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J. G. FRAZER — THE GOLDEN BOUGH


We tend to feel disturbed by religion. We’d like to be respectful but so many of the ideas sound entirely bizarre and impossible. We don’t want to be mean to friends, relatives, or strangers who are devout but how can we make sense of their apparent devotion to absurdities? The Golden Bough is the book to help us, for it explains how a conviction can be at once empirically false and yet profoundly meaningful and moving.  Frazer was born in Glasgow in 1854; he was a spectacularly diligent student, winning a scholarship to Cambridge and then a Fellowship at Trinity, then the most prestigious and intellectual of the many colleges that make up the University.  Initially published in two-volumes in 1890, Fraser kept adding to the text and by 1915 it had grown into an enormous twelve volume set. It was the first very widely read study of myth and anthropology.  Frazer’s interest is in shared myths: he’s struck by how, across time and space, different societies have invented similar stories for themselves. There is the myth of ‘the chosen one’ which the title of the book obscurely alludes to. It refers to a tree, in ancient Roman stories, from which only one, divinely appointed person is able to pluck a wonderful branch, made of gold. In Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama is revealed by fate, not selected by human competition. Likewise, In English myth there was supposed to be a sword, stuck in a stone and only one person — the rightful King — could pull it out. And, in a modern version, in the Harry Potter stories, Harry is frequently named as ‘the chosen one.’  For Frazer, this commonality suggests that it is the structure of the human mind that prompts such diverse communities to latch onto the same ideas. The ideas might not be true, but they are clearly important. We can critique them as unscientific but we can’t dismiss them as humanly worthless.  At the time of writing England was officially a Christian country and Frazer’s most controversial argument was that Jesus, the God who sacrifices himself and is then resurrected or reborn, is a standard figure. The early Mesopotamian god, Dumuzid is dragged by demons into the realm of the dead, but is eventually released, thus returning to the world of the living. In Egyptian myth, Osiris — the god of fertility — is killed and dismembered by his brother Set, the God of storms and violence. But the fragments of Osiris are put back together by the maternal goddess, Isis. All such stories, Frazer suggests, are retellings of a more ancient myth concerning the sun. The sun, which feeds all life, ‘dies’ in the Autumn and is ‘reborn’ in the spring. Jesus fits a pattern, but it’s a pattern that humans seem to need.  The religious may be empirically wrong in their beliefs, Frazer’s book hints to us, but they are participating in the great collective and historical adventure of the human mind. 

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