The Golden Bough: a Study in Magic and Religion [Paperback]

Originally, Frazer sought to explain the strange custom at an Italian sacred grove near the city of Aricia. He wanted to know why it was custom there for a priest of Diana to continually guard a sacred tree with his life. Why was it required that this pagan priest murder anyone who dares to break a branch from the tree & why were so many willing to risk their lives to do so? What power did this broken branch have that made it a symbol of the priests own coming death? Why could the priest only be relieved of his position by being ritually murdered & who in their right mind would strive to take his place?

What Frazer discovered in his search for answers went well beyond what he expected to find. He very quickly found himself surrounded by ancient pagan beliefs & magic rituals that were as old as mankind & just as widespread. He slowly reveals to us, by way of hundreds of examples, that ancient or primitive man was bound up in a never ending web of taboos & restrictions that regulated his existence here on earth. Every move, spoken word or even thought could swing the powers of the divine for or against pagan man. Every action was bound by religious code & any mistake could invoke supernatural retribution. The entire world, it seemed, was a reflection of the mystic other world that pagan man worshipped & everything here was symbolic of something there.

While studying this idea Frazer covers many other perplexing questions about culture & belief that have affected our lives. For example, he explains the origins of many of our holidays. He reveals the original symbolism & meaning of the Christmas tree & mistletoe & tells us what they represent. He explains the pagan origins of Halloween & why it's necessary to placate the spirits who visit your home that night. He solves the question of why Easter isn't a fixed holiday but is instead linked to the Spring Equinox & just what colored eggs have to do with anything. In short he covers just about every known superstition or tradition & relates it back to it's pagan beliefs.

What emerges from this collection of superstition & folktales isn't a chaotic mess of mumbo-jumbo but is instead a fully expounded religious system. Frazer shows again & again that these traditional customs & continuations of ancient rites are the basis for a religious system pre-dating any of our own. We find that in this system man can not stand apart from nature or the world. Nor can he commit any action without it's usual equal but opposite reaction. Eventually, we learn of the powerful but frightening association between a king's fertility & his lands well-being. Lastly, we learn that it's not always "good to be king" & just what sort of horrible price one must pay to be "king for a day".

But more than all of this Frazer is commenting on our own times & our own beliefs. "The Golden Bough" isn't simply about ancient pagan religious ideas for their own sake. The book provides & explains these ideas so we can see how they are still in operation even today. Primitive pagan beliefs & symbolism are with us daily, besides the obvious Christmas tree & Easter eggs. Behind his exhaustive examples & explanations of mystic or secret magic rituals Frazer is actually commenting on our own Judeo-Christian religions. A careful reading between the lines reveals what Frazer was afraid to state bluntly in 1890. That idea is that all religions, even our own, are based on the same basic pagan ideas of "sympathetic" & "contagious" magic. Despite advancements in science & knowledge & even despite spiritual advancements in religion & philosophy, we're still trying to comprehend the divine with the same tools our ancestors used thousands of years ago.

Of course, the scientific, objective study of religion tends to turn you into an atheist. I've noticed a lot of skeptical books about religion are linked to this one. If you read the book, you may come to the conclusion that Christ was just a representive of god sacrificed for the benefit of humanity, just like all the other representatives of god that were sacrificed to have good crops. Abundant life replaces an abundant harvest in this case.

Frazer doesn't talk much about biblical "myths" much and not at all about Christ, but one can draw inferences from his work about certain passages in the Bible such as eating the body and blood of Christ during communion. Apparently, sacrificing and eating the body and blood of a representative of a god is an old pagan practice that the Biblical story has much in common with. Or the death and resurrection of a god is old pagan belief that Bible has much in common with as well. The sacrificing an offering for the sins of the people was also practiced long before Christ sacrificed himself for sins. One gets the impression that religion is just superstition in which primitive people tried to control an unpredictable environment with certain rituals to ensure a good harvest or to get rid of disease.

One could say that Christ as God sacrificed himself once and for all in such a way that people would understand what he was doing; he sacrificed himself using their cultural understanding of religion. Such an explanation would help keep your faith, if you wanted to keep it. But I can see why objective, scientific, rational, non-mystical types would love this book because it shows that "thank god" the best minds don't believe in old superstitions about god anymore, such as human sacrifice for better crops.

James Frazer is not exactly a cultural relativist so he has no problem with calling certain societies savage or primitive and his own society civilized and more advanced, although he admits its primitive past. I am agreement with his assumptions, so that labelling didn't bother me most of the time.

This is an easily read scholarly work that is really long and presents examples of our primitive past before the scientific method was developed and saved us all from irrational thinking. I can see why people of like mind to Frazer's would shudder at thought of a revival of religion, to them religion is just irrational superstition.

I found particularly interesting Frazer's coverage of kings who were treated as gods on earth and how restrictive their lives were. If people thought they could no longer deliver good health and crops to the people, or if they thought he was past his prime, or if he refused to obey certain rules and rituals, they would kill their useless god and get another.