12 - James George Frazer

Summary

The Golden Bough

James George Frazer (b. 1854; d. 1941) studied Classics and graduated in 1878 with a dissertation on The Growth of Plato's Ideal Theory. Around the 1880s, strongly influenced by Tylor (see Chapter 11), Frazer adopted the evolutionist agenda and subsequently focused on comparative religion, myth and anthropology. Frazer, a fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, for almost all his life, has written extensively on a huge variety of topics; his most important work, however, is The Golden Bough, first published in two volumes in 1890, swelling up to twelve volumes in the third edition published between 1906 and 1915 (furthermore, a supplementary volume entitled Aftermath was published in 1936). The excerpt presented here is taken from the “abridged” (one-volume) edition of The Golden Bough (1922).

The text begins with Frazer's classical definition of “magic” that distinguishes two main principles – namely, the Law of Similarity and the Law of Contagion: “From the first of these principles […] the magician infers that he can produce any effect he desires merely by imitating it; from the second he infers that whatever he does to a material object will affect equally the person with whom the object was once in contact.” Frazer assigns both principles to the superordinate concept of “sympathetic magic” as both “assume that things act on each other at a distance through a secret sympathy”. Frazer categorically refutes the existence of this secret sympathy (“magic is […] a false science as well as an abortive art”) and explains – like Tylor (see Chapter 11) – mankind's widespread and continuous belief in “magic” as a false “association of ideas”.