Golden Bough

American  

noun

Classical Mythology.

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

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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.

From New York Times

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.

From New York Times

“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.

From Washington Post

At a young age, Ms. Le Guin immersed herself in books about mythology, among them James Frazier’s “The Golden Bough,” classic fantasies like Lord Dunsany’s “A Dreamer’s Tales,” and the science-fiction magazines of the day.

From Seattle Times

Edmund Wilson’s famous review of “The Waste Land,” which catalogs the source material — Vedic hymns and Ecclesiastes, Ovid and Augustine, Jessie L. Weston’s “From Ritual to Romance” and Sir James George Frazer’s “The Golden Bough” and much more — interests Goldstein far less than Wilson’s take in a private letter.

From New York Times