“If in the present work I have dwelt at some length on the worship of trees, it is not, I trust, because I exaggerate its importance in the history of religion, still less because I would deduce from it a whole system of mythology; it is simply because I could not ignore the subject in attempting to explain the significance of a priest who bore the title of King Of the Wood, and one of whose titles to office was the plucking of a bough — the Golden Bough”

— James Frazer , book The Golden Bough

from a tree in the sacred grove.
Preface, 1 Brick Court Temple, London, June 1922.
The Golden Bough (1890)

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James Frazer 50

Scottish social anthropologist 1854–1941

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