Access Today The Golden Bough By James George Frazer In Text
read an abridged version of this some years ago that I picked up in a bookshop for a pound the output of a cheap publisher.
It was a slow and awkward read, possibly because of the abridgement, but the original was long and appeared in numerous editions each of which tended to get more elaborate during Frazer's lifetime.
The opening echoes Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the British scholar in Italy looks over the landscape and allows a vision of the past, the product of their classical learning, to sweep over them.
In Frazer's case though this was not a vision of the City of Rome but of the myth of the King of the Grove at Nemi.
The practise at Nemi was that there was a priest of the Goddess Diana who became priest by killing the current occupant of the office in single combat, and who would then be the priest until they in turn were killed by a younger, stronger applicant for the role.
The priest was generally, maybe eventually always, an escaped slave, at least by the time that that the Classical writers were mentioning the practise a few years, however brief, as Priest of Diana were better than a long life of slavery.
Frazer felt that the central idea of the cycle of eternal renewal was the foundational idea of religious and magical thinking manifesting itself from the most 'savage' culture to Christianity.
The Christian connection was soft pedalled since one couldn't print that kind of thing in Victorian Britain, but by implication, Christ's death and resurrection was simply in his view just one more repetition of the death and rebirth of the natural world, the symbolic or actual death of a ritual figure magically required to ensure the rebirth of seed crops every year.
This Frazer set out to demonstrate by stock piling examples of this kind of myth from rural European corn kings and nineteenth century harvest songs to the cult celebration of the death of Adonis as well as everything in between.
In this way it still functions as a convenient treasure trove of myths, stories and beliefs irrespective of the validity of his thesis.
Having said that the choice and arrangement of his material is determined by his goals,
What I found most interesting was the snippets from the disappearing culture of the Victorian British countryside.
Machines are all well and good, but they don't sing songs or trade their savings to buy the horseman's word off a stranger in an ale house .
It seems all a little sitelinkFoucault's Pendulum on the one hand, in its assumption of a metanarrative and its urgent quest to reveal it, while on the other it speaks to the centrality of Christianity in Frazer's mind in that even in his effort to put it in an explanatory framework he is clearly still engaged with the central idea of the resurrection.
Rather than get away from it he has expanded it and imposed it or discovered it depending on your point of view on everything else.
In that respect in my imagination Frazer is something like the archetypal angry atheist, still so firmly possessed by their religious background that they carry it with them were ever they go.
The Foreword compares Frazer and Golden Bough in its impact to such revolutionary thinkers of theth Century as Darwin, Marx, and Freud.
This seminal work of anthropology and comparative religion first published inwas in fact a great influence on Freud and Jung as well as T.
S. Eliot and Yeats and the modern Neopagan movement, Frazer's influence on Joseph Campbell is obvioushe's the original, Frazer tries to argue for the monomyththe idea that religion and myth can be reduced to a few universal principles and symbols such as sacrifice, scapegoats, the soul and totem and taboo.
Taking an ancient Roman custom involving the "King of the Wood" at Nemi as his launching pad, Frazer examined myths and folktales from every part of the world and drew connections to explain, as the subtitle on the cover of my copy put it, "the roots of religion and folklore.
" His argument seems to be that the origins of religion can be found in a crude science, an attempt to influence the world through sympathetic magic.
Although he never attacked Christianity directly in this original edition, I could see how the idea of Jesus as entirely myth could come out of this book.
Frazer's examination of vegetation deities, cycles of sowing and reaping and kingly sacrifice and his examination of the myths of Ishtar and Thammuz, Isis and Osiris, Aphrodite and Adonis and spring fertility rites is certainly suggestive.
I often found this book tedious, primarily because of Frazer's exhaustive examplesand the edition I read is the original twovolume workbefore he, as the Foreword put it, "overburdened the book with volumes of illustrative examples which tended to hide the thread of his argument.
" Twelve volumes in fact. In his pileon it reminded me of my recent read of the original edition of Darwin's Origin of Species.
This was a time when science wasn't yet so technical and specialized as to be unduly esoteric to the layman.
So as with Darwin, I think Frazer was aiming his book at both his scientific brethren as well as the laymanthus the exhaustive examples in an effort to prove his theories.
However, unlike the case with Darwin, I believe Frazer's examples do more to hidenay, buryhis argument rather than illustrate it, even in this original more compact edition.
More and more I found myself skimming, There is an abridged edition from the author, but my understanding from reviews is that it excised a lot of the more controversial and interesting parts found in the expanded versions, such as a chapter on "The Crucifixion of Christ.
" Also as with Darwin, who didn't at the time have the advantages of our advances in genetics and geology, I suspect much of the anthropology in Golden Bough is outdated.
Especially given that unlike Darwin, who famously conducted many observations in the field and experiments of his own, Frazer seemed to entirely rely on secondhand accounts, mostly by travelers and missionaries.
Nor do I entirely buy Frazer's contention that modern peasant customs and folklore represented a continuity with a pagan past.
Some may be put off by Frazer's characterization of peoples as "rude" and "savages, " To his credit though, Frazer doesn't exempt Europe or Britain in his examples of primitive rituals and superstitions.
Given that and the context of the times, I don't as some reviewers do see this book as essentially racist.
Frazer notes, "when all is said and done our resemblances to the savage are still far more numerous than our differences from him.
" This book reminded me, of all things, of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, That novel is famous as a denunciation of colonialism, But one of the things I took away from Achebe's book was that the Christian missionaries gained adherents because they freed their converts from frightening and oppressive superstitions that propagated slavery, infanticide and human sacrifice.
As much as I can see the ugly side of the history of modern monotheistic creeds such as Christianity, I think we forget that much of the legacy of polytheistic pagan beliefs isn't as pretty as many of its New Age adherents would have it.
This bookfor all I suspected the accuracy of many detailswas a salutary reminder of that with its tales of scapegoating, sacrifices and taboos.
Ironically, Frazer's successors, such as Joseph Campbell, have formed a new myth of the "noble savage," of a pagan and prehistoric past as egalitarian and in harmony with nature.
We seem to have few fans of civilization and reason these days, It's ironic that a book that tried to explain the spiritual scientifically might have contributed to that, Ultimately I'm glad I read it, and I'm keeping it on my shelves as a rather thorough reference book of beliefs and rites across cultures and agesor at least as far as was known over a century ago.
A classic, groundbreaking piece of comparative mythology and anthropology, It's influenced Jung, Campbell, T, S. Eliot and even Apocalypse Now,
It's a bit dated, particularly in its sticking to the "primitive savage" evolves into "sophisticated civilization" model, but alot of the basic principals are still very sound.
Frazer starts a single incident, a Latin ritual of a King of the Forest, who is ritually killed and replaced by his successor.
He uses this a launching pad for a far reaching, global discussion of sitelinkmagical thinking, divine kings, birth/rebirth cycles, and the psychology of killing the god.
I recommend it, Yes I do. This is not a "review" of the classic "Golden Bough, " This is a review of several hardback and soft back editions available to the collector which are complimentary to each other's content and pagination.
The purchaser may wish to take care in selecting which edition of the Golden Bough they consider for purchase.
Several hardbound editions exist.
The most common edition is thevolume abridgedth edition,this is the edition supervised by Graves widow it is woefully incomplete.
It seems Mrs. Graves was bothered by the JudeoChristian references as myth, and reedited thevolume set to the bone,
But still, it is to therd Edition that most collectors will want to turn, Therd edition has twelve volumes, and avolume afterward, which, when assembled look rather like a set of encyclopedias.
There have been twelve reliable and interchangable printings fromtowhich may allow the collector the opportunity to assemble a complete set of mismatching volumes, as I have done, spending less thanto assemble the entire series, or averaging less than.
a volume. The original publishers to look for are MacMillan amp Co, and St. Martin's Press. One cannot vouch for the print accuracy of the plethora of "On Demand" editions, I avoid them after a couple bad experiences with other titlestoo many transcription errors.
The numbering on these volumes is sometimes confusing The online seller's lists at ALibris and ABE books always get them wrong, so you may want to do a general search for "Frazer" "Golden
Bough Part" and compare the listing to the contents below as printed on the dust jacket back of theedition:
Thebooks are divided intoparts:
Part I Vols.
amp, The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings
Part II Taboo and The Perils of the Soul
Part III The Dying God
Part IV Adonis, Attis Osiris Vols.
amp
Part V Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild Vols,amp
Part VI The Scapegoat
Part VII Balder the Beautiful: The Fire Festivals of Europe and
The Doctrine of the External Soul
Part VIII Bibliography and General Index
Part IX Aftermath: A Supplement to "The Golden Bough.
"
With a little preserverance you can assemble a set within a few months, These books ought to be required reading to any student of religion, history, sociology, and occult sciences, So far, while it does a lot of mythological namedropping, and the very thin veil of a theme seems accurate, I'm tempted to say that this book is a real mess.
Goddesses with mixed up attributes, baldfaced assumptions about ancient societies, and rampant misspellings almost turn me off, And yet, I have stamina, I have fortitude. I shall endure another escaped slave trying to murder me so he can break off the branch of my sacred tree and so take my place.
Some random, albeit unfortunate, quotes:
"And they were forced to lay upon some erections.
"
"And she was given the gift of a cock, "
Seriously enough, I've been very impressed by the work, Ok, so on my ebook reader, it only runs up to a little underpages, and there are at least a dozen accounts as proof of each point.
I cannot, in good faith, find fault with much of his conclusions, I was astonished to realize how many assumptions I had held about Osiris were completely balderdash, At least I've been put to rights about the real reason he was worshiped, Hint: it wasn't because they never found his penis,
Overall, the main themes are drilled into our skulls so thoroughly that there's no way we could ever forget them, even if we tried.
The best and the worst that I can say for this work is that it is very thorough.
I can honestly say I've heard discussions of the many themes, as I'm sure most of us have fertility deities, all manifestations thereof.
What I was most astonished to feel, after reading this work, was a great sadness, I look back at all of the thousands of cultures that have independently worshiped the same principles over time and see how they were systematically wiped out as "poppycock", and I wonder about the nowlost depth of understanding that is now lost to time and chronos.
. . and I wonder if Uranus ever did find his penis, .