In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

∏ James G. Frazer The Orthodoxy Monumentalized In a memorial tribute to William Robertson Smith written in 1911, the French scholar Salomon Reinach concluded a recital of his subject’s virtues and accomplishments by pointing to the greatest achievement of all—‘‘Genuit Frazerum!’’∞ Forty years later, it would have been difficult to find many anthropologists or sociologists who would agree with the implied judgment on the relative merits of Robertson Smith and his protégé, but at the time, even Robertson Smith’s own biographers did not dispute the claim. Reinach certainly intended no insult to the memory of the departed scholar, and his remarks do no more than echo the contemporary consensus. Frazer’s scholarly reputation suffered a precipitous decline after his death in 1941, but he remains one of the most important figures in the intellectual history of the twentieth century.≤ The source of his fame is, of course, The Golden Bough, still the most widely read of any work on anthropology or comparative religion . While many important works of Müller, Tylor, Lang, and Robertson Smith have long been out of print, one could walk into almost any bookstore today and find the one-volume paperback edition of The Golden Bough sitting on the shelves. Though the names of his predecessors are little known outside academic circles, it is rare to find a liberally educated Westerner who has never heard of Frazer, and his work has been the subject of numerous books and articles. Many scholars have argued that The Golden Bough occupies a distinct category somewhere in the unclaimed territory between imaginative literature and empirical social science, and that this hybrid character accounts for much of the book’s cultural impact.≥ It is not merely that the book is well written, 182 | James G. Frazer readable, and accessible to a nonspecialist audience, though it is all these things, but rather that Frazer’s magnum opus is at once a vast panorama of the world of Homo religiosus and a stirring meditation on the ‘‘long tragedy of . . . folly and suffering’’ which is human history.∂ But while The Golden Bough may defy conventional classification, it was not utterly unique. It was, instead, the product of a long-established tradition of scientific inquiry into the origins and development of religious institutions. Despite his close friendship with Robertson Smith, Frazer preferred the intellectualist approach of Tylor to the more sociological one advocated by his friend. Where Robertson Smith had tried to direct attention to the relationship between a human society and its god, Frazer turned inquiry back to the question that Tylor had posed: by what train of reasoning had primitive man come to believe in the existence of the spirits to whom his rituals appealed? In The Golden Bough, Frazer adopted a procedure much like that employed by Tylor in Primitive Culture. Drawing on the ethnology of non-European ‘‘savages ’’ as well as European folklore, and reasoning by analogy, Frazer attempted to decode the legend of the priest, or King of the Wood, who guarded the sacred grove of Diana at Nemi, not far from Rome. He concluded, among other things, that the Priest of Nemi was believed to be a god, and that his ritual murder was best understood as a survival of ancient fertility rites. This reading of the legend took pride of place in the first edition of the book, but by the third edition, it had become a purely structural device, a ‘‘convenient peg’’ on which to hang a variety of more or less independent disquisitions on such topics as the evolution of kingship, the ritual killing of men and animals regarded as divine, the fire festivals of Europe, and rites and superstitions associated with agriculture. Superficially at least, Frazer’s outline of history bears a strong resemblance to that enunciated by Tylor in Primitive Culture. Both men identify critical shifts in human consciousness as the determining forces in history and use them to demarcate successive epochs, and both defined religion primarily as an erroneous natural philosophy (with practical applications) which was destined to disappear as science assumed more and more of its functions.∑ Nevertheless, the pattern actually disclosed in Frazer’s work is not one of linear advance, but a repetitive cycle of conflict, ‘‘a long tragedy of human folly and suffering,’’ as the author himself put it. The dominant mood is pessimistic, and Frazer’s faith in rationalism and science is eventually overshadowed by his preoccupation with their...

Share