in the South Pacific as in the Americas.

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“In just under 400 pages, Mr. Calasso manages to quote Goethe, Sainte-Beuve, the Upanishads, Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough,’ ‘Das Kapital,’ the German anthropologist Leo Frobenius . . . and several hundred other works in several languages,” the literary biographer James Atlas wrote in the Times.

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At sight of the golden bough, however, he yielded and took them across.

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The Sibyl, however, bade him have no fear, but fasten boldly the golden bough on the wall that faced the crossroads.

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