After deciding to read the Golden Bough and brustling past the kvetching anthropologists, the embarking reader is beset by another, more daunting hurdle: which edition to read. The two-volume original? If it’s so great, why are there more editions? The three volume-second edition? Perhaps, but maybe there’s still something missing. The twelve-volume third edition? Ugh, twelve volumes!? Maybe the 1922 author’s abridgement! Well, that throws the juicy bits away along with the excessive examples…
Frazer aims to explain the origins of a historical legend called the Rex Nemorensis, an institution involving a priest of a sacred grove by the shores of lake Nemi in Italy where a runaway slave could challenge the priest to mortal combat. If successful the slave would become the new priest, the new king of the wood, the new Rex Nemorensis. To explain this Frazer catalogs religious and spiritual practices throughout the world, detailing how magic and superstition operate in primitive societies, how these primitive societies come to elevate priests-kings, and how the priest-kings (or their stand-ins) are ritually sacrificed in accordance with cyclical seasonal changes.
I resolved to start with the third edition and whittle down to an abridgement or earlier edition once I got a taste. Frazer is sometimes accused of cherry picking examples to fit his thesis, but when going through the third edition’s seemingly endless litanies of exampla, the reader starts to wonder if Frazer isn’t so much picking cherries, but putting his bucket on the ground and shaking a whole branch.
Scholars tend not to like large, overarching theories that explain everything. They’re not good for them individually or in the aggregate as academia. They need to write original scholarship to get published, and with so much ground already tread, this usually involves dialing down into something hyperspecific. You can’t keep getting grants to go study some highland Papuan animist tribe if you just say they fit into the same rubric of humanity outlined over a hundred years ago by a big-bad British colonizer. You need to say how these tribes are different: how they’re unique in and of themselves. It’s an important stance that laudably perpetuates scholarship, but tends to miss the forest for the trees.
As with the lumpers and the splitters of biological taxa, so too with the anthropologists and societies. Even if Frazer is wrong with regards to his secondhand facts or misinterpreting a few things, the thousands of examples he cites in the aggregate paints a compelling picture that people and societies gravitate toward certain trends in narrative and religious practice.
The first volume of the third edition covers various forms of magic categorized into contagious and homeopathic magic. Primitive societies are replete with these but the modern colonizing Englishman isn’t necessarily beyond it. Even the modern anthropologists admit that this is one of the few redeeming theses of Frazer. Sometimes I wonder if this is because they too tried the third edition, fully took in the full, litanous details about homeopathic and sympathetic magic, but naturally fatigued, consigned themselves to abridgements for the later sections.
One folklorist, while debunking one of Frazer’s misuses of a Cornish tradition to fit his schema still professes to use the third edition as a reference work.
Others say it’s good only for his work on the Rex Nemorensis, as if Frazer isn’t martialling all this comparative religious scholarship to cast light on that historically murky institution.
Even Frazer is aware that the general thrust of his work is a generalization and anticipates the above critiques:
“Like the great majority of mankind the savage is above being hidebound by the trammels of a pedantic logic. In attempting to track his devious thought through the jungle of crass ignorance and blind fear, we must always remember that we are treading enchanted ground, and must beware of taking for solid realities the cloudy shapes that cross our path or hover and gibber at us through the gloom. We can never completely replace ourselves at the standpoint of primitive man, see things with his eyes, and feel our hearts beat with the emotions that stirred his. All our theories concerning him and his ways must therefore fall far short of certainty; the utmost we can aspire to in such matters is a reasonable degree of probability.”
In his introduction the Oxford Publishing’s new abridgement, Fraser (That’s Fraser with an S, a different guy as if this wasn’t all confusing enough!) asserts the literary structure of the entire work as recapitulating the bible. The text ends with talking about the archetype of the dying-and-rising god where the god is torn apart in a sparagmos and consumed, generating new fertile ground or more abstractly, salvation. This is instantiated in not only in Christianity with Jesus’ crucifixion and the eucharist but in mythology and ancient religions generally. Neither is it something modern man is above.
The patchwork reception of the book by modern anthropology is rather poetic. The text of the Golden Bough is torn apart by these multiple scholarly parties, each ritually strikes down some aspect of titanic Frazer, and each imbibes their own little favored piece in fecund hopes for their own scholarship.
While Frazer’s current merit is questioned by anthropologists, the importance to literature, particularly that of the early 20th century, cannot be understated. Joyce, Yeats, Lovecraft, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, and Graves all share Frazer as an influence. Extending the influence to avenues of literary criticism, Freud, Jung, Campbell, and Paglia can be added to the list as well.