This is the best edition of Frazer’s monumental work on magic, folklore and mythology. It was first published in two volumes in 1890, and was expanded to three volumes in 1900, whilst this, the third edition, extended to twelve volumes, was first published in 1911. The supplementary volume "Aftermath" was originally published separately in 1936. In this massive work Frazer attempts to define the shared elements of religious belief and scientific thought, discussing fertility rites, human sacrifice, the cult of the dying god, the scapegoat and many other symbols and practices whose influence has extended into twentieth-century culture. Its thesis is that old religions were fertility cults that revolved around the worship and periodic sacrifice of a sacred king. Frazer proposed that mankind progresses from magic through religious belief to scientific thought (and perhaps back to magic again). This thesis was developed in relation to Turner’s painting of The Golden Bough, a sacred grove where a certain tree grew day and night. It was a transfigured landscape in a dream-like vision of the woodland lake of Nemi, “Diana’s Mirror”, where religious ceremonies and the "fulfillment of vows" of priests and kings were held. The king was the incarnation of a dying and reviving god, a solar deity who underwent a mystic marriage to a goddess of the Earth. He died at the harvest and was reincarnated in the spring. Frazer claims that this legend of rebirth is central to almost all of the world's mythologies. Frazer based his thesis on the pre-Roman priest-king at the shrine of Nemi, who was ritually murdered by his successor: "When I first put pen to paper to write The Golden Bough I had no conception of the magnitude of the voyage on which I was embarking; I thought only to explain a single rule of an ancient Italian priesthood." The book's title was taken from an incident in the Aeneid illustrated by Turner: Aeneas and the Sibyl present the golden bough to the gatekeeper of Hades to gain admission. An amazing reference work.