The Golden Bough Read online

  The third major influence on Frazer’s development was another Cambridge contact, James Ward. Ward was a self- educated Englishman of Calvinist background who managed to take a degree at Cambridge when he was in his thirties. Another of Smith’s protegés, Ward’s contribution to the Britannica was an article on psychology so famous in its day that Ward received honorary degrees on the basis of it. It is still cited as the beginning of the modern discipline of psychology in Britain and Ward’s profound understanding of the history of epistemology provided Frazer with a context for conceptualising the workings of the human mind at the point when, historically, it was just beginning to emerge into the framework that we define as ‘culture’. Indeed, it was Ward – probably on a walking tour that they did together in Spain in 1883 – who first introduced Frazer to the study of the primitive mind by suggesting he read Ε. Β. Tylor’s Primitive Culture. 1

  Frazer’s lifelong study of the ways in which primitive cultures conceived the world can be seen as the effort to answer the questions that these three original thinkers had posed. M’Lennan, as Frazer himself phrased it in his introduction to his four-volume study of Totemism and Exogamy in 1910, ‘put the right questions’ 1 in attempting to understand the relation between exogamy and totemism; Robertson Smith – whom Frazer describes in the same preface as ‘his revered friend’ – provided a historical and comparative methodology in the study of the ancient sources of religion, and Ward provided a model of the development of the mind which could underpin Frazer’s historical assumptions about the nature of humanity’s social evolution. Ward attempted to combine the British tradition of associationist psychology stemming from Hume with the neo-Kantianism and Hegelianism that had been introduced into British thought in the nineteenth century largely by Scottish thinkers and philosophers from Carlyle and Hamilton to Caird and Hutchison Stirling. The conception of the mind offered by the associationists – in which all knowledge derives from the senses – was historicised to produce a conception of humanity as a whole as being like the individual mind as presented by the associationists. Thus, all knowledge originally derives from the senses and the associations that the mind forms from its original sensations; over time, however, these become acculturated and passed on from generation to generation in such as way that they are, for the modern individual, as unavoidable as Kantian categories, forming the conceptual framework within which we necessarily see the world. As Ward puts it in his article in the Encyclopedia Britannica,

  What was experienced in the past has become instinct in the present. The descendant has not consciousness of his ancestors’ failures when performing by ‘an untaught ability’ what they slowly and painfully found out. But if we are to attempt to follow the genesis of mind from its earliest dawn it is the primary experience rather than the eventual instinct that we have first of all to keep in view. To this end, then, it is proposed to assume that we are dealing with one individual which continuously advanced from the beginning of psychical life, and not with a series of individuals of which all save the first have inherited certain capacities from its progenitors. The life-history of such an imaginary individual, that is to say, would correspond with … all that could be called evolution or development, in a certain typical series of individuals each of whom advanced a certain stage in mental differentiation. 1

  For Frazer, too, the study of the primitive mind was the study of those acquired categories by which, generation upon generation, the world comes to be understood. Underlying his analysis was the assumption, shared with his great predecessors of the Scottish Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, that human history passed through fixed stages, and that ‘all the civilised races of mankind have at some time passed through the stage of savagery’, 2 so that the Australian aborigines represent not a special group of people in a particular place but people who ‘at the end of the nineteenth century, still think the thoughts and retain the habits of primeval man’ and from whom we can acquire an understanding of the ‘seeds of most of the institutions on which we pride ourselves’. 3 The ‘conjectural history’ of the eighteenth century thus becomes the conjectural anthropology of the nineteenth; where Hume or Adam Smith sought to understand the processes of history, Frazer uses the same techniques to try to understand what preceded the beginnings of history as we know it.

  In analysing the workings of the primitive mind, however, Frazer relied, as Ward suggested, on the basic elements of psychical experience, which both understood as the processes of association as defined by Hume. For Frazer, as for Hume, it is ‘regularity in the succession of phenomena’ alone which ‘breeds in our mind the conception of a cause’ and, ‘in the last analysis cause is simply invariable sequence’. 1 In the early stages of human experience, however, it is impossible to know what constitutes ‘invariable sequence’ and Frazer attributes all of the power of magic and all of the mythic structures that go with it to the misapplication of Hume’s principles of association: the associations based on ‘resemblance’ and ‘contiguity’ are taken, in the primitive mind, to be the same as those of causation, and thus there arises the belief in ‘homeopathic magic’ – in which things affect each other because they are similar – and in ‘contagious magic’ – in which things transfer qualities as a result of contact. The history of humanity, in other words, is the history of a vast and often terrifying organisation of mistaken conceptions about the nature of causation: in Psyche’s Task, published in 1910, Frazer tried to show how the mistaken causalities of savagery might have assisted ‘at certain stages of evolution’ the development of ‘some social institutions which we all, or most of us, believe to be beneficial’ despite the fact that they ‘have partially rested on a basis of superstition’. 2 Significantly, it is a very short book, only eighty-one pages, compared with the six thousand pages into which The Golden Bough had grown by its third edition, published between 1911 and 1915, or the four volumes of Totemism and Exogamy, published in 1910. However hard he might occasionally have tried to conceive of the material he was analysing as beneficial to humanity, he saw in it primarily ‘an unmitigated evil, false in itself and pernicious in its consequences’ which ‘has sacrificed countless lives, wasted untold treasures, embroiled nations, severed friends, parted husbands and wives, parents and children, putting swords, and worse than swords between them’. 3 As much as his great predecessor, Hume, on whose psychology he relied, Frazer was appalled by the superstition he spent his life charting, because, ‘not content with persecuting the living it has pursued the dead into the grave and beyond it, gloating over the horrors which its foul imagination has conjured up to appal and torture the survivors.’ 1

  Frazer’s ever-expanding task of both recounting and accounting for the structures of superstition in magic and religion, was undertaken with the purpose of exposing it to the strictures of reason – not for nothing has Alasdair MacIntyre described those associated with the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica as a ‘second Scottish enlightenment’. But just as in the first Scottish enlightenment, the effort to apply reason to the workings of the human mind revealed just how much of its workings were, in fact, irrational, so too in the second. Frazer found in primitive magic a mistaken application of the same logic that actually underlies modern science so that magic, like science, assumes ‘a certain established order of nature on which [man] can surely count, and which he can manipulate to his own ends’. 2 The failure of nature to conform to the magical account of it, however, leads not to the evolution of science but to its replacement with the even more deceptive structures of religion: ‘When he discovers his mistake, when he recognises sadly that both the order of nature which he had assumed and the control which he had believed himself to exercise over it were purely imaginary’, man ‘throws himself humbly on the mercy of certain great invisible beings behind the veil of nature, to whom he now ascribes all those far-reaching powers which he once arrogated to himself’. 3 Science is, as it were, the recovery of the power of magic but a recovery based on ‘real’
rather than imaginary causation; or, as Frazer sceptically predicts at the conclusion of the 1922 edition of The Golden Bough, science itself may be discovered to be simply another error, and an error which may be of benefit to us since the world that science offers us is a bleak and painful one compared to the riches of the magical world:

  The dreams of magic may one day be the waking realities of science. But a dark shadow lies athwart the far end of this fair prospect. For however vast the increase in knowledge and of power which the future may have in store for man, he can scarcely hope to stay the sweep of those great forces which seem to be making silently but relentlessly for the destruction of all this starry universe in which our earth swims as a speck or mote … Yet the philosopher who trembles at the idea of such distant catastrophes may console himself by reflecting that these gloomy apprehensions, like the earth and sun themselves, are only parts of that unsubstantial world which thought has conjured up out of the void, and that the phantoms which the subtle enchantress has evoked today she may ban tomorrow. They too, like so much that to common eyes seems solid, may melt into air, into thin air. 1

  The vast design of The Golden Bough itself may be, for Frazer, no more than the phantom outcome of the power of that subtle enchantress, the imagination.

  In this Frazer was, perhaps, accurately predicting the fate of his own work, for it is precisely for its imaginative rather than its scientific value that The Golden Bough has survived: Frazer’s theories of totemism, his conceptions of magic, his explanations of primitive ritual have largely been superseded – indeed, Frazer changed his mind about them several times between the original publication of The Gold en Bough in 1890 and the Afterword published in 1936. What remains is the powerful evocation of that ‘tragic chronicle of human error and folly’ 2 presented in a stately, elegant prose which holds at an ironic distance all the terrible material with which it has to engage. The opening of The Golden Bough – and many readers may not have progressed much past the opening – was constructed not as the prologue to an intellectual analysis of ancient myth but as a dramatic encounter between modern art and the ancient past:

  Who does not know Turner’s picture of the Golden Bough? The scene, suffused with the golden glow of imagination in which the divine mind of Turner steeped and transfigured even the fairest natural landscape, is a dream-like vision of the little woodland lake of Nemi – ‘Diana’s Mirror’, as it was called by the ancients. 1

  This transfigured landscape, however, is, like civilisation itself in Frazer’s conception, haunted by an apparently inexplicable past:

  In antiquity this sylvan landscape was the scene of a strange and recurring tragedy … In this sacred grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day, and probably far into the night, a grim figure might be seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he kept peering warily about him as if at every instant he expected to be set upon by an enemy. He was a priest and a murderer; and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. 2

  The dramatic opening of The Golden Bough reveals its real credentials – it is a worldwide murder mystery, an enormous investigation aimed at explaining this apparently inexplicable ritual and so revealing the fundamental order of humanity’s progress towards civilisation, in which will be unveiled the ‘essential similarity with which, under many superficial differences, the human mind has elaborated its first crude philosophy of life’. 3 At the heart of the mystery is the combination of political and spiritual leadership in primitive kingship, a combination that requires the king to be the conduit between the supernatural and the natural worlds. When his powers fail, however, either because he is being asked to achieve supernatural ends which are impossible, or because of the decline of his natural powers, such kings have to be ritually sacrificed in order that the connection between the natural and the supernatural can be re-established. That the central events of the Christian story represent a late and spiritualised repetition of these primitive ritual sacrifices was a topic on which Frazer remained delicately unassertive. His own family were members of the Free Church and a grand-uncle, Ninian Bannatyne, was among the most prominent of those who had left the established Kirk in 1843 for an uncertain but righteous future. It is part of the delicacy of Frazer’s irony that The Golden Bough could be taken by many as a justification of religion: my own copy of the 1922 edition is inscribed as ‘Presented to Mr Harold E. Berry by the Officers and Teachers of the Oaklands Congregational Sunday School as a small mark of appreciation of his services as a teacher.’ Though Robertson Smith had hoped to prove that religion was an essential and beneficial part of the evolution of humanity, for Frazer himself the fruit of that bough was the bitter awareness of the inevitable falsities upon which religion was based. While claiming that the process by which the multitudinous gods of animism were turned into the single God of the Judaeo–Christian religion is like the process of simplification by which science develops, Frazer’s irony underscores the extent to which, in religion, this represents a desperate attempt to sustain a role for the supernatural in an increasingly naturalistic universe: ‘But as time went on, and the uniformity of nature and the immutability of natural law were recognized and firmly established by every advance of science, it was found necessary, or advisable, to relieve the deity of his multifarious duties as the immediate agent of every event in the natural world, and to promote him, if I may say so, to a higher sphere in the supernatural world, as the architect or creator of the universe’. 1 The parentheses – ‘or advisable’, ‘if I may say so’ – turn the development of religion from a God-centred to a human-centred project, but without committing Frazer to publicly or specifically challenging its reality.

  Nonetheless, for Frazer, the religion in which he was brought up remained in some sense the justification of his enterprise, even if the enterprise could not avoid reducing the justification of religion, and to the end he recorded how ‘the sound of Sabbath bells, even in a foreign land still touches a deep chord in my heart’; 2 and it is those bells which peal over the final paragraphs of The Golden Bough: ‘Nemi’s woods are still green, and as the sunset fades above them in the west, there comes to us, borne on the well of the wind, the sound of the church bells of Aricia ringing the Angelus. Ave Maria! Sweet and solemn they chime out from the distant town and die lingeringly away across the wide Campagnan marches. Le rot est mort, vive le roi! Ave Maria!’. 3 The dead kings of past religions and magical rites live on, lingeringly, in Frazer’s regal prose.

  Frazer himself lived in Cambridge from 1874 till his death in 1941, but the project of The Golden Bough, like Frazer’s own imagination, was rooted in the Scotland whose religious controversies of the 1840s put belief in religion to tests both practical – in the establishment of the Free Church – and intellectual, in attempting to harmonise biblical Christianity with evolutionary conceptions of human history. The methods of Frazer’s analysis, the psychology which it assumed, and the conception of history which it developed, were all rooted in the previous hundred years of Scottish intellectual life. In particular it was rooted in the intellectual environment of Glasgow University in the 1860s and 70s, where that Scottish tradition was being defended by John Veitch (who believed that ‘we must have Psychology – that is the study of consciousness in its widest sphere – before we can have Metaphysics’) 1 and being transformed by Edward Caird, the leading Kantian among British philosophers. 2 Frazer’s combination of classical culture – he attributed his enthusiasm for the classics to George Gilbert Ramsay, Professor of Humanity at Glasgow – with sufficient philosophical and psychological learning to allow him to seek the most general explanations of the phenomena he was studying is another testimony to the powerful influence of the Scottish ‘generalist’ tradition in education in the nineteenth century.

  In this edition of Frazer’s writings, I have included the first edition rather than the final edition of The Golden Bough. T
he latter, in its 1922 abridged edition, is widely available and, indeed, is available on the Internet in electronic form. The first edition, however, is the one which made Frazer famous and in its brimming enthusiasm for the new discoveries that Frazer believed himself to be making was the one which had a major impact on the generation of writers coming to maturity in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth. I doubt if many ploughed through the twelve-volume edition when it started to appear in 1911, though they may, like T. S. Eliot, have consulted particular sections. To set that startling first edition in context, however, I have included Frazer’s two extended essays in anthropological analysis which framed the writing of The Golden Bough itself, his essay on ‘Totemism’, published in 1887, and which was an extended version of his Encyclopedia Britannica contribution, and ‘The Origin of Totemism’, which appeared in the Fortnightly Review in 1899. (Both were included in the four-volume Totemism and Exogamy in 1910.) Also included is Frazer’s inaugural lecture at the University of Liverpool, ‘The Scope of Anthropology’, which gives an overview of his understanding of the development of social anthropology, and the first of the Gifford lectures which he delivered in the University of Edinburgh in 1924 and 1925, and which were published as The Worship of Nature in 1926. This introductory lecture provides Frazer’s most mature account of the theories that underlie his conceptions of magic and religion. Frazer’s career was one of enormous and dedicated effort to ascertain the truth of the human past. What he produced contributed significantly to the development of the discipline of social anthropology but it is perhaps the mark of his real achievement that his work, however outdated as anthropology, remains one of the great pieces of writing in nineteenth-century prose.