Anthropologists From Scotland

"Studies of culture like The Golden Bough and the usual comparative ethnological volumes are analytical discussions of traits and ignore all the aspects of cultural integration."

"When posterity comes to estimate the work of our age, the record of Sir James Frazer would suffice, almost of itself, to redeem it of a charge of sterility. It is a work, to be sure, which sums up and organizes the past, marshals it, so to say, with the sweep of an encyclopædic construction of theory; the sort of work, as Spengler tells us, which civilization performs after its creative ardour is spent. That is to undervalue it grossly: science, when she brings to bear upon the meaningless disorder of fact such inventive insight as Frazer's, creates as truly and as boldly as art."

"Scholars before him may have equalled this monument of toil, but Frazer has the kind of genius which, in spite of Carlyle, goes so rarely with this "infinite capacity for taking pains." He conjectures with a boldness which ranks him among the great pioneers; he has in his speculation a vision so far-reaching that one marvels at the power of this eye to adjust itself to the microscopic focus which much of his work demands. With it all, this exact yet daring scientist is also a great writer. It is much that he is always lucid and never writes a less than perfect sentence, but these are the least of the merits of an artist who can pass with ease from humorous irony to the high colours of a bravura passage."

"To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough."

"In any case Tylor's (and Frazer’s) general outlook was one that later on became adopted and developed by the psychoanalysts, in whose hands the general similarities between the different aspects of "primitive mind"—whether in the child, the dreamer, the neurotic or the savage—have recently undergone an elaboration which seems likely to establish a successful and progressive "comparative psychology" upon a very wide basis."

"Tylor paved the way for Sir James Frazer, who, in a series of great treatises, Totemism and Exogamy, The Golden Bough, The Folklore of the Old Testament, The Belief in Immortality, etc., each of them in several volumes (no less than twelve in the last edition of The Golden Bough), gave to the world a vast wealth of material presented in a most attractive form. Frazer had the patience and enthusiasm of the collector, combined with an astonishing power of marshalling his facts and a rare literary charm. His weakness lay, perhaps, in a lack of theoretical insight wherewith to interpret his results, and a want of critical discrimination with regard to the relative value of the innumerable sources from which his data were collected."

"Frazer laid matters out in such a way as to support my instinctive belief that divinity was bunk. He was a scholar, he had studied tribal societies. It was a moment of great excitement. Now everything became clear to me. The earliest people had seen their gods in natural phenomena they didn't understand. They didn't understand thunder so they made a god of thunder. They didn't understand why there were good seasons and bad seasons so they made a god of fertility. And then the Earth Mother appeared all over the world, the universal god controlling the mysterious process of conception in humans, animals and plants."

"In its boundless erudition, its constructive imagination, and its wealth of suggestion, the Golden Bough stands forth as perhaps the most notable contribution of the age to our knowledge of the evolution of the human race."

"Among my own contemporaries was J. G. Frazer, who was soon to light the dark wood of savage superstition with a gleam from The Golden Bough. The happy title of that book—Sir James Frazer has a veritable genius for titles—made it arrest the attention of scholars. They saw in comparative anthropology a serious subject actually capable of elucidating a Greek or Latin text. Tylor had written and spoken; Robertson Smith, exiled for heresy, had seen the Star in the East; in vain; we classical deaf-adders stopped our ears and closed our eyes; but at the mere sound of the magical words "Golden Bough" the scales fell—we heard and understood."

"The author of The Golden Bough holds a unique position in our present world. There are few men of letters writing to-day of whom it can be said with greater certainty that their works will be collected. For Sir James is both a man of letters and also an historian; and, as Bury said when he edited The Decline and Fall and noted how Gibbon had endured, this is a combination which makes a man immortal. Indeed Sir James's position may, when men look back, appear even more commanding than Gibbon's. For Gibbon only made ordered and more amusing for the polished world what was known to every contemporary scholar about the ancient world. But Frazer revealed a completely strange world, and strove to interpret, not to mock, its strangeness."

"The Golden Bough, compared by Virgil to the mistletoe but now revealing some affinity to the banyan, has not only waxed a great tree but has spread to a spacious and hospitable forest, whose king receives homage in many tongues from a multitude resorting thither for its fruit or timber or refreshing shade. There they find learning mated with literature, labour disguised in ease, and a museum of dark and uncouth superstitions invested with the charm of a truly sympathetic magic. There you have gathered together, for the admonition of a proud and oblivious race, the scattered and fading relics of its foolish childhood, whether withdrawn from our view among savage folk and in different countries, or lying unnoticed at our doors. The forgotten milestones of the road which man has travelled, the mazes and blind alleys of his appointed progress through time, are illuminated by your art and genius, and the strangest of remote and ancient things are brought near to the minds and hearts of your contemporaries."

"If we define, then an anthropologist as one who passionately loves the continuity of tradition and works for its preservation and development, who also brings to this task a profound knowledge of our own mythology as well as of the superstitions of other savages—Sir James Frazer is the greatest anthropologist of our age."

"In this work of revealing to us the full human meaning of Greek and Latin culture, Frazer started with his classical interests. The six volumes of his Pausanias give us a vision of ancient Greece as it was in the times of Imperial Rome. In his Golden Bough, starting from one of the most inexplicable and barbarous customs recorded from Latium, Frazer gives us the theory of primitive culture and of the rational savagery of human faith, a theory which will for ever remain a master piece of comparative anthropology."

"The case for Frazer—who like Spencer is rather under a cloud to-day—is too complex and technical to be argued briefly here. His use of the comparative method on an enormous scale can be faulted, though the fascinating detail it reveals and the charm of his Augustan style ensure that he is still read. His industry was truly Darwinian, and I believe that his success in subsuming vast masses of data under a few leading ideas was considerable. Unfortunately the anti-evolutionary reaction, largely led by Malinowski, has resulted in neglect of Frazer's achievement. Such a reaction was not surprising, for hypothetical yet untestable evolutionary theories had multiplied endlessly in the early years of the present century. In rejecting these a new freedom was gained, but, alas, much that was solid in the work of a Frazer or a Westermack was forgotten."

"But just occasionally an epic reference book is so beautifully written that it actually inspires artistic creativity. Think of how T. S. Eliot acknowledged his huge debt to J. G. Frazer's anthropological masterpiece, The Golden Bough, in the preface to The Waste Land. And rightly so: I am currently reading a new paperback edition of Frazer's monumental study of ritual slayings (invaluable background for anybody working in a newspaper office), and it has lost none of its stupendous evocative power in the 80 years since it was finished."

"I remember the shock, the combined shock of interest and almost of horror, with which The Golden Bough burst upon classical scholars like me when it first appeared in 1890. Of course it was not quite our first introduction to anthropology. We knew something of Tylor and Andrew Lang and perhaps Mannhardt, perhaps even of Robertson Smith's sacred camel which had to be eaten alive before sunrise. But Frazer, for one thing, overpowered us with his mass of carefully ordered facts. We had heard of "the beastly devices of the heathen" but had not realised their great number and variety, had not understood the method which underlay their madness."

"The long avenues of thought that have led from Frazer's Golden Bough seem to start physically in front of the dining-room fireplace of the home where as a boy of 15 I sat hour after hour absorbing first the one-volume abridgment and then the three-volume edition. I cannot imagine how different my mental and religious life would have been if the impact of J. G. Frazer had come at another time or not at all."

"When the history of British anthropology during the last half century or something more comes to be written, it will be found that three names stand clear away from those of their contemporaries—Tylor, Haddon, and Frazer. Each of these men represents an aspect of the science of man: Tylor as the initiator of general ethnology in the modern critical sense; Haddon receiving the torch and begetting (with Rivers's help) a school of precise field anthropology; Frazer, the supreme interpreter on the literary side of man's hopes, fears, and beliefs, his relations with his gods, his fellows, and with his own soul."

"Frazer, Harrison and the others took the politeness out of myths and released them from the tameness of mere decoration. They saw them as reflecting the bare substructures of society and of its rituals; and they emphasised the irrational, dark elements of myth (in keeping with the age of Nietzsche). For them, Dionysus was not only the merry god of wine, he was the god whose possessed followers tore living creatures into bloody fragments."

"Frazer's account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory; it makes these views look like errors."

"Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves."

"The Golden Bough (not to speak of the many other anthropological volumes) is one of those books which have a tremendously vitalising and fertilising effect upon a branch of human knowledge. It is not unworthy of comparison with The Origin of Species. Both books consist largely of an immense number of facts, collected and related with immense patience; in both the generalisations from this vast accumulation of facts are made with extreme caution and even reluctance, and at the same time they have a kind of cosmic range and relevance. To many people Frazer seemed to do for the mental evolution of the human race what Darwin had done for its physical evolution. Whatever be the ultimate judgment upon his method and conclusions, there can be no doubt of the profound effect that he has had upon the science of anthropology."

"I still possess the complete edition of Frazer's The Golden Bough which Aubrey gave me at that time, and which opened my eyes to the ritualistic origins of theatre, affecting considerably the way I was later to conceive of opera."

"The natives of British Columbia live largely upon the fish which abound in their seas and rivers. If the fish do not come in due season, and the Indians are hungry, A Nootka wizard will make an image of a swimming fish and put it into the water in the direction from which the fish generally appear. This ceremony, accompanied by a prayer to the fish to come, will cause them to arrive at once."

"For there are strong grounds for thinking that, in the evolution of thought, magic has preceded religion."

"Dwellers by the sea cannot fail to be impressed by the sight of its ceaseless ebb and flow, and are apt, on the principles of that rude philosophy of sympathy and resemblance...to trace a subtle relation, a secret harmony, between its tides and the life of man...The belief that most deaths happen at ebb tide is said to be held along the east coast of England from Northumberland to Kent."

"But once a fool always a fool, and the greater the power in his hands the more disastrous is likely to be the use he makes of it. The heaviest calamity in English history, the breach with America, might never have occurred if George the Third had not been an honest dullard."

"The old notion that the savage is the freest of mankind is the reverse of the truth. He is a slave, not indeed to a visible master, but to the past, to the spirits of his dead forefathers, who haunt his steps from birth to death, and rule him with a rod of iron."

"From the earliest times man has been engaged in a search for general rules whereby to turn the order of natural phenomena to his own advantage, and in the long search he has scraped together a great hoard of such maxims, some of them golden and some of them mere dross. The true or golden rules constitute the body of applied science which we call the arts; the false are magic."

"By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life."

"Ancient magic was the very foundation of religion."

"We seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below."

"If the test of truth lay in a show of hands or a counting of heads, the system of magic might appeal, with far more reason than the Catholic Church, to the proud motto, Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus [always, everywhere, and by all], as the sure and certain credential of its own infallibility."

"Small minds cannot grasp great ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their purblind vision, nothing seems really great and important but themselves. Such minds hardly rise into religion at all."

"I am a plain practical man, not one of your theorists and splitters of hairs and choppers of logic."

"In primitive society, where uniformity of occupation is the rule, and the distribution of the community into various classes of workers has hardly begun, every man is more or less his own magician; he practices charms and incantations for his own good and the injury of his enemies."

"The slow, the never ending approach to truth consists in perpetually forming and testing hypotheses, accepting those at which at the time seem to fit the facts and rejecting the others."

"In point of fact magicians appear to have often developed into chiefs and kings."

"With the advance of knowledge, therefore, prayer and sacrifice assume the leading place in religious ritual; and magic; which once ranked with them as a legitimate equal, is gradually relegated to the background and sinks to the level of a black art."

"When a tree comes to be viewed, no longer as the body of the tree spirit, but simply as its abode which it can quit at pleasure, an important advance has been made in religious thought."

"If their king is their god, he is or should be also their preserver; and if he will not preserve them, he must make room for another who will."

"It is a common rule with primitive people not to waken a sleeper, because his soul is away and might not have time to get back; so if the man wakened without his soul, he would fall sick. If it is absolutely necessary to rouse a sleeper, it must be done very gradually, to allow the soul time to return."

"The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology."

"In primitive society the rules of ceremonial purity observed by divine kings, chiefs, and priests agree in many respects with the rules observed by homicides, mourners, women in childbed, girls at puberty, hunters and fishermen, and so on. To us these various classes of persons appear to differ totally in character and condition; some of them we should call holy, others we might pronounce unclean and polluted. But the savage makes no such moral distinction between them; the conceptions of holiness and pollution are not yet differentiated in his mind. To him the common feature of all these persons is that they are dangerous and in danger, and the danger in which they stand and to which they expose others is what we should call spiritual or ghostly, and therefore imaginary. The danger, however, is not less real because it is imaginary; imagination acts upon man as really does gravitation, and may kill him as certainly as a dose of prussic acid."

"Man has created gods in his own likeness and being himself mortal he has naturally supposed his creatures to be in the same sad predicament."

"Yet perhaps no sacrifice is wholly useless which proves there are men who prefer honour to life."

"If any of my readers set out with the notion that that all races of men think and act much in the same way as educated Englishmen, the evidence of superstitious belief and custom collected in this work should suffice to disabuse him of so erroneous a prepossession."

"In course of time the slow advance of knowledge, which has dispelled so many cherished illusions, convinced at least the more thoughtful portion of mankind that the alterations of summer and winter, of spring and autumn, were not merely the result of their own magical rites, but that some deeper cause, some mightier power, was at work behind the shifting scenes of nature."

"If mankind had always been logical and wise, history would not be a long chronicle of folly and crime."

"Indeed the influence of music on the development of religion is a subject which would repay a sympathetic study."