Sir James George Frazer: an author of many destinies

VERY few academic books remain continuously in print for over 120 years. Fewer still manage to do so despite having been systematically critiqued, debunked in terms of methodology and even referred to as an “embarrassment” by contemporary practitioners in the field. For such a book also to have been a popular bestseller is practically unheard of, yet this has been the fate of Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough. First published in 1890, in two volumes; then expanded to three in 1900; swelling to a shelf-groaning 12 volumes between 1906 and 1915 and finally abridged to a single, mass-market edition in 1922, it has, thanks to Frazer’s longevity, only this year left copyright.

Almost the rest of this article could be filled with the names of artists and thinkers influenced by The Golden Bough: William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Carl Jung, DH Lawrence and Mary Renault; the horror writer HP Lovecraft and the “wickedest man in the world”, the Satanist Aleister Crowley. Naomi Mitchison’s novel The Corn King And The Spring Queen and John Buchan’s The Dancing Floor were profoundly influenced by it, as was TS Eliot’s The Waste Land – Eliot wrote in the poem’s appendix “to another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean, The Golden Bough”. A copy of the book can be glimpsed in a scene of Apocalypse Now and Francis Ford Coppola’s ending for the film was determined by the book’s theories. When the Emperor in Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi gloats at Luke Skywalker, saying, “Your hate has made you powerful. Now, fulfil your destiny and take your father’s place at my side,” it is yet another homage to the vision of myth outlined in The Golden Bough.

The author of this remarkable book was born in Glasgow in 1854, the eldest of the four children of Daniel and Katherine Frazer. His father was a successful pharmacist (of Frazer & Green’s), and both parents were devout members of the Free Church of Scotland. They moved when young James was a teenager to Garelochhead, where he attended Larchfield Academy in Helensburgh before going to Glasgow University. The record of his attendance shows how omnivorous his mind was: he not only studied classics under GG Smith and philosophy under John Veitch (who combined an anti-idealist philosophy – as he wrote, “we must have psychology – that is, a study of consciousness in the widest sphere – before we can have metaphysics” – with writing about the folklore of the Scottish Borders), but also physics under William Thomson, Lord Kelvin. From Lord Kelvin’s lectures Frazer took a worldview which both facilitated his great work and laid the grounds for its future criticism. It was “a conception of the physical universe as regulated by exact and absolutely unvarying laws of nature expressible in mathematical formulas. The conception has been a settled principle of my thought ever since”, according to Frazer. Frazer’s great leap was to unite Veitch’s psychology with Kelvin’s idea of fixed laws to a non-scientific, non-philosophical sphere: culture, specifically, a culture grounded in the classics of Greece and Rome. For this achievement, he became, in 1920, the first Fellow of the Royal Society who was neither a natural nor physical scientist.

On graduating, Frazer went to Trinity College, Cambridge. This was not the most obvious decision: there was a well-worn path from Glasgow to Balliol College, Oxford – the Snell Exhibition – taken by the economist Adam Smith and the biographer John Gibson Lockhart. Although Frazer had already disavowed any belief in Christianity, it may be that a sense of filial duty prompted him to go to the more “rationalist”, and less Anglo-Catholic, Cambridge. Like many people who “grow out” of religion, he would remain obsessed by it. Likewise, having completed his graduate work with astonishingly high marks, he initially declined a fellowship, training as a barrister – a suitable “trade”, in paternal eyes – at Middle Temple instead. He never once practised law, and apart from a year at Liverpool University, stayed in Cambridge the rest of his life.

Although Frazer wrote a great many other books about the classical world – a translation of the Greek travel writer Pausanius, an edition of Ovid’s Fasti, a commentary and translation on The Library of Apollodorus – none of these would secure him such a significant place in Scotland, and Britain’s, intellectual history. The catalyst for this change was a meeting with William Robertson Smith. Smith was a year younger than Frazer, and an equally prodigious intellect. He had held the chair in Hebrew at the Aberdeen Free Church College, but his work on the Bible as a work written in a specific place and a specific time for a specific tribe had led to a trial for heresy, and his dismissal from his post. He became a reader in Arabic at Cambridge, as well as the editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica, and commissioned Frazer to write two articles, one on “taboo” and one on “totems”. The amount of research Frazer put into these meant that he could write an entire book Totemism in 1887 on the topic (and a further work, Totemism and Exogmay in 1910). Thinking about the earliest forms of religion, and how their traces might remain in later forms of belief, was fundamental to the approach in The Golden Bough. His work on these topics had a major influence on Freud, whose own work Totem And Taboo came out in 1913. Of it, Frazer wrote “I have got a new book, Totemism And Taboo [sic], the translation of a book by a German or Austrian psychologist, who borrows most of his facts from me and tries to explain them by the mental processes, especially the dreams, of the insane! Not a hopeful procedure, it seems to me, though he seems to have a great vogue with some people”.

Frazer’s long life was unexceptional: he was no Indiana Jones as a professor. He mildly shocked colleagues by marrying, at the age of 42, a French widow with two children. Lady Frazer – he was knighted in 1914 – became increasingly deaf as he became increasingly blind, and they died within a few hours of each other. Although he visited Greece and Rome, and went round Europe looking for a cure for his failing eyesight, his research was done from an armchair, not in the field. One colleague, RR Marett, called him “an athlete of the study”. Another called him “cordial” and “a bookworm”. He compared himself to a spider, sitting at the centre of a vast web of correspondence, learning from missionaries and travellers about religious behaviour around the world. His biographer, Robert Ackerman, says pointedly that he had “no sense of humour whatsoever”.

“When I first put pen to paper to write The Golden Bough I had no conception of the magnitude of the voyage on which I was embarking; I thought only to explain a single rule of an ancient Italian priesthood”, Frazer wrote. The seed from which 12 volumes grew was a single line of Virgil, and the commentary on it by Servius. At Lake Nemi in Italy, a priest-king waited in a sacred oak grove. A freed slave would eventually come there as well, take a bough from the tree, kill the old priest-king and become the new priest-king. Frazer ransacked world culture finding parallels – the Norse god Baldur, the Egyptian god Osiris, the Greek myth of Attis – and posited an idea of early fertility cults where the dying god-king replenished the earth to bring about spring after winter. The King is dead, long live the King. Frazer brought in everything from Fijian rat-gods to Vietnamese legends about snakes, to analyses of the scapegoat in various cultures and – although he hinted at it at first, then made it explicit, then purged it from the popular version – New Testament stories. Jesus, like Attis, died staked to wood; like Osiris he was resurrected and then became the judge of the “quick and the dead”. The “Lamb of God” and the sacrificial lambs of countless European mythologies were subtly placed next to each other, like a stony-silent poker-player laying down a royal flush. All myths were one myth, modulated by circumstance. In all this, he never failed to remember his Scottish roots: who else would write “if the prototype of Demeter is the Corn-Mother of Germany, the prototype of Persephone is the Harvest-Maiden which, autumn after autumn, is still made from the last sheaf in the braes of Balquhidder”?

Frazer also set out an evolutionary theory of belief. Humanity first had magic, then religion, then science, all seeking to explain the same thing: the world. Darwin may have rocked beliefs with evolutionary theory, but Frazer did something more radical: he suggested that beliefs themselves have an evolutionary history. It was shocking then that religion was just a “stepping-stone” towards truth. What is more shocking now is how clearly Frazer – ever the scholar – refused to endorse that position. At the end of The Golden Bough he imagined that even science might have to yield, and be revealed as another noble attempt at understanding the incomprehensible.

The effect of the publication was double. On one hand there was outrage, on the other, a strange sense of confirmation. As his biographer says: “Frazer’s importance to those seeking a diagnosis for the malaise of the West amounted to little more than a statement of the obvious. The war has exposed the savagery that lay beneath the veneer of civilization, and the hollowness of every belief and institution that had been assumed to rein in humanity’s baser urges. In his analysis of religion… as the institutional incarnation of a mistaken and outworn mode of understanding the world, Frazer was thoroughly in tune.”

But that is not the whole story. There is a very odd little book, called Men Of Turmoil: Biographies By Leading Authorities Of The Dominating Personalities Of Our Day, published in 1935. After learning about Stalin, Roosevelt, Hitler, Gandhi, Picasso, Einstein, Trotsky, George Bernard Shaw and Lawrence of Arabia, the reader comes to Sir James Frazer. The author of that piece, Theodore Besterman, was eloquent: “It is undoubtedly true that The Golden Bough … has made an impression chiefly on the general educated public. It was The Golden Bough … that first opened their eyes to the unity of mankind; showed them something of the brotherhood of humanity, united by its folly and superstition as well as by its endurance and heroic qualities; gave them a glimpse of the lowly birth of even their loftiest religions; and instilled in them something of his own impartial tolerance and comprehensive sympathy.”

Frazer was, as his biographer says, the “last representative of… a tradition that dates back to the Scottish Enlightenment”. With a watercolour life and an oil-painting intellect, now might be the time to resurrect Frazer as an architect of possible modernity.