The Golden Bough Read online

  J.G. FRAZER

  The Golden Bough

  A Study in Comparative Religion

  Introduction by

  Cairns Craig

  Contents

  Introduction

  Preface

  Chapter One: The King of the Wood

  The Arician Grove

  Primitive Man and the Supernatural

  Incarnate Gods

  Tree-Worship

  Tree-Worship in Antiquity

  Chapter Two: The Perils of the Soul

  Royal and Priestly Taboos

  The Nature of the Soul

  Royal and Priestly Taboos

  Chapter Three: Killing the God

  Killing the Divine King

  Killing the Tree-Spirit

  Carrying out Death

  Adonis

  Attis

  Osiris

  Dionysus

  Demeter and Proserpine

  Lityerses

  The Corn-Spirit as an Animal

  Eating the God

  Killing the Divine Animala

  Transference of Evil

  Expulsion of Evils

  Scapegoats

  Killing the God in Mexico

  Chapter Four: The Golden Bough

  Between Heaven and Earth

  Balder

  The External Soul in Folk-tales

  The External Soul in Folk-custom

  Conclusion

  Note: Offerings of First-fruits

  Appendix One: Totemism

  Appendix Two: The Origin of Totemism

  Appendix Three: The Scope of Social Anthropology

  Appendix Four: from The Worship of Nature

  Index

  Introduction

  IN the fifty years after its publication in 1890, no single book had a larger impact on the intellectual concerns of the Western world than J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough. It was, of course, a foundational text for the new discipline of social anthropology, shaping the issues around which the discipline would develop, but its impact was felt just as powerfully in philosophy, theology and psychology, in the social disciplines of sociology and politics and in literary and art criticism. The roll call of those who were influenced by or responded to The Golden Bough includes many of the most prominent and radical thinkers of the period, including Malinowski and Durkheim in social anthropology, Bergson and Ryle in philosophy, Freud in psychology and Spengler and Toynbee in philosophical history. The power that Frazer’s work held over the European mind is symbolised by the fact that Wittgenstein, who had written about it in 1930, was still writing about it as late as 1948. 1 Equally, the search for the ritual and archetypal significances of works of art, initiated in the 1890s by Jane Harrison and Gilbert Murray, who applied the methods of The Golden Bough to classical literature, was to culminate in the mid-century in some of the most important of modern approaches to the study of English literature in the work of critics such as Wilson Knight in Britain and Northrop Frye in North America. Like some volcanic irruption from deep underground, Frazer’s accounts of the magic and the legends of primitive peoples, his tracking of the strange origins of familiar Graeco–Roman myths, the explanations of the savage roots of religion and the relation of sacrificial kingship to seasonal rituals poured across the intellectual landscape, reshaping the ways in which the human mind and human history were conceived. And perhaps The Golden Bough’s most enduring legacy was its impact on creative artists, who found in Frazer’s work not only a new vocabulary of myth that could be applied to modern conditions but a new conception of the profound and irrational depths of the human mind, depths which could only be expressed through entirely new forms that combined the most adventurous aspects of modernity with the most powerful remnants of the primitive. 1

  When T. S. Eliot declared that for modern writers ‘the maxim, return to the sources, is a good one’ because they ‘should be aware of all the metamorphoses of poetry that illustrate the stratifications of history that cover savagery’, 2 he was acknowledging what had been learned from Frazer: that underlying the modern world, like a series of archaeological strata, were a variety of savage ones, and that modern civilisation was a thin layer through which it was easy to reach down into those savage origins. When Frazer envisaged the modern world as ‘cracked and seamed, sapped and mined with rents and fissures and yawning crevasses’, opening on to a primitive belief in magic which ‘is very much what it was thousands of years ago in Egypt and India’ and remains the environment of the ‘ignorant and superstitious classes of modern Europe’, 3 he implied the structure of works like Eliot’s The Waste Land, with its underlying framework of powerful myths haunting the facile surface of modern European civilisation. Eliot proclaimed that Joyce, with some help from Yeats, was the inventor of the ‘mythic method’ which could make sense of the ‘immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history‘, 1 in fact, all of them depended on Frazer, as Eliot himself made clear in his notes to The Waste Land: ‘To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I have used especially the two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris’. 2 Throughout the development of modernist literature in the first half of the twentieth century Frazer’s writings played a crucial role, providing both some of its key narrative structures – such as the myth of the dying god who must be sacrificed for the return of fertility 3 – and the inspiration for some of its most daring formal innovations, such as the revelation of archetypal myths still operative within a modern environment. Both aspects can be found in the work of the major modernist writers of the period on both sides of the Atlantic – in Conrad, in Yeats, in Joyce, in Woolf, in Faulkner – and in the work of many of the most important writers of the Scottish Renaissance, from John Buchan and Lewis Grassic Gibbon to Neil Gunn, Edwin Muir and Naomi Mitchison. Even when Frazer’s work had lost much of its original surprise, and its treatment of the primitive had been superseded by later anthropologists, its literary influence continued to be felt in works such as Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, 4 in the poetry of Ted Hughes, in the work of Scottish writers such as Muriel Spark – who sets one of her late novels, Territorial Rites, on the banks of the Lake at Nemi where Frazer’s narrative opens – and in the writings of Allan Massie, whose depictions of modern European society are constantly juxtaposed with elements from Frazer’s narrative. Indeed, in Sins of the Father, a novel about the consequences of Fascism, one of the characters has on the wall in his apartment, an ‘aquatint reproduction of Turner’s The Golden Bough,’ 1 which becomes the symbolic locus for the terrors both of Europe in the Second World War and of Argentina in the 1960s. In its representation of a terrifying past which humanity had not progressed beyond, Frazer’s work provided an explanation for the horrific present which Europe lived through between 1890 and the 1960s, and if that explanation provided no palliative to the horrors of modern history, it at least provided artists with a means of making sense of it, and thereby making it amenable again to the powers of the imagination.

  The profound effect of The Golden Bough was based not on the absolute novelty of Frazer’s work – much had been done before him by British anthropologists such as Tyler – nor on its long-term significance as an explanation of ‘the savage mind’ – no modern anthropologists would regard Frazer as the basis of the discipline as it now exists. Its shock effect came from the fact that it collapsed traditional conceptions of progressive history, revealing that the past that modern humanity thought it had left behind still shadowed its contemporary existence and was, indeed, more pervasive in modern consciousness than the discoveries of science made over the last four hundred years. Frazer’s presentation of the history of humanity negated both the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment and the nineteenth-century social Darwinist conceptions of continuous progressive improvement towards ever-higher levels of rationality: for Frazer, the history of humanity was a tale of repeated and terrible error out of which, with little certainty, had come the fragile conceptions of scientific truth on which modern civilisation was based, conceptions constantly threatened by the return of the mistaken forms of understanding – both magical and religious – on which primitive society was based. It is this negation of progressive history, this awareness of the fact that even the ‘light’ of modern science is rooted in the ‘dark’ truths of the primitive, that made Frazer the prophet of the modern consciousness. At the same time, Frazer presented this dark history of humanity in a prose as lucid and as ordered as any eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinker could have asked for. In Frazer, the Enlightenment search for truth is enacted in the clarity and regularity of his sonorous prose; but the post-Enlightenment awareness that truth may be no more than an illusion of our own making is the burden of the history that he has to recount. The balance between the two made The Golden Bough both the closing statement of one historical epoch and the opening statement of the next: a grand Victorian narrative of the rise of civilisation from savagery reveals, at the same time, that savagery is the stronger and more permanent condition, and that the beneficent truths of the Christian religion are themselves but the spiritual after-echo of all-too-physical savage rituals. Frazer’s ultimate achievement was the blending of a style which reflected Enlightenment optimism about the powers of reason with a content which undermined and challenged that optimism, producing a text which hovers constantly between sympathetic identification with the early stages of the journey towards civilisation and appalled horror at the irrational beliefs, and even more irrational actions, of primitive humanity. 1

  Frazer’s work established the context in which modernist – and indeed postmodernist – thought conceived of Western history not as the paradigm of humanity’s development towards perfection, but as the elaboration of a vast mistake about the nature of reality. When Heidegger or Derrida argue that Western culture is based on a philosophical mistake about the nature of language they follow in the footsteps of Frazer, who sees in magical and then in religious forms of human culture the misapplication of the logic of causation which modern science has only partially, and perhaps ineffectually, redeemed. For Frazer, the world we inhabit is powerfully and disturbingly illusory, and no more illusory than when we are sure we have escaped from previous illusions. As he puts at the opening of his Gifford Lectures on The Worship of Nature (included in this edition):

  … every one of us is perpetually, every hour of the day, implicitly constructing a purely imaginary world behind the immediate sensations of light and colour, of touch, of sound, and of scent which are all that we truly apprehend; and oddly enough it is this visionary world, the creation of thought, which we dub the real world in contradistinction to the fleeting data of sense. Thus viewed, the mind of man may be likened to a wizard who, by the help of spirits or the waving of his magic wand, summons up scenes of enchantment which, deceived by the very perfection of his art, he mistakes for realities. 1

  Trapped in its own imaginings, the tale of humanity is a tale in which no absurdity, no grotesquerie, no horror, has not been believed as true somewhere in the world. As The Golden Bough expanded, from two volumes in the first edition in 1890 (reprinted here) to twelve volumes in the third edition of 1915, the enormous weight of evidence of the delusory powers of the imagination – and of humanity’s capacity to commit itself to them – expanded into a vast ocean of irrationalism upon which the ship of reason voyaged almost without compass. In Afterword, a final supplementary compilation, published in 1936, of yet more evidence about the pervasive power of the imagination to delude the human mind, Frazer declared that he was ‘led on, step by step, into surveying, as from some specular height, some Pisgah of the mind, a great part of the human race; I was beguiled, as by some subtle enchanter, into inditing what I cannot but regard as a dark, a tragic chronicle of human error and folly, of fruitless endeavour, wasted time, and blighted hopes.’ The effort rationally to annotate all the irrationalisms of human history was itself, one might say, a ‘tragic chronicle’ of ‘fruitless endeavour, wasted time’, however much Frazer himself might have hoped that his researches would ‘serve as a warning, as a sort of Ariadne’s thread, to help the forlorn wayfarer to shun some of the snares and pitfalls into which his fellows have fallen before him in the labyrinth of life’. 1 That the myth of the labyrinth becomes an explanation of the labyrinthine myths in which Frazer found himself enmeshed reveals the fundamental duality that made The Golden Bough so powerful: it sceptically unveiled the dubious foundations of myths, legends and rituals to discover that it was only by means of the myths themselves that their falsehood could be comprehended. The book that set out to reveal the delusions of myth ended up by providing Western culture with a new series of myths by which it could seek to comprehend the contradictions of its own cultural history. It was to be a vicious circle repeated regularly in Western philosophy from Husserl to Foucault, and as such represented one of the founding statements of the problems with which modern thought has struggled since the 1890s.

  The twentieth-century implications of Frazer’s work in an international environment were, however, no more remarkable than its nineteenth-century origins in Scottish and British thought. Frazer’s work was built on the insights of three of the most remarkable figures of the latter part of the nineteenth century and on some of the most significant contributions of Scottish intellectuals to the modern world. The first was John Ferguson M’Lennan (1827–81), an Edinburgh advocate with an interest in ancient history and culture who, in contributions to the Chambers Ency clopaedia, made the radical suggestion that ancient civilisation was structured on matriarchal rather than on patriarchal foundations. The particular form of this matriarchy required the acquisition of the bride from an alien tribe, because marriage within the tribe was forbidden. Exogamous marriage (the term is M’Lennan’s invention) required that the bride had to be extracted from her own tribe or social group, if necessary by force, and installed at the centre of her new family structure. Descent, with all its legal implications, then passed through the matrilineal line, and polyandry (one wife, many husbands) was the likely accompaniment of these arrangements. Such a view, of course, was entirely at odds not only with the contemporary expectations of Victorian society, but with its assumptions about the nature of the development of civilisation, and M’Lennan’s challenge to both was to be the beginning of a long line of anthropological studies focused on the implications of the fact that in primitive societies children were assumed to be the offspring of the mother alone. In developing these theories, M’Lennan provided later anthropologists with one of the key terms – totemism – which Frazer himself would later develop in his articles for the Encyclopedia Britannica (included in this edition) and which would define much of the development of social anthropology in the period up to the First World War. The significance of M’Lennan’s speculations, first published in Chambers Encyclopaedia in 1868 and developed in The Fortnightly Review in 1869, 1 is attested by the fact that the terms came to be the title of one of Freud’s major publications, Totem und Tabu, published in 1913, though Freud himself was to take the terms not from M’Lennan but from Frazer.

  M’Lennan’s theories were to reach the young J. G. Frazer through one of the most remarkable figures in the intellectual landscape of nineteenth-century Scotland, William Robertson Smith. A precocious linguist – he learned Hebrew from the age of five under the tutelage of his father, a Free Church minister in Aberdeenshire – Smith was, even in his twenties, a leading conduit between Scottish theology and developments in France, Germany and Holland. His introduction of a challenging new perspective in Scottish theology was marked by a series of lectures delivered in 1875 in which he argued against understanding the Bible primarily ‘from the supernatural point of view
’, because

  … the evolution of God’s dealings with man cannot be understood, except by looking at the human side of the process. The only idea of moral and spiritual evolution possible to us, is that of evolution in accordance with psychological laws. The nexus sought must always be psychological. The teleology of revelation is divine; but the pragmatism of the revealing history must be human.

  The challenge which faced contemporary biblical scholars was, for Smith, the effort to ‘trace the process of the Old Testament religion completely from the side of psychology and human history’, so that,

  the divine elements in the process will take their proper place of themselves, unless with arbitrary rationalism we forcibly thrust them aside. For it is the postulate of all moral religion, that God communicates himself to man in such a way that his revelation is interwoven with history, without violence or breach of psychological laws. 1

  This was too radical for the Free Church which sponsored his professorship, and Smith was forced to resign after one of the most famous confrontations in Scottish academic history. 2 That resignation, however, led to his becoming an editor of the ninth edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica (1871–88), one of the most outstanding products of Scottish publishing in the nineteenth century and the first encyclopedia to attempt an overview of the consequences of evolutionary theory for the totality of human knowledge. By the time of its completion, Smith had become a fellow of Christ’s College Cambridge where he would encounter the young J. G. Frazer, also recently promoted to a fellowship after a brilliant undergraduate career in Classics at both Glasgow and Cambridge. It is on Smith’s combination of textual, psychological and anthropological studies that the method of The Golden Bough was to be based, and it was Smith who spurred Frazer to the exploration of the primitive mind by inviting him to substantiate M’Lennan’s insights in the entry on ‘Totemism’ for the Encyclopedia Britannica.