Frazer, Leach, and Virgil, The Popularity (and Unpopularity) ofThe Golden Bough

Abstract

In 1985 Edmund Leach, well into retirement from his chair of Anthropology in Cambridge, made his first visit to the site of the temple of Diana at Nemi, some fifteen miles southeast of Rome.Leach called this visit a pilgrimage, for Nemi and the problems of its bizarre cult were the starting place for James Frazer's founding work of Social Anthropology,The Golden Bough. This was the spot that Frazer described in such lavish detail in his opening chapter: ‘the sylvan landscape [that] was the scene of a strange and recurring tragedy.’ This was the setting for the problem that Frazer set out to solve: Why in Roman times could the priest-king of the sacred grove of Nemi (the so-calledRex Nemorensis) win his priestly office only by killing the previous incumbent; why would he himself lose it only through murder at the hands of his successor? For those who see Frazer's work as the start of anthropological study in its modern sense, the site and the cult of Nemi must hold a particular place: This colourful, but minor, backwater of Roman religion marks the source of the discipline of Social Anthropology.