James George Frazer

• 1. Introduction

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  James George Frazer was born on the 1st of January 1854 in Glasgow, Scotland, the son of a chemist named Daniel F. Frazer. He would spend most of his life inside the walls of Trinity College, Cambridge, rarely venturing far from the library. He never conducted fieldwork in the places he wrote about. Instead, he mailed questionnaires to missionaries and colonial officials scattered across the globe, gathered their replies, and wove the answers into what became one of the most influential works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. How does a man who barely left England shape the way an entire civilization understands myth, religion, and the origin of death? And what happens when the world catches up to the assumptions buried inside his grand theory?

• 2. The Scholar Who Stayed Home

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  Frazer graduated with honours in classics from Trinity College, Cambridge, and his dissertation on Plato was eventually published decades later as The Growth of Plato's Ideal Theory. He was elected to a Trinity Fellowship four times and remained a Classics Fellow all his life. He studied law at the Middle Temple but never practised. The one exception to his institutional life was a single year, 1907-1908, spent at the University of Liverpool. His principal sources were ancient histories and the written responses that came back by post from missionaries and imperial officials who had direct contact with the cultures Frazer analyzed from a distance. When Frazer's Australian colleague Walter Baldwin Spencer asked to use native terminology to describe Aboriginal Australian cultures, arguing that Christian terms would be foreign and misleading to those cultures, Frazer refused. He told Spencer that native terms would seem pedantic and off-putting to readers. The preference for familiar language over accurate language would come to define both his method and his legacy.

• 3. The Golden Bough

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  The first edition of The Golden Bough appeared in two volumes in 1890, a study of ancient cults, rites, and myths and their parallels in early Christianity. By the third edition, finished in 1915, the work had expanded to twelve volumes, with a supplemental thirteenth volume added in 1936. Frazer published a single-volume abridgement in 1922, largely compiled by his wife, Lady Frazer, with some controversial material on Christianity removed. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, cited Frazer's Totemism and Exogamy frequently in his own Totem and Taboo. The symbolic cycle of life, death, and rebirth that Frazer traced across the myths of many peoples captured the imagination of a generation of artists. T. S. Eliot drew on Frazer's framework when writing The Waste Land, published in 1922. Frazer was the first scholar to describe in detail the relationships between myths and rituals, and his vision of the annual sacrifice of the Year-King, though not supported by later field studies, kept mythographers returning to his work for its dense documentary detail.

• 4. Magic, Religion, Science

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  Among the most discussed elements of the third edition of The Golden Bough is Frazer's theory of cultural evolution, which proposed that cultures pass through three stages: from magic, to religion, to science. Frazer's framework diverged from that of Auguste Comte because he argued that magic was initially separate from religion and always preceded it. He also defined magic as something distinct from superstition and belief in the supernatural. Frazer saw magic and science as sharing an emphasis on experimentation and practicality, a comparison broad enough that almost any disproven scientific hypothesis technically counts as magic under his system. Religion, by contrast, he defined as belief in personal supernatural forces and the attempt to appease them. As historian of religion Jason Josephson-Storm described Frazer's position, Frazer viewed religion as "a momentary aberration in the grand trajectory of human thought." Frazer was also aware that his stages could reverse: he noted that alchemy underwent a revival in Early Modern Europe and became chemistry, effectively cycling magic back into science. At the same time, he displayed what the source describes as a deep anxiety about widespread belief in magic empowering the masses, a bias against lower-class people that sat alongside his theoretical framework.

• 5. Stories of Death's Origin

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  Frazer collected origin-of-death stories from throughout the British Empire and organized them into four recurring types. The first type, common in Africa, involves two divine messengers: one carrying the promise of eternal life, the other carrying death. In Zulu tradition, the god Unkulunkulu sent the chameleon with a message of life but grew impatient and sent the lizard with a message of death. The lizard arrived first, and so death became fixed in the world. Because of the chameleon's delay, Bantu peoples such as the Ngoni have punished both animals; children may be allowed to feed tobacco to a chameleon so the nicotine kills it. In a Bura story from northern Nigeria, a malicious lizard named Agadzagadza told the people to bury a corpse before a worm could deliver the correct instruction to hang it in a tree and revive it. The second type links death to the moon's cycle of disappearance and return. In Fiji, the rat god Ra Kalavo refused to let humans return from death the way the moon does, insisting they die like rats instead. The third type involves animals that shed their skin. In a Vietnamese account, snakes overheard a divine command and threatened to bite the messenger unless he reversed the decree, leaving humans mortal while snakes renew eternally. The fourth type, built around the banana plant, holds that a creator once offered the first couple a stone, which they refused, before lowering a banana instead. The creator told them they would live as the banana lives: bearing fruit and then dying, rather than enduring like stone.

• 6. Lilly Frazer and the Work Behind the Work

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  Frazer married Elizabeth "Lilly" Grove in 1896. Her father was from Alsace, and she was a writer in her own right. Early in the marriage, Lilly concluded that Frazer's reputation was not equal to his abilities. She became his manager and publicist, guarding access to his office. He was indifferent to prizes; she valued them. She arranged translations of his work into French and adapted his Golden Bough as a book of children's stories called The Leaves from the Golden Bough. The 1922 abridged edition of The Golden Bough was largely compiled by her. Frazer was severely visually impaired from 1930 onward. He and Lilly died in Cambridge within a few hours of each other on the 7th of May 1941. They are buried together at the St Giles, also known as Ascension Parish Burial Ground, in Cambridge. A public lectureship in social anthropology was established in Frazer's honour at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Glasgow, and Liverpool in 1921, two decades after his work had already reshaped how scholars and artists understood the human past.

• 7. Criticism and Legacy

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  In the 1980s, the social anthropologist Edmund Leach published a series of critical articles, one of which appeared as the lead piece in Anthropology Today, volume 1, 1985. Leach criticized The Golden Bough for its broad comparisons across widely separated cultures, though Leach often based his critique on the abridged edition, which omits the archaeological details that support the fuller argument. More recently, critics have pointed to what are described as imperialist, anti-Catholic, classist, and racist elements in Frazer's work, including his assumption that European peasants, Aboriginal Australians, and Africans represented earlier, fossilised stages of cultural evolution. Historian Timothy Larsen argued that Frazer systematically applied western European Christian terms to non-Christian cultures, distorting them to make them appear more Christian. Frazer called the elders of the Njamus of East Africa "equivalent to the Levites of Israel" and described the Grand Lama of Lhasa as "the Buddhist Pope... the man-god who bore his people's sorrows, the Good Shepherd who laid down his life for the sheep." Larsen concluded that this terminological strategy was not intended to make foreign cultures seem familiar, but to make Christianity itself look primitive and barbaric. Frazer is commonly read as an atheist because of his criticism of Christianity in The Golden Bough, but his later writings and unpublished materials suggest an ambivalent relationship with Neoplatonism and Hermeticism. A 1973 review of a book focused on the Hittite city of Nerik noted approvingly that its author "sticks closely to the fully quoted documentary evidence in a way that would have been unfamiliar to the late Sir James Frazer" - a backhanded tribute to the scale of Frazer's reach, and to the limits of the method that made it possible.