The Golden Bough — Volume 8

Volume 8 of Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough (third edition, 1912) is the first half of his sub-treatise Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild — the ethnographic study of harvest customs, corn-mother and corn-maiden figures, the eating of the god in vegetation festivals, the sacrifice of first-fruits, and the magical principles of vegetation rites across the world's pre-modern agricultures. This edition reproduces the standard 1912 third-edition text in full.