Chapter no 2

INTRODUCTION

I

FEW books have been bought by so many as The Golden Bough. Few have been perused so perfunctorily, or been so blithely misunderstood. It is one of the great classics of the world, a foundation stone of the modern sensibility, and yet we do not know it. We do not like to read our great books, yet they read us, every day of our lives. It is not we who have made the literature of the twentieth century. It is the literature that has made us. If we wish to know ourselves better, it is to the literature that we must turn.

Our grandparents, in some ways more diligent readers than ourselves, had a different problem. For them, from the very beginning, Frazer’s book possessed a shady reputation. ‘If it’s anything like what you make it out to be, it’s neither a safe nor a proper book to have knocking about here.’ So the head librarian to the young Sean O’Casey, who in a moment of adolescent curiosity had requested it in Dublin. In its time The Golden Bough was the sort of book to read beneath the bed-sheets by the light of a torch. When the first edition appeared in 1890, a little frisson seems to have gone round the literary world. People sent one another letters, phrased in an urgent whisper. The speed and extremity of this reaction is even now not surprising. For The Golden Bough is a dangerous book which retains its ability to disconcert. As then, so now, it is a work whose essence lies in its challenge to received cultural attitudes. Authors who place such a challenge are seldom likely to find uncritical favour amongst any readership. If the status quo is conservative, they are called liberals. If it fancies itself as liberal, they are called reactionaries. The effect of such gratuitous labelling is, however, often to tempt readers less easily gulled to read the forbidden text.

One of Frazer’s subjects in this book is that strange phenomenon, well known to Victorian society but named after an obscure Tongalese custom, called a taboo. Frazer was interested in this subject, amongst other reasons, because he was aware that books are often taboo, just as words and even

thoughts sometimes are. He was also well aware that in certain companies religion is a tabooed subject, either amongst those who take their religion for granted or else those who dismiss it too lightly. Frazer was neither.

Instead he was a man deeply fascinated by religion, who could not bring himself to subscribe to any doctrinal beliefs. In the late nineteenth century such people were often called free-thinkers. For Frazer the fittest response to such a dilemma was to shed light in obscure places: to investigate the sources of religion and, thereby, the root causes of taboo.

Taboos are fences around cultures, guide-posts to provinciality, definitions of belonging and of place. All of us hold such taboos dear because they inform us, whether through inclusion or else through exclusion, of who we are. Therefore no taboo is more sacrosanct than that which ensures our difference, and no idea more scarifying than the levelling notion of our kinship with those whose taboos are otherwise. Frazer knew this, and he knew the power of infringement. Victorian society was full of taboos that informed its members as to who they were. Christian society too was full of taboos reassuring its adherents that they were in possession of a unique and revealed faith. Victorians did not like to be told that there were other societies whose taboos were as rooted as their own, or that this taboo- building capacity was something that all human beings hold in common and which, by means of the very devices intended to enforce difference, render all men akin. Victorian Christians did not like to be told that other people have religions, that many of these religions are sacrifical. Nor did they relish being instructed that sacrifice could sometimes be explained as mere magic, or that magic might lie at the tap-root of much they themselves held dear. All of this Frazer implied. The equivalences set up between things so apparently unlike were taboos; to find them, in 1890 or thereabouts, you read The Golden Bough.

In the later twentieth century anthropology and criticism have become much obsessed by the idea of l’autre, the other. It was a concept which for Frazer was so obvious as to be of little real interest. In the late twentieth century we take our sameness for granted, and furtively probe for difference. The late Victorians by contrast took their otherness for granted, and probed forbidden areas of parity. Hence Frazer was much less interested in otherness than he was in sameness. It was a preoccupation that got him into trouble, since most Victorians were assured of their own otherness, and

were even quite proud of it. The notion that, to quote one of Frazer’s own formulations, all humans possessed an ‘essential similarity’, was at one level very threatening to the Victorian mind. Hence the notoriety of Frazer’s comparative study of culture and belief when first published in 1890. Hence the reaction of the head librarian to Sean O’Casey’s passionate request.

II

Frazer’s subject is the comparative study of culture, a subject which he knew about because he had deep cultural roots of his own and had investigated widely the cultural contexts of others. He was thus interested in the idea of bringing experience and investigation, life and reading, into the same discursive zone. To see how this became possible, we need to know something about him.

At the turn of the year of 1854 James George Frazer was born in a tiny flat in Brandon Place, Glasgow, a city to which he always remained devoted and where, a few streets away, his father practised as a pharmacist. New Year’s Day was thus always to be his birthday, a fact which may or may not have influenced his later assiduous speculations as to New Year’s rites in many lands, including Scotland, where he thought the feast must originally have fallen on 1 November, the beginning of the Celtic Year, Hallowe’en thus being the original New Year’s Eve on which ghosts and demons were driven out to ensure fair prosperity over the following few months. In the comfortable, pious household of the Frazers such primordial rites must, however, have seemed far distant. The father was industrious, punctilious, thrifty (he wrote a brief treatise on pens); the mother, Katherine Frazer, née Bogle, romantic, excessive, and given to ample dissertations upon her family history. The Bogles, she claimed, had had dealings with the royal House of Stewart. The surname Bogle too turns up with a fair amount of regularity in Caribbean history, since Robin Bogle, in the eighteenth century, had emigrated to the West Indies where he started a sugar plantation. One of his namesakes, a certain Moses Bogle, turns up later as a ringleader in the Morant Bay rising in Jamaica in 1865; combined with that other iconic name of Caribbean history, ‘L’Ouverture’, the name survived until recently as part-title of one of London’s most flourishing black presses. The Bogles were thus travellers: one of Robin’s brothers, George

Bogle, found his way to India where he so endeared himself to Warren Hastings that he was sent over the Himalayas where he visited the Teshu Lama, one of the first Englishmen ever to step on Tibetan soil. His account of this episode, reprinted in Frazer’s lifetime at the behest of the Frazer family, was one source for Frazer’s theory of the carrier or scapegoat; and an ornate necklace, a present from the Teshu Lama to his eighteenth-century ancestor, was kept as an heirloom in the house of one of Frazer’s numerous Bogle aunts.

Rumour of distant times and places thus ran through Frazer’s childhood home, together with more recent reminiscences of the part played by the family in Scottish ecclesiastical history. It was Frazer’s maternal uncle Ninian Bannatyne who, when Thomas Chalmers had stormed out of the Assembly of the Church of Scotland in Edinburgh in 1843 to form the so- called Free Church of Scotland, had stalked behind him as second in the column. Into the wilderness they had gone, sacrificing stipend and status, an example of moral courage and independence of mind that Frazer seems always to have held dear. The Reverend Bannatyne lived on in Old Cummock and as a boy Frazer used to visit him: he remembered him as frail, kindly, and precise and, jejune as Frazer must have been, this observation at close quarters of faith, and the consequences of faith, is something that he retained through later years when his sympathies ran riot away from the religion which as a boy he had known and cherished. In obedience to the tenets of the Free Church, the family were frugal, diligent in religious observance, but never morbid. Family prayers every evening, church several times on Sunday, a Sabbath rigorously maintained. Contrary to our current prejudices, such an upbringing was the opposite of oppressive. Fun of a rather rumbustious sort was always, apparently, breaking out. One of the most memorable photographs of the Young Frazer in Ackerman’s biography was taken at the family holiday home on the Gareloch above Glasgow, and shows him crawling out of an ivy-framed hole as if caught out in an amorous prank. A later photograph, taken at Cambridge, shows him looking Sherlock Holmes-like in a laboratory with a Watson-like scientist-friend who is pretending to drink acid out of a straw.

When covered in honours later in life, Frazer’s face assumed a somewhat solemn cast, but the humour is always there in his books. On rarer occasions it even broke out in his social life: he had a marvellous, almost invisible way of putting pretentious people down. In conversation this

irreverence and tact were often misunderstood by people of a more literal turn of mind. Frazer was never literal nor, despite a widespread impression to the contrary, was he ever dour.

Daniel Frazer’s business was sufficiently flourishing for James to be sent to several private schools before matriculating, according to the then widespread Scottish custom, at the local university, that is, at Glasgow. At school he received a thorough grounding in Latin and Greek, which stood him in good stead when he took to academic life. At the university he received an education much broader than he would have enjoyed south of the border, studying philosophy under John Veitch, Latin under George Gilbert Ramsay, and physics under William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin.

These studies set the foundations of his life’s work. The course-work in philosophy introduced him sequentially to the great figures of the Scottish epistemological tradition, with its marked grain of scepticism, most notably to David Hume, whose Treatise of Human Nature, with its investigation of the sources of human credulity, was to form the ground-plan of the treatment of human belief in The Golden Bough. Latin and Greek gave him access to a wide range of classical sources which he would later use to lend historical depth to his argument (indeed The Golden Bough itself begins with a classical problem). Science gave him methodology, clarity, and a basis in inductive logic which he would later use to great effect. Later nineteenth-century physics, tutored by Kelvin, Frazer’s own professor, was deeply pessimistic about the future in discernible ways, which Frazer too imbibed. A certain philosophical pessimism, a darkening of the clouds around the dying sun, infiltrates the fading moments of The Golden Bough.

This too Frazer learned from Kelvin and from Glasgow.

The family were inclined towards business, but Frazer wanted to be a scholar. In those days a degree in a Scottish university was not always deemed sufficient. Splendidly though Frazer had already been prepared, therefore, he was sent south of the border where it was felt desirable that he should attend one of the ancient English universities. Oxford recommended itself, and as a future anthropologist he might have learned much there: Oxford had Edward Burnett Tylor, the Quaker iconoclast whose Primitive Culture was to lure Frazer into the ethnographic fold. It had Friedrich Max Müller, whose theories as to the origins of language, much though Frazer came to dissent from them, clearly ran parallel to those he himself would

later propose as to the origins of culture. It was soon to have Andrew Lang, a fellow Scot much interested in folklore whose attitude to Frazer in later years wavered between adoring disciple-hood and petulant, irksome querulousness (Frazer, as always with his critics, forgave him). But Oxford also had the Tractarians and their offspring—Catholics or, worst still, Anglo-catholics—and Calvinist Daniel Frazer did not want any of it. So to Trinity, Cambridge, James went instead to apply himself assiduously to the classics—all of Herodotus in Greek, all of Virgil in Latin—until three-and- a-half years later he came out with his expected First, and a life of uncontroversial scholarship was his almost for the asking.

But Frazer seldom took the easy path, even if his early steps look conventional. The way to an academic career lay via a college fellowship.

Frazer duly set to work and produced a trim and witty account of Plato’s dialogues. While doing so he also took the train to London a few days a week and sat for his Bar examinations, probably to appease his father who must have been doubtful that his son could make a living from mere scholarship. But Frazer got his fellowship and thus stayed on, his mind a lumber-room of learning, his book-shelves groaning with volumes. (A few years later he had to be moved out of the Great Court because the weight of his accumulated erudition threatened literally to sink him through the floor into the set of rooms beneath. According to Lady Frazer, the floor was bending inwards like a sail.)

In this benign, traditional society Frazer lived as a resident fellow for twenty years until marriage obliged him to move out. He was a man who understood rules, and this partiality for convention, or for what sentimentally we might call tradition, seems to have equipped him splendidly to comprehend the conventions of other societies. He knew that rules are founded on rituals which in turn enshrine magical beliefs. Rules are held to be sacrosanct, not because people are stuffy, but because the beliefs they embody are essential to a society’s conception of man, the universe, and his place within it. Frazer believed, at one level quite passionately, that acts have consequences, and this was a conviction in which his subjects shadow him. If an aborigine stood on a hill in central Australia greeting the dawn with a lighted candle, this was because he was assured that the sun would more effectively rise as a consequence. And while we might think his concern naïve or absurd, our no-less ardent

attachment to other such customs obliges us at least to understand him. The world is founded on cause and effect. When a given cause arises, none of us can at that moment discern the consequences. Our shortsightedness, however, does not inhibit us from acting on assumptions founded on the most sanguine form of determinism. All actions based on calculation are, therefore, acts of faith.

All of this Frazer knew instinctively, but he needed a framework in which to say it. Initially, in the wake of his still-unpublished dissertation, he seems to have wanted to turn himself into a professional philosopher. There are philosophical jottings in various notebooks, interleaved with speculations as to early law to which Frazer had been introduced by the writings of Henry Maine and John Ferguson M’Lennan. There are also meditations on the origin of language. At one point he even seems to have been on the trail of an elementary form of semiological linguistics (‘Language’, he scribbled in pencil at the back of a hastily compiled bibliography headed ‘Books to read’, ‘is a system of signs’). But in Easter 1883, at a loss as to what to do for vacation, he accepted an invitation by the psychologist James Ward to accompany him on a walking tour of Spain, where amongst other things Ward lent him a copy of Tylor’s Primitive Culture. The effect was instantaneous. Tylor’s thematic account of superstitions the world over, his conviction that much in modern behaviour consists of a series of survivals from ages gone by, his explicit and sceptical account of the theology of the Mass as a sort of latter-day magic, gripped Frazer from the very beginning. On his return to Cambridge he set about more systematic reading, still searching for a theme. That autumn another vital meeting occurred, with William Robertson Smith, Lord’s Almoner’s Reader in Arabic, who had recently been expelled from his Old Testament Chair at the Free Church Academy in Aberdeen for his advocacy of critical methods in studying the Bible and, without a college to call his own, was putting up at Trinity until a fellowship became available elsewhere. Smith had just been appointed editor of the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica for which he commissioned some classical contributions from Frazer, together with two seminal articles on ‘Totem’ and ‘Taboo’. Both articles were eventually to lead to books: ‘Totem’ to the tiny Totemism of 1887, later expanded into the vast Totemism and Exogamy in 1910; ‘Taboo’

to The Golden Bough.

III

It was the second of these books that Frazer started to write in 1889. But before he did so there was much preparation to be done. Frazer had already steeped himself in the classics and had imbibed the historical bases of law, but this was not enough. From the beginning he seems to have had in mind a single study which would incorporate the whole of man’s early culture and beliefs, set out not, as Tylor had done it, thematically, but in the form of a narrative. He therefore needed two things: a wide framework of reference in cultures, and a nexus on which to hang it. With the first of these in mind he sat down to read through as many accounts as he could of non-western societies: accounts in ethnographic journals, in the memoirs of colonial administrators, the observations of missionaries. In 1887 he had the idea of amplifying these by sending out a questionnaire to workers in the field requesting information on certain specified matters: marriage customs, rules of succession, myth and ritual. The answers were instructive, and by means of this method Frazer formed a close professional association with many workers in the field, some of whom, like Canon Roscoe in Uganda and Baldwin Spencer in Australia, would have a quite crucial effect upon his thinking.

But the nexus was still lacking. At one stage taboos concerning various kinds of marriage or sexual union seem to have been a likely common strand, but soon these speculations dissolved to be replaced by other and more promising ones until, in the March of 1889, the inspirational and galvanic moment occurred when The Golden Bough in its essence lay before his mind.

The elements that cohered to form the germ of the work were various.

In the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid Aeneas, after fleeing from Troy, is on his way to Italy where he will found the dynasty of kings that will rule the city of Rome. On the way, however, his father Anchises dies, and Aeneas pays a visit to the grotto of the Sybil at Cumae on what is now the Bay of Naples to ask whether she will gain him admittance to the Underworld to visit him. The Sybil is doubtful: few, she says, have been that way and lived to tell the tale but, if he is determined, then he must take some manner of protection with him. There then follows a passage which in William Pitt’s translation of 1743 runs thus:

 But since you long to pass the realms beneath,

The dreadful realms of darkness and of death,

Twice the dire Stygian stream to measure o’er,

And twice the black tartarean gulf explore:

First, take my counsel, then securely go;

A mighty tree, that bears a golden bough,

Grows in a vale surrounded by a grove,

And sacred to the queen of Stygian Jove.

Her nether world no mortals can behold,

Till from the bole they strip the blooming gold.

(Aeneid, vi. 133–9)

It was these lines, and in this translation, that had come to the attention of Turner in 1834, and around them he had composed a picture which stands as a frontispiece to Frazer’s book. It depicts the legendary Lake Avernus at the mouth of the underworld. In the middleground the mythical Shades dance in a circle. Beyond stretches the immemorial Italian landscape crested by pines, while at the very last moment Turner added the Sybil herself in the foreground holding up the bough. She seems to have been something of an afterthought, since several years after the picture was acquired its owner found, to his dismay, that she was coming away from the canvas, having been hastily painted on paper and then simply stuck on to the surface. When Turner heard of it he rushed round and painted her in again where still she stands, a sickle in her right hand, the eponymous bough in her left.

What manner of branch Virgil’s bough was we can never be sure. Frazer thought it was mistletoe, with which Virgil compares it, but in that case the simile is circular. But Frazer’s interpretation of the picture and of the Virgil passage on which it is based is finally indebted less to botanical identification than to another passage in classical literature which Turner did not know. In the fourth century AD, commenting on Virgil’s lines, the scholar Servius had written:

 Those who write about the mysteries of Prosperine hold this branch

to be mystical, but rumour states otherwise: that after killing the

King Thoas in Taurica, Orestes … fled with his sister Iphigenia, and

near Aricia re-established the effigy of Diana, in whose temple the

rite was transformed. There was a certain tree whose branch none

might disturb, except that a prerogative was granted to runaway

slaves that whosoever broke this branch might challenge the fugitive

priest to single combat, and so become priest himself in

commemoration of the original flight.

Now this passage was a lot odder. Iphigenia had been transported to Taurica (the present-day Crimea) after her father Agamemnon had supposedly caused her to be sacrificed so as to secure fair sailing for the Trojan expedition. Later, her brother Orestes had taken refuge there after killing his mother Clytemnestra who had murdered his father Agamemnon in revenge for Iphigenia’s death. All this was well known, but that the destination of the flight was Aricia, a small town about twelve miles from Rome along the Appian Way, that they had set up there an effigy of Diana (whose priestess, in Taurica, Iphigenia had become), and that the rule of succession to the priesthood of the newly established cult proceeded in the manner described, was bizarre in the extreme, and almost equally suggestive.

It was on to this passage that Frazer latched in 1889, all the more eagerly because Aricia had recently been in the news. In 1885 the British ambassador to Rome, a keen amateur archaeologist, had excavated a site about five miles south-east of Aricia at the foot of an escarpment beneath the tiny town of Nemi (see map). The dig had confirmed the connection with Diana, various statuettes of whom were found; it had discovered, however, no evidence of a priest or of the somewhat grisly rite of succession which Servius expounds. Various other factors might well contribute to incredulity on that score. Whoever had heard of a kingship confined to slaves and runaways? What kind of kingdom was it that could be focused on a tree?

 Nemi and its surrounding area, showing towns and peoples of the Latin

League.

Inset: location of the Temple of Diana. (After A. G. MacCormick)

But that the cult had existed Frazer could be sure. In 1889 he had been perusing the first book of the travels of Pausanias, a doctor from Asia Minor who is one of our main informants on the ancient Greek sites, and whose work he was thinking of translating and editing. At one point Pausanias visits the sanctuary of Aesculapius, the Greek god of medicine, at Epidaurus in the Peloponnese. Various monuments stood in the shrine, one of which was of especial interest:

Apart from the others stands an ancient tablet with an inscription stating that Hippolytus dedicated twenty horses to the god. The people of Aricia tell a tale which agrees with the inscription on this tablet. They say that Hippolytus, done to death by the curses of Theseus, was raised from the dead by Aesculapius, and that being come to life again, he refused to forgive his father, and disregarding his entreaties went to Aricia in Italy.

There he reigned and there he dedicated to Artemis a precinct, where down to my time the priesthood of the goddess is the prize of victory in a single combat. The competition is not open to free men, but only slaves who have

run away from their masters.

(Pausanias, ii. 27. 4) Here, if you like, was confirmation of the rite, but what caused Frazer to sit up and pay attention was the phrase ‘down to my time’. Pausanias was writing in the second century AD. If what he said was true it was startling confirmation that the cult itself was no mere myth, even if Hippolytus, the focus of the above passage, was just that. Hippolytus is relevant because at some level the cult itself seems to have involved horses, which feature in his name (from Greek hippos), and by which he was torn to pieces. One of the quaintest features of the shrine at Nemi was that horses for some reason were excluded from it, but that the shrine existed Frazer could be sure. With Pausanias’s help he could also be sure that, no mere atavistic memory, it had flourished right through the classical period, through the reigns of Julius Caesar and Caligula, both of whom watered there, and within earshot of the villas of the polite patricians who, in the most affluent days of the empire, flocked there to disport themselves on the shores of Lake Nemi.

All of this might seem a footnote to classical literature, and a pretty minor one at that, but it was not for this reason that Frazer valued it. In March of 1889 he was scouring the tightly packed volumes of John Pinkerton’s General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels (1808–14), when he came upon a reference to the kingdom of Malabar in southern India. There, it seemed, according to Alexander Hamilton who visited Malabar in the eighteenth century, the raja or king had previously been obliged to step down every twelve years, until the rite of succession had been commuted to a combat at arms in which, defended by his bodyguards, the king was theoretically forced to defend his kingdom against all comers. Here was a rite rather like the Arician one, but a great

deal more recent. Did the Arician rite and the Malabar one draw on similar habits of mind? If so, here was a platform on which Frazer could build up his structure concerning early societies, the way they organized the affairs, and the philosophies of life that sustained them.

It is important to realize, however, that Frazer’s subject is no more southern India than it is ancient Rome. Both of these simply exist for him as exempla of something much broader and deeper: the intellectual principles upon which early men conducted their corporate lives. Frazer’s work might seem to be a compendium of ritual and custom. In fact it is something very different: a book on the human mind and the connections habitually made by it. If Frazer had begun his research life as a philosopher, his migration to anthropology in 1883 was not as drastic as it may now seem. From studying the nature of human thought he had simply turned aside to examine its history. It was because the human mind, across a variety of cultures and times, and especially when trained upon the religious and the magical, showed certain constancies that generalization of the sort that fascinated Frazer became possible. It was to examine the refinements of such universal thought-processes, and their different ways of expressing themselves in a variety of places and periods, that he wrote his book.

IV

Before long he was sufficiently confident to approach a publisher. To George Macmillan, on 8 November 1889, he wrote:

I shall soon have completed a study in the history of primitive

religion … The resemblance of the savage customs and ideas to the

fundamental doctrines of Christianity is striking. But I make no

reference to this parallelism, leaving my readers to draw their own

conclusions, one way or another. (B. L. Add. Ms. 55134)

Macmillan accepted and the text, enough to fill two generously spaced volumes, was soon at the printers: R. & R. Clark of Edinburgh. Conscious of being on the trail of a book with some popular appeal, Frazer plied Macmillan with letters. No aspect of the book was to be left to chance: the

cover had to be green and carry an elegant Art Nouveau design based on the mistletoe motif; the typeface must be bold and clear; a reproduction of Turner’s painting was to be included as a frontispiece. Frazer was in a hurry; he wanted to go off to Greece to continue his work on Pausanias. So by March the proofs were read and dispatched and Frazer was off on a strenuous itinerary of walking, writing, and observing—his author’s copies had to be posted to Athens. Frazer had to come back to England before he found that he had written that unusual thing: a scholarly best-seller.

The success was not unprovided for. Frazer had wanted a book which the layman could read. He had an urgent theme, he expressed himself well, he raised far-reaching questions without first raising hackles; he caught the mood and curiosity of the hour. Besides, The Golden Bough was to some extent written like a pot-boiler or detective story. Like Conan-Doyle, he kept back the solution until the end. It was a kind of whodunnit: ‘I find it very difficult to summarize the gist of the book’, he wrote to Macmillan, ‘without disclosing what I may call the plot.’

This plot ran on two levels. It was first a disentanglement of the knotted skein around the ritual of Nemi, but it was much more than that: an exposition of a deeply embedded pattern of belief observable in many cultures at different periods of history. This ancient cosmology or metaphysic may be summarized thus. Each year nature dies. People too weaken and then expire. These events are connected, and the force that connects them is magic. Magicians are people who know about these processes; their usefulness is that they intervene. Sometimes the magicians themselves are kings, but in any case kings, in whom much of the energy of the community is invested, are able to orchestrate the process. But kings too sicken and die, and in so doing imperil the whole. There is a force of energy within them which, if diminished by illness or death, will diminish everyone along with it. The force, however, transcends them and is transferable from individual to individual. If, when the period of their weakness is upon them, kings can be forced to relinquish their power, it can then be handed on to a different human vessel who will ensure its survival.

Frazer scoured history for examples of kings who were obliged to relinquish their authority at the end of a fixed term or else to defend their power in some kind of trial of strength. An example of the latter was the priest of Nemi, with whom he begins his account, obliged to defend his

power against all comers. But he had other examples, some of the more promising of which came from India or Africa. Sometimes, it seemed to Frazer, the king went quietly; at other times he was, not surprisingly, reluctant and forced others to die in his stead in a kind of surrogate sacrifice. Sometimes (and this is where uncomfortable parallels with Christianity came in), the substitute was the king’s son. At others a buffoon or slave was selected who enjoyed the king’s privileges temporarily before his life was summarily snuffed out. At such times it was often convenient for this individual to double as a scapegoat (as Christ, it seemed to Frazer, was a scapegoat).

Later, the original purpose of the rite was entirely forgotten and men and women played out the role of sacrificial gods and goddesses with very little sense of what they were about. This was the stage of what, from the second edition of 1900 on, Frazer called religion as opposed to magic. Later still, death was converted into a ritual humiliation until at length the process, once so grisly, degenerated into a series of ossified and purposeless mumming plays, the folklore of the modern or industrial age. At the root of it all, still dimly discernible, lay a desire to master the forces of nature by controlling them, ensuring that the life force flowed from ruler to ruler, generation to generation.

Thus summarized, two things become obvious about Frazer’s storyline.

It is strongly dependent on a rather abstract notion of energy as an immanent force like electricity that somehow informs the universe and binds it together; it is thus dependent on seeing the whole human organism in terms of the science of, say, Faraday. It is also, unconnectedly, itself rather mystical and capable in its turn of provoking strong mystical feelings among readers who are often swept along by a suggestion of things half remembered and brought to life. How much of this Frazer intended is hard to say: had it been pointed out to him that the continuing success of his narrative one hundred years after its inception was due to half-buried intimations stemming from residual mysticism, it is not clear that he would have been pleased.

The potential for misunderstanding was present from the beginning, and in order to forestall it Frazer inserted into the second edition a triple scheme of evolutionary development intended to clear the mind. It was all, he now argued, a question of cultural phases. Men want, say, rain. They begin by

performing a rain-dance, which often does not work. This is the Age of Magic. Then, baulked of success, they do the next best thing and fall on their knees to pray. This is the Age of Religion. When the prayers do not work, they set about investigating the precise causes of the natural world, and on the basis of their new understanding attempt to alter things for the better. This is the Age of Science which, Frazer argued, we now inhabit.

Magic and science have this in common: that they are techniques of intervention, while religion is an abjuring of all responsibility in favour of the gods. The closeness of intent shared by magic and science should not, however, blind us to the fact that the second is informed while the first is not. All recourses to magic in later ages are relapses. Faced with such relapses, which indubitably occur, the proper attitude of science can only be to regard them as phenomena themselves fit for examination. To confuse the process by indulging the phenomena investigated, as contemporary occultists too often did, was, Frazer argued, both an adulteration of the scientific method and an anachronism. It was, to use a metaphor which he borrowed from Carlyle’s French Revolution, to tread upon a sheet of ice which too readily would give way, precipitating the trespasser into the lightless abysses beneath.

With these distinctions clear in our minds, it is possible to paraphrase Frazer’s argument. After a brief description of the shrine at Nemi and the rites associated with it, he proceeds to enunciate the grand principles upon which all magical (and later religious) principles are based. Having illustrated these principles, he then proceeds to show how the kingship is to be explained as the supremacy of those whose manipulation of magical practices is most impressive and conclusive. This leads him to a discussion of kingship in general and thence to the devices by which the power and kudos of the king is sustained. Of these the most important is a peculiar mystical charge surrounding the regal person operating rather like an alternating electrical current. This he calls ‘taboo’, a word whose meaning for Frazer is somewhat more complicated than that which we ascribe to it.

For Frazer, taboos were ways of insulating certain persons and activities from harmful social contact. Some of these persons and activities are deemed holy; others, abhorrent. Frazer’s point is that, in the mind of early man, these two states are not rigorously separated: thus the emperor of Japan was secluded from the world, but so were homicides. ‘Taboo’, like the Latin world sacer which Frazer regarded as a conceptual synomym for

it, therefore meant both sacred and profane. The ambiguity of the concept and the attitudes bred by it serve to explain much that follows.

Frazer’s account continues with a lengthy dissertation on the mortality of kings and human gods, contained, in the early editions of The Golden Bough, in one extended chapter. After considering the mortality of the gods, he turns to those special kinds of human god called kings, and illustrates how they do not simply die but are sometimes forced to relinquish their lives in order to safeguard the divine pulse within them, which is then transferred to their successors. Such practices are, strictly speaking, forms of magic, but Frazer next turns his attention to the deposits left by such practices in religious systems. Of these he has two main extended examples: the religious cults of the ancient Near East—of Phoenicia, Phrygia, and Egypt—and the religious myths of the ancient Greeks. He then turns to that peculiar kind of semi-divinity known as a scapegoat, and shows how individuals who in ancient communities are at intervals obliged to carry away the sins of the people often fuse with the divine essence as already perceived. Such orgies of cleansing were, Frazer thought, regular features of the ancient and non-western world; within recorded memory they had been embodied in annual Saturnalia celebrations such as may once have preceded the Christian Lent.

The reference to the magical foundations of Christian rites brings him within the vicinity of Christian theology. It is at this stage that, in the second edition of 1900, Frazer incorporated a large section preparatory to his climactic discussion of Jesus Christ as the ultimate scapegoat, a discussion later demoted to an appendix, then finally cut (see Section V below). In all versions of the work, however, Frazer continues with a dissertation on one particular dying god, the Norse deity Balder. According to the Icelandic sagas Balder was slain by a sprig of mistletoe, and then cremated on a flaming ship. He therefore serves as a pretext through which Frazer examines seasonal fires and finally the nature of the ‘Golden Bough’, the mistletoe, itself, with a discussion of which he closes.

V

Thus set out, Frazer’s thesis seems fairly self-contained, but there are doubts and ambiguities within it. From the very beginning, for example, he seems to have been genuinely tormented by the issue of religion. In a very early notebook, dating from about 1885, we find him worrying about that old chestnut, the relation between religion and morals. Why were the manners of any given age so often out of kilter with its declared beliefs?

Frazer found the answer to this question in a kind of ossification that set in to religious systems once their heyday was past. The theology of any given society represents a past age of social development; when men progress further, a disparity between belief and custom opens up, and reformers arise to bring them into line, by modifying the belief so as to reconcile it with the best of modern practice. When the religion is handed down by word of mouth (as it is in many non-literate societies and was, by and large, even among the Greeks and the Romans) this is easy because the force of written precedent will not weigh against them. When, as in India, the Arab world, or Christendom, the religion is enshrined in a book, the task is much more difficult because the opponents can always cite chapter and verse in support of their conservatism. This is the point which western society, Frazer believed, had reached in his own age, of which ‘conflicts between thought and religion … form so marked a feature’:

In our own age as the progress of knowledge has been immense, so the breach between religion and science has widened; hence the number of people who are seen to be busily employed in endeavouring to fill up this breach. Nor is it between religion and science alone that men are beginning to become conscious of the breach. Between religion (that is, of course, the book religion) and morality they begin to see a gulf opening. That this gulf should be narrower, in other words that the difference between should be less than the difference between religion and science is due to the fact that an advance in morals is necessarily subsequent to an advance in knowledge … Hence we see the disadvantages of a book religion.

(B. L. Add. Ms. 45, 442)

In any age, therefore, there were on the one hand rebels, those who tried to reform religion or else do away with it, and on the other integrationalists or consolidators who attempted to reconcile belief and practice by some less drastic method. It is to the first, revolutionary category that Frazer thought

of himself as belonging. All religions breed counter-religions; book- religions breed counter-books. The fossilized religion of the early Greeks had its answer in Socrates and through him the works of Plato; the fossilized religion of the early Hebrews, the pedantry of the Scribes and the Pharisees, had its answer in Christ, and through him the New Testament.

The book religion of his own day, Victorian Christianity in its various forms, also required a counter-book. There is a strong case for saying that this book, whether consciously or unconsciously, was The Golden Bough.

Frazer seems to have groped towards these possibilities somewhat timidly at first; and towards the end of his life the timidity well-nigh overwhelmed him. The 1890 edition of The Golden Bough, as Frazer’s letter to his publishers avows, is a cautious, though already a disturbing book. But in 1900 Frazer took his courage in both hands and produced what in effect and in structure was a sort of counter-Bible. The second edition hence begins where the first had begun: in an Edenic Grove with a tempter on the prowl; but proceeds upwards through a great arch until, at the climax to the second volume, ‘The Crucifixion of Christ’ is reached. Having demolished the orthodox theology on which the act of Christian atonement is based (or, what amounts to the same thing, demonstrated its equivalence to all other supposed acts of atonement), Frazer then proceeds with an elaboration of the motif until, in the closing paragraphs of the work, a sort of sceptical apocalypse is reached. In the third edition of 1906–15, this counter-Biblical typology grows still more ornate: so we have a Passover sequence; an Immaculate Conception sequence; a Nativity sequence; a Baptism sequence; a sequence on fires followed by a Resurrection sequence —all of which are embedded within the text. To identify them is part of the fun of reading.

But, having dealt his great blow, Frazer was then seized with panic. Had he gone too far? Was the disparagement of the uniqueness of the Christian revelation perhaps too bold? These nagging doubts were reinforced by an attack launched on his crucifixion theory by Andrew Lang in the pages of the Fortnightly Review. Hastily Frazer rethought his position and in 1913, when rewriting the section of his work that has to do with the atonement, transplanted ‘The Crucifixion of Christ’ to an apologetic appendix where it was admitted as being ‘in a high degree speculative and uncertain’. And in 1922, when collaborating with his wife on an abridgement of the work for

the wider reading public, he cut it out altogether, rendering the argument of the 1900 edition innocuous, its shape less than recognizable. Many of the other counter-Biblical episodes go as well. In The White Goddess (1956) it was Robert Graves’s contention that such cat-and-mousery is unworthy of critical scholarship, and a symptom of cowardice:

Sir James Frazer was able to keep his beautiful rooms at Trinity

College, Cambridge, until his death by carefully and methodically

sailing all round his dangerous subject, as if charting the coastline of

a forbidden island without actually committing himself to the

declaration that it existed. What he was saying-not-saying—was that

Christian legend, dogma and ritual are refinements of a great body

of primitive and even barbarous beliefs, and that almost the only

original element in Christianity is the personality of Jesus.

This indictment is over-flattering to Frazer’s college, the only stake in which he retained at the end of his life was a large room in which he kept his library. About the retention of ‘the personality of Jesus’ as the lone core of Christianity Graves was, however, more accurate; one of the texts constantly cited in Frazer’s early notebooks is Renan’s Vie de Jésus (1869) which for Frazer’s own generation had been as effective a counter-gospel as Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu (1835–6) had been for the previous generation of free-thinkers, such as George Eliot, who had translated it. But such counter- gospels require Old Testaments, Acts of the Apostles, Revelations to flesh them out if they are to attain the status of fully fledged counter-Bibles. If The Golden Bough is indeed that, then in the abridgement of 1922 the Frazers kept the frame but threw out the Gospel. In the present abridgement, it is retained.

VI

Hence in Frazer the quiet iconoclast we meet a spectacle quite common in the late Victorian period: a Protestant-inspired exegetical honesty turning against itself. Earlier in the century, and especially in Germany, a painstaking examination of Holy Writ had led to two results: a recognition of its textual instability and of the radical similarity between Judaeo-

Christian traditions and those of pagan religions. In Frazer’s work this enterprise is carried to its logical extreme, the Christian focus dissolving to give way to a cultural and moral relativism disorientating to those who take their certainties too seriously. That such relativism carried dangers Frazer cannot help but be aware; at times the plethora of example threatens to swamp the theme, but then Frazer draws back, gathers in his evidence, and take stock of the proceedings. The tension in the work between spiralling example and a centripetal tendency to argue an overwhelming case is something which The Golden Bough never quite resolves.

To later anthropologists it seemed perverse to separate magic and religion from other aspects of society, as if the myth and ritual and of a given people could somehow be set apart from their fishing skills or methods of exchange. To this generation, led by Frazer’s protégé Bronislaw Malinowski, it seemed that Frazer lacked a holistic appreciation, not of mankind but of individual, local cultures. The decline in Frazer’s reputation in professional circles since his death has much to do with this particular objection. But as the functionalist school of social anthropology itself falls astern we can perhaps see how its strictures, valid in their own terms, ignored the climate of receptivity to which books like The Golden Bough were addressed. Frazer’s readers were less interested in the ethnographic tabulation of the rites, customs, and economy of particular societies than they were in the broad trans-cultural sweep. For, whatever else we may think of them, late Victorians readers had hearty theoretical appetites.

Schooled in the historicism of their age, and in the comprehensive attempts to make sense of man’s social and mental development already proposed by scientific popularizers like Herbert Spencer and George Henry Lewes, their inclination was for vistas that would enable them to make sense of themselves as part of an unfolding scheme. And if Frazer cared neurotically about the details, few who read him were so fastidious. For his first readers Frazer offered the facilities not so much of a field camp as of a headquarters with an extensive and reliable network of communications. Frazer neither was, nor claimed to be, a first-hand observer: what he offered instead was a panorama of mankind’s mental development which stimulated the historical curiosity while opening up large views towards a horizon shrouded in mist, though amenable to the compass.

 The bearings of Frazer’s own compass, checked at regular intervals, were more complicated than they may now seem. The assumptions underlying The Golden Bough are, for example, both materialist and idealist: materialist in that the motivation behind all ritual, whether ‘magical’ or ‘religious’, is interpreted as a struggle for physical survival; idealist in that, in Frazer’s epistemology—derived from his academic upbringing in Scotland—thought is invariably seen as preceding practice, doctrine as preceding ritual. It is thus, with very uneven success, that Frazer strives to reconcile a Darwinian belief in life as a combat in which the fittest survive (and what else is the hand-to-hand duel at the lakeside shrine at Nemi but this?) with a Humean conviction that all belief, rational or otherwise, stems from associations of ideas abstracted within the mind. The fight at Nemi, and the analogies he records were, Frazer thought, no such abstractions, but historical events. But that the necessity for such events was based on the presence in the minds of the participants of philosophical tenets which, however befuddled, were capable of subsequent analysis is, finally, the very essence of his case.

His essential tenet, set out near to the beginning, is that human behaviour is based on the association of ideas, a phenomenon first identified by David Hartley and later classified by David Hume into three categories: association by contiguity (this is next to that); by resemblance (this is like that); and by cause and effect (this produces that). The ramifications of this Enlightenment view in the nineteenth century were widespread. For Frazer, who had imbibed this model in Scotland where an unbroken philosophical tradition stretched back to Hume, these divisions were the foundation of all magic which was either contagious (I cast a spell on something which pertains to you—your hair, for example, or your fingernails), or homoeopathic (I cast a spell on something which resembles you—a wax effigy or doll). Frazer spends some time establishing these types, which may to us appear too absolute. More recently, however, with an explicit acknowledgement to Frazer but little sense of the epistemological tradition that lies beyond him, an equivalent divide has been diagnosed in our use of language, which the linguist Roman Jakobson (who read The Golden Bough in German) has divided into functions of metonymy (calling attention to affinities of adjacency) and metaphor (articulating affinities of resemblance). That such a view should have found its way into modern semiotics is testimony to its resilience.

 Frazer’s is thus a book with strongly etched and well-attested premisses.

Much of the earlier part, covering a full two volumes of the great third edition, is devoted to outlining these, on which foundation the rest of the structure is reared. The pyramid that results is not so much amplificatory as rhetorical. On occasions one is even reminded of the advocate it was once Frazer’s intention to become. At the bar of the court he stands, his wig tight about him, his gown a little dowdy, mustering the evidence. Mankind, the rambling and devious historical species, is in the dock, and, a little stunned by the weight of exhibits though undeniably impressed by his forensic charm, sit the readers, held by that severe but subtly twinkling eye.

For Frazer, as for his readership, anthropology was meaningless unless it instructed one as to the general nature of the species anthropos or man.

The key to that understanding was the comparative method, which earlier in the century had already been used in the study of language and of law.

Some indication of the relevance it seemed to possess to the study of anthropos may be gleaned from Frazer’s synopsis of an introductory lecture on ‘The Scope and Method of Mental Anthropology’, delivered at Trinity College on 4 November 1921:

Anthropology a modern science. Physical Anthropology and Mental Anthropology. No absolutely primitive race known to us. Application of the Comparative Method to the study of lower races: analogy with comparative anatomy. Mental or social anthropology a science of origins … Importance of the study of uncivilized races for the early evolution of human thought.

The method is inductive. Necessity of the exact observation of living savages. Observation and comparison to be kept strictly apart and carried out simultaneously by different classes of workers.

Notice, first, that anthropology is defined as a scientific: as the carrying through into the accurate depiction of human society of that project of disinterested observation defined once and for all in the writings of Francis Bacon. Notice secondly the substitution for the (to us more familiar) term Social Anthropology of the highly revealing term Mental Anthropology.

For Frazer anthropology is the study of thought: not so much of what men now think (though that is not irrelevant to it) as the study of what men have thought, the stages through which the thinking process has passed. Just as it was, or had been, vital to the physical anthropologist to see human types

evolving each from each; just as it had become mandatory for the archaeologist to classify the deposits he dug up as belonging to the Stone, Iron, or Bronze ages; just as it had become conventional for the student of prehistory to regard all early societies as having passed through hunting, pastoral, and agricultural phases; so it behoved the ‘Mental Anthropologist’ to seek out equivalent phases in the history of human thought. Throughout the 1890s and beyond there was a fairly vigorous debate among students of early society as to what these stages might have been, and in what order they had occurred. By 1900 Frazer himself thought that he had identified the order of succession as magic, followed by religion, followed by science.

That such stages in the development of human thought corresponded to successive ages in the evolution of particular societies few at the time seem to have doubted; but equally the superimposition of these ages, like the superimposition of geological or archaeological strata, implied—as Tylor had argued—coexistence. Dig down wherever you are, and at some level or other the Age of Magic would be waiting for you. Such persistence into later ages of characteristics of earlier ones had been called by Tylor ‘survivals’, and it was to the survival into the classical or modern ages of phenomena characteristic of earlier ages of man that Frazer paid particular attention in The Golden Bough.

In order to hunt down such survivals it was sometimes necessary to travel far and wide but, as Frazer’s programme also strongly implies, the observation and the collation were distinct activities. There were thus ‘descriptive ethnologists’ and ‘comparative ethnologists’, the task of the former being to supply the latter with information to be interpreted or woven into a significant pattern. Some indication of the scope of each of these activities may be sought in an obituary notice which Frazer wrote after the death of one of his most diligent respondents: the naturalist Baldwin Spencer who, for twenty years, had supplied information concerning the Australian aborigines. For Frazer, the books which Spencer wrote with his collaborator Francis Gillen were valuable precisely because of the bare factuality of their style:

The openness of a mind unwarped by preconceived notions and

foreign conclusions, which is one of Spencer’s formal

characteristics, is conspicuous in all his writings and contributes

 largely to their scientific value. Not a few scientific descriptions of

primitive people are to a certain extent vitiated by the comparison

which the observer institutes with the customs and beliefs of other

ages and other parts of the world—comparisons which, while they

serve to display the extent, too often reveal the superficiality, of the

author’s reading, and in any case are best left to be drawn by the

comparative ethnologist, whose function is at once different from

and complementary to that of the descriptive ethnologist. From all

such ill-judged exercises into alien fields the writings of Spencer are

absolutely free.

For the modern reader that passage may appear to be rife with a particular form of wishful thinking. Spencer is portrayed as a tabula rasa, a blank eye, a retina merely receptive and innocent of all preconception, as if one’s impressions really could be sorted out from one’s pre-existent ideas.

Thus far Frazer’s aspirations on Spencer’s behalf fly in the face of the Lockean empiricism both had inherited. But the fact is that Frazer needs Spencer to be transparent, needs him to be the neutral eye in order to transmit back to him, Frazer of Staircase ‘E’, Great Court, the unadulterated rays emanating from a distant and moving object. The vices that Spencer has avoided may thus become Frazer’s virtues. Spencer’s writings are blessedly unvitiated by ‘comparisons … with the customs of other ages and parts of the world’ precisely so that Frazer’s own writings may be informed by these very things.

The comparative method, and the techniques of information-gathering associated with it, are now facets of the history of anthropology, but the subsequent history of the subject is instructive. Shortly after the close of the First World War the division between observer and interpreter broke down when the next generation of social anthrologists, led by Malinowski, insisted that all anthropologists worthy of the name got their shoes dirty by researching in the field. To this generation it seemed that at last the observing and the interpreting eye had fused, to the everlasting benefit of science.

That measure of improvement, that sanguine sense of a necessary momentum, seem to us naïve—for two connected reasons. The first is this: that no eye, however detached, can possibly attain the complete objectivity

which Frazer required of his informants and which his successors strove personally to put into effect. The second is that, of all forms of observation the most imperilled by personal imposition is that in which the eye occupies the field of its observation, since the inquisitive occupant of any social space will of necessity send out ripples of disturbance caused by his very presence and by the persistence of his inquiry.

Thus, it has come to seem to us, all anthropological accounting of whatever kind partakes of a variety of personal testimony. The recognition of such mitigating factors in the operation of the anthropological intelligence has had the recent effect of placing in extreme highlight those facets of the subject which correspond to a species of writing.

Anthropology may aspire towards the condition of science. It is, however, whether it likes it or not, inevitably a branch of literature. When the implications of such an inference have been absorbed, the effect is to drive us back to the founding fathers of the subject, such as Frazer, for whom all discourse was a form of literature, and literature itself no badge of shame even for (perhaps especially for) the would-be empiricist. It is no accident that in expounding this train of consequences I have already had reason to adapt a sentence of Walter Pater who, in the years immediately before the publication of the first Golden Bough, had devoted some attention both to the boundaries between, and the greyareas across, disciplines. In 1888, in an essay on ‘Style’ (collected in Appreciations), he had this to say about the distinction between what he called ‘the literature of fact’ and ‘the literature of the sense of fact’:

The line between fact and something quite different from external fact is, indeed, hard to draw. In Pascal, for instance, in the persuasive writers generally, how difficult to define the point where, from time to time, argument which, if it is to be worth anything at all, must consist of facts or groups of facts, becomes a pleading—a theorem no longer, but essentially an appeal to the reader to catch the writer’s spirit, to think with him, if one can or will—an expression no longer of fact but of his sense of it, his peculiar intuition of the world, prospective, or discerned below the faulty conditions of the present, in either case changed somewhat from the actual world. In science, on the other hand, in history so far as it conforms to the scientific rule, we have a literary domain where the imagination may be

thought to be always an intruder. And as, in all science, the functions of literature reduce themselves eventually to the transcribing of fact, so all the excellences of literary form in regard to science are reducible to various kinds of painstaking; this good quality being involved in all ‘skilled work’ whatever, in the drafting of an act of parliament, as in sewing. Yet here again, the writer’s sense of fact, in history especially, and in all those complex subjects which do but lie on the borders of science, will still take the place of fact, in various degrees. Your historian, for instance, with absolutely truthful intention, amid the the multitude of facts presented to him must needs select, and in selecting assert something of his own humour, something that comes not of the world but of a vision within. So, Gibbon moulds his unwieldy material to a preconceived view. Livy, Tacitus, Michelet, moving full of poignant sensibility amid the records of the past, each after his own sense modifies—who can tell where and to what degree?

—and becomes something else than a transcriber …

Pater’s essay was published in book form by Frazer’s publisher in the same year as the first Golden Bough. With how uncanny a touch does he put his finger on precisely those writers who had played so large a role in the make-up of Frazer’s being: Pascal, Livy, Tacitus, Michelet. To hold the whole of man’s history in the mind’s eye, transmit the spectrum of human cultural experience through a single pane of richly coloured glass—this is what Frazer had learned from the masters of classical and neo-classical historiography, and this is the perspective which as readers he invites us to adopt, both to the entirety of his written structure and to each and every part of it.

The method by which Frazer achieved such refraction of matter into sensibility is his style, which has often been misunderstood. Ackerman, his biographer, refers to it somewhat dismissively as ‘literary’ without realizing that its literariness is part of the point. For if Frazer’s methods of research, his evolutionary convictions and empirical edge, belong to the nineteenth century, his style is from another stable altogether. His critical essays, his polite imitations of Addison’s ‘Roger de Coverley’ give the clue: it is to the balance and perspicacity of the eighteenth century that he aspires. His wit, for example is of a distinctively Gibbonian order, exposing the absurdities of human credulity in paragraphs which emulate a detachment ever-so

slightly etched with scorn. Here he is on the rivalry of the Christians and the followers of Attis over the priority in devising resurrection festivals in the Spring:

In point of fact it appears from the testimony of an anonymous Christian, who wrote in the fourth century of our era, that Christians and pagans alike were struck by the remarkable coincidence between the death and resurrection of their respective deities, and that the coincidence formed a theme of bitter controversy between the adherents of the rival religions, the pagans contending that the resurrection of Christ was a spurious imitation of the resurrection of Attis, and the Christians asserting with equal warmth that the resurrection of Attis was a diabolical counterfeit of the resurrection of Christ. In these unseemly bickerings the heathen took what to a superficial observer might seem strong ground by arguing that their god was the older and therefore presumably the original, not the counterfeit, since as a general rule an original is older than its copy. This feeble argument the Christians easily rebutted. They admitted, indeed, that in point of time Christ was the junior deity, but they triumphantly demonstrated his real seniority by falling back on the subtlety of Satan, who on so important an occasion had surpassed himself by inverting the usual order of nature. (pp. 363–4) The whole effect of this passage lies in the seriousness of demeanour, which is appreciated as serious until the subtle twinkling of the ironic eye is discerned beneath it. The adjective ‘remarkable’, for example, has the flat force of something ‘fit-to-be-observed’ until the remarkableness of the coincidence is found to be such patent evidence of chicanery. The case for the followers of Attis is seemingly undermined by the adjective ‘superficial’ until, following through the logic of the construction, you realize that this particular superficiality has the unquestionable strength of a tautology. Then the tautology is written off as ‘feeble’, which in the logical sense it can never be, a tautology being always true even when, especially when, it is trite. This achieved, the adverb ‘triumphantly’, the seemingly conclusive epithet ‘real’, simply enhance an impression of absurdity into which the Christian case ineptly falls, even in the act of acknowledging the power of Satan to deceive the faithful and the disinterested observer alike.

Then back to tautology again, the ‘usual’ order of nature being just that,

‘usual’. Thus we reach sanity at last across the sandbanks of antique casuistry, the result being a confirmation of the folly, not of the Attis cult nor of the Christ cult, but of religious adherents everywhere, especially when inspired by what the eighteenth century liked to call ‘enthusiasm’.

But wit is only one aspect of Frazer’s style. More largely it is a matter of what Pater calls ‘humour’, meaning a ‘peculiar intuition of the world’, a sensibility infusing everything, even the most harrowing. As one telling instance we might take Frazer’s account of the climax of the Toxcatl feast in pre-colonial Mexico which, as he disarmingly notes, ‘corresponded in date as well as character to the Christian festival of the death and resurrection of the Redeemer’. He is describing the moment when the boy- victim, who, for twenty days has enjoyed the privileges of ‘the god of gods’ Tezcatlipoco, is obliged finally to succumb to the knife:

On the last day the young man, attended by his wives and pages, embarked in a canoe covered with a royal canopy and was ferried across the lake to a spot where a little hill rose from the edge of the water. It was called the Mountain of Parting, because here his wives bade him a last farewell. Then, accompanied only by his pages, he repaired to a small and lonely temple by the wayside. Like the Mexican temples in general, it was built in the form of a pyramid; and as the young man ascended the stairs he broke at every step one of the flutes on which he had played in the days of his glory. On reaching the summit he was seized and held down by the priests on his back upon a block of stone, while one of them cut open his breast, thrust his hand into the wound, and wrenching out his heart held it up in sacrifice to the sun. The body of the dead god was not, like the bodies of common victims, sent rolling down the steps of the temple, but was carried down to the foot, where the head was cut of and spitted on a pike. Such was the regular end of the man who personated the greatest god of the Mexican pantheon. (p.

609)

The theoretical vantage-point from which the episode is viewed is that of Euhemerism: the doctrine that godhead is an afflatus visited upon mortal beings who have at one time or another enacted the part of a God. Thus the dignified yet frightened young man—dignified because frightened, frightened underneath his dignity—does not so much play the part because he is a god as grow into godhead by virtue of his enacting it. In the eyes of

the worshippers and celebrants, therefore, he is, and must perforce be viewed as divine before, at, and beyond the moment of his slaying. As he ascends the steep flight of steps towards the altar (one can almost see it: the slow, drugged yet pious gait, the inexorable half-relucant, half-joyous commitment of his advance, step after step in the still morning air), it is as a god regretting the fragility of his manhood, or a man regretting the fragility of his godhead. In any case the simple and relentless gesture of breaking a flute on every stair perfectly conveys the simplicity and inevitability of a renunciation which is simultaneously a form of apotheosis. There is a sharp movement up and then down as in reaching the summit he collapses into the waiting arms of the priests, a rapid conflation of spiritual possibilities and limitations, a quick-as-lightning reflex by the ministrants, the brandishing of the boy’s still beating heart by one of whom is an action both of obeisance and of triumph. But as always Frazer’s almost imperceptible intervention is reserved for the last sentence which honours while disclosing the temporary suspension of belief on which the rite is founded.

The sacrifice is a waste—Frazer’s ‘regular’ here being both descriptive and ironic—yet for all that he has ‘personated the god’, not impersonated him.

His end is both fitting and noble.

It will be observed how crucially such writing depends upon a constant, darting repositioning of the reader in relation to the man, the god, and the priests. We are witnesses to the rite. Fitfully we are celebrants too and throughout, with a controlled seepage of feeling as subtle as it is pervasive, we are ourselves the victim. A revealing practical exercise might be to contrast this passage with the New Mexican sacrifice at the culmination of D. H. Lawrence’s story ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’, partly based, like his novel The Plumed Serpent, upon a reading of episodes in this same chapter. Lawrence has his human victim staring up into the eyes of the priests, the eldest of whom seems instinct with qualities which the author seems as incapable of recognizing as he is of naming:

Only the eyes of that oldest man were not anxious. Black, and fixed,

and as if sightless, they watched the sun, seeing beyond the sun.

And in their black, empty concentration there was a power, power

intensely abstract and remote, deep, deep to the heart of the earth,

and the heart of the sun. In absolute motionlessness he watched till

 the red sun should send his ray through the column of ice. Then the

old man would strike, and strike home, accomplish the sacrifice and

achieve the power.

The confusion between cthonic and solar potency here is but one facet of a redundant intellectual fug which blunts everything except Lawrence’s own befuddled mysticism. Frazer’s virtues by contrast are those of a perfect clarity, a clarity all the more impressive for burning through the author’s own declared prejudices. He does everything that Lawrence tries and fails to do. By refusing to say what he means, he says everything; by renouncing comment or palapable emotion he commends the episode to our attention, making it the focus for that shifting field of attitude and readerly response on which his work as a whole depends.

The effect of such focusing is to leave his theories in tatters. God or man, frightened or noble, the human subject of this ghastly yet solemn ritual fits nowhere into Frazer’s schemes. He is neither hunter nor nomad, stone-age man nor bronze-age man, magician nor priest, nor yet scientist.

He is simply what he is: a young man climbing a flight of steps on a May morning: everywhere and nowhere, everything and yet nothing. The effect is achieved partly through a manipulation of tense which modulates between what the French would call the iterative imperfect, and the past historic. As viewed, the incident is singular since dependent upon a given moment in time, yet repetitive: the ‘regular’ close of a tradition of which we cannot, and do not want to see the far end. Confounding all evolutionary schemes, the action is timeless, primitive and yet modern.

VII

With these aspects of his achievement in view, Frazer has frequently been seen as a harbinger of modernism. This has a certain justice; yet the uncertainties of Lawrence’s prose have much to tell us about the nature of Frazer’s influence on the literature of this century. For the writers of the years immediately following the First World War he seemed to offer a way back to intimations of a religious or magical kind. W. B. Yeats, for example, read him with an eye to the folklore of the peasantry, as a lens through

which the beliefs of his own Irish countrymen could be given both context and depth. In the Twenties T. S. Eliot read the sections on Adonis, Attis, Osiris and briefly deployed the idea of pagan baptismal rites in The Waste Land (especially in the section ‘Death by Water’). Wyndham Lewis’s The Childermass is apparently indebted to the volume of the third edition known as The Scapegoat. In none of these attempts was Frazer remotely interested. When towards the end of his life his amanuensis Robert Angus Downie read him extracts from The Waste Land, he apparently fell asleep.

Again, in old age Frazer often has a dead-set jaw and unsmiling countenance that remind the modern viewer irresistibly of Freud, and it was Freud who took up some of his most daring hints as to the origins of religion, and in Totem and Taboo extended them in directions which would probably have given Frazer indigestion if not apoplexy. For Freud again the widespread belief in contagious magic was reminiscent of the delusions of neurotics; it is not entirely certain, however, that Frazer would have known what he meant. He might very well have been more interested in the widespread deployment of rituals and myths identical or analogous to those he mentions by artists originating from the cultures concerned. That Igor Stravinsky composed a ballet in 1913 called The Rite of Spring and depicting a female sacrifice to the Russian deity Yarilo is remarkable confirmation of the power of a rite that Frazer depicts, though no tribute to his influence. The same may be said of the frequent structural use of Yoruba or Igbo ritual by recent African writers.

Thus to call Frazer a proto-modernist is both just and richly mistaken.

What separates him finally from the modern movement is the severity of a humour determined to be taken in by nothing, and opposed to all forms of mystification. The splicing of echoes from different religious cultures is, for example, fundamental to Eliot’s method in The Waste Land, but Frazer’s ambivalence over these matters is not of the Eliotic kind, nor like Eliot is he disposed towards faith or despairing of the future. What holds his work together is a delicate, ever-so-slightly sardonic poise, a sceptical musing, a wise and trenchant passiveness. Even in his scepticism he is not extreme, expressing in his final pages a sense of the appeal of the religious seemingly at odds with his programme. In both the second and third editions he ends his deconstruction of the religious with the salutation ‘Ave Maria’, but though the bells of St Peter’s sound over his closing paragraphs, he is not

inclined to follow them. Frazer is a mild man, and much as we may wish to turn him into a sort of rationalist ogre, behind the unsmiling countenance played a quicksilver wit, even a puckishness, displayed clearly in early photographs and forever bubbling beneath the lucid surface of his prose. It is the contradiction between scholarly deliberateness and subversive humour that provides much of the attraction of his book, an attraction which is forever erupting in the most surprising places: in footnotes or paragraphs where his prime concern is festivals for the exorcism of the dead. To us it may seem as if the contradictions in his literary personality are almost wilfully extreme; so extreme that if we are not very careful we ignore one half of the equation and so misconstrue him completely.

Black humour; scholarship; religious nostalgia; doubt: what can all these creatures be doing in the same menagerie of the mind? But flourish together they do and, though with polite stringency they may sometimes turn and rend one another, the general effect is one of a consort of attitudes.

Of all the scientific writers of the late nineteenth century Frazer is among the most fluent, but his fluency sometimes sweeps past, and into, peculiar corners, precarious and craggy river bends. In reading him one is aware of kinships he would have been loath to acknowledge: to Pater, even to Wilde; but beneath the fin-de-siècle smoothness there is something else that anchors and sustains it: a toughness that comes from his reading in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Sir Thomas Browne (Urne-Buriall particularly); Milton (whose works as a young man he apparently searched for impressive-sounding locutions); Gibbon; Swift; Hume. Like Pater he will feel his way sentiently through a seeming contradiction; but then like Hume he will argue it out patiently, with tortuous and spellbinding logic.

Nothing more clearly demonstrates his contrariness than his attitude to his subject-matter, the many and varied peoples of whom he writes. There is an apocryphal story of his once dining with William James in Rome and, on being asked whether he had encountered any of the tribes on whom he had waxed so prolix, replying with anecdotal disdain: ‘Good God, no!’ There is no truth in the story whatsoever. There is another prevailing impression that he believed himself to exist mentally at the apex of a pyramid from where, in descending ranks, mankind sloped down to the fabled primitive. Like many statements intended simply to derogate this is both true and utterly false. Frazer, let it be said, was the product of his time (as those who raise

the objection are products of theirs). It was a time beset with jingoism, with the Raj at its height, with, at the time he started writing, Africa newly divided. When Lord Lugard created the colony called Nigeria, Frazer was 47; it is a sobering thought.

But no man gives everything to his age. If Frazer’s scepticism is allowed in one direction, it must be allowed in others. If he could implicitly take on the monstrous regiment of the faithful (who, though fatally weakened, in the 1890s still had the upper hand, and nowhere more so than in Cambridge), he could also counter assumptions that ran deep in most of his contemporaries. As impressive as the subversiveness of his wit (more impressive in the circumstances) is the subversivenes of his imagination.

Frazer was an ethnographer, yes, but unlike many, including some of his officially more-liberal disciples (Malinowski, for example, who, when performing field-work in the Trobriand Islands, kept Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in his back pocket), he was also an inhabitor of skins—including that of a frightened Mexican boy on one distant May morning.

Because Frazer was a product of the nineteenth century we think of him, confusedly, as an imperialist and a romantic. He was at bottom neither, believing fixedly in a kinship of the intellect that transcended cultures, and above all in the primacy of thought. Magic was this: schematized thought; and ritual was thought-in-practice. His aborigines, like his Romans, come with a completely worked out, if fallible, system of epistemology and ontology, even of technology. They had views, so do we; they got things wrong; but which of us, in the last resort, is wiser? In one of his chapters on taboo Frazer reports a conversation between an unknown missionary and group of Australian tribesmen. The missionary is endeavouring to persuade the aborigines of the superiority of the Christian doctrine of the soul. A conversation ensues which may be set out as follows:

MISSIONARY: ‘I am not one as you think, but two.’ (laughter) MISSIONARY: ‘You may laugh as much as you like. I tell you that I am two

in one; this great body that you see is one; within that there is another

little one that is not visible. The great body dies, and is buried, but the

little body flies away when the great one dies.’ ABORIGINES: ‘Yes, yes. We also are two, we also have a little body within

the breast.’ (p. 154)

Footnoting this dialogue Frazer sagely comments: ‘In this edifying catechism there is little to choose between the savagery of the white man and the savagery of the black.’ The purport of this remark is not only to bring the whole of mankind together into one imaginative pool, but also to question the very notion of ‘savagery’ or, supposing there to be such a thing, our conviction that we do not possess it. Curiously and carefully, The Golden Bough is a book that calls the bluff of its own readers.