Sir James George Frazer's Golden Bough (third edition, 1906–1915) remains, despite a century of academic criticism, one of the foundational works of the modern comparative study of myth, religion, and ritual. Volume 3 reproduced here takes up taboo and the perils of the soul — the burden of royalty, the conception of the soul as a substance that can be lost, stolen, or trapped, tabooed acts, persons, things, and words, and the modern world's debt to the savage.
This edition reproduces the complete 1911 third-edition text of Volume 3 in full. A short editor's preface places the book in its scholarly context.
