The Golden Bough was originally published in 1890, and can be described as comparative mythology. It is a very famous book. Which has influenced the modern understanding of world religions and superstitions. I recognized the introductory chapter as one I'd heard before, about the office known as, "The King of The Wood" or priest of Artemis in the sacred grove of Nemi, the office of which is passed by means of mortal combat.
"A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier.
The post which he held by this precarious tenure carried with it the title of king; but surely no crowned head ever lay uneasier, or was visited by more evil dreams, than his. For year in, year out, in summer and winter, in fair weather and in foul, he had to keep his lonely watch, and whenever he snatched a troubled slumber it was at the peril of his life. The least relaxation of his vigilance, the smallest abatement of his strength of limb or skill of fence, put him in jeopardy; grey hairs might seal his death-warrant."
But the main part of the book's contents were not what I expected.
It is a study in etymology of ritual practices, or maybe it could be compared with the work of the Brothers Grimm, who by collecting and noting similarities and differences in folktales and the pronunciation of words yields convincing conclusions about how practices in different times and places are essentially similar.
The vast bulk of the book consists of cataloging similar rituals, of magic, religions of various peoples of the world, beliefs about witches, sorcerers, fertility, etc.
The most impressive thing about The Golden Bough is the breadth of its scope. To illustrate a point about how magic is supposed to work, for instance in a ritual performed to bring the rain, Frazier will adduce exhibits of rituals from across Europe, practices of American Indian tribes, rites performed by shamans in Africa, Australian aborigines, the people of India, and rituals from Japan. To illustrate the beliefs about men who are given some special status as magical protectors of the vitality of villages or crops, or of good weather, he gives examples from South America, Ancient Greece and Rome, Tibet etc, and compares the practices and taboos with passages from the Bible, the Illiad, the Ennead and others.
In citing sources from around the world to attest to the rituals of various people he will, when necessary, cite reports by ancient historians like Herodotus or Tacitus.
Altogether the strength, and most striking characteristic of The Golden Bough is that it appears to show a broad continuity of beliefs in magic, with similar rituals apparently resting upon similar assumptions by people from around the world.
The main question, or riddle raised when all of these examples and continuities are juxtaposed before us, is: why are all of these so similar? It would be very hard to believe that, as with the case of the tales cataloged by the Brothers Grimm, the customs had been diffused by people with a common origin migrating into all parts of the world.
The psychologist Carl Jung mentioned Frazier's book in "Man and His Symbols", the connection is obvious, Jung's answer to why beliefs and rituals are so similar in unconnected or isolated tribes around the world is that they all have similar instincts, inherited from their common ancestors in the remote past. This is how I understand Jung's notion of the collective unconcious. This collective unconcious is an impulse that arises from human biology to expect certain categories and relationships, and thus to construct stories informed by these vague expectations, in a way similar to how birds have the impulse to build nests, or spiders to build webs. Jung described how, in his younger years he had been an avid student of comparative anatomy, such as the similarities of organs and structures in different species of fish. So, for him, "The Golden Bough" was something like a comparative anatomy of belief and ritual. Jung identified one of his qualifications as his broad knowledge of mythologies, and saw everything, from medieval alchemy to the UFO sightings in the 50s as primarily of psychological significance. He must be right to some degree, because it is the mind that percieves, and makes sense of all things according to its priors and a process of selection. Take anything new, or out of common experience, say the introduction of plants or animals from newly explored lands, or spacecraft, or a technology out of Star Trek, and present it for the first time to someone from the medieval world, and someone from the 50s, and they will not describe it, nor recognize it in the same way.
In more recent times, for example in the book, "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature", by Stephen Pinker there is an appendix of the evidence for default assumptions and the intuitive rules of thumb that people use in a wide variety of situations, as in courts of law, economics and understanding types of loans etc. a list from "Human Universals" a book by Donald Brown, an American professor of anthropology (emeritus) of the University of California, published by McGraw Hill in 1991. Brown's human universals, "comprise those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exception."
The purpose of Pinker's book, carried out well, was to demolish the idea that the human mind's contents and processes may be determined entirely by our experiences. The claim of Empiricists of the 16th century, that our minds from conception were blank slates that were in the course of our lives filled in by our experiences alone. But at the very least, some categories prior to all experience, like space, time and causation are necessary to begin to understand the impressions that come from the senses.
At any rate, in The Golden Bough, Frazier discovers underlying principles and specific categories of understanding of magic. The belief in the efficacy of magic, he believes is ubiquitous and primary. Magic came before religion, in his opinion. His distinction between magic and religion, including types of animism and polytheism, is that in magic, a charm or ritual is supposed to be directly effective, and a person can do it on their own. But if they believe that the effect they desire is under the control of some other being or spirit, then they propitiate them, either with praise and maybe gifts or threats.
The idea of threatening a god might seem ridiculous to us, but, years ago I had heard that there is a well known practice, when a homeowner is anxious to sell their house, of burying a statue of St. Joseph in the yard, upside-down, to help things along!
With the following prayer; "O, Saint Joseph, you who taught our Lord the carpenter’s trade, and saw to it that he was always properly housed, hear my earnest plea. I want you to help me now as you helped your foster-child Jesus, and as you have helped many others in the matter of housing. I wish to sell this house quickly, easily, and profitably and I implore you to grant my wish by bringing me a good buyer, one who is eager, compliant, and honest, and by letting nothing impede the rapid conclusion of the sale.
Dear Saint Joseph, I know you would do this for me out of the goodness of your heart and in your own good time, but my need is very great now and so I must make you hurry on my behalf.
Saint Joseph, I am going to place you in a difficult position with your head in darkness and you will suffer as our Lord suffered, until this house is sold. Then, Saint Joseph, I swear before the cross and God Almighty, that I will redeem you and you will receive my gratitude and a place of honor in my home."
To be clear, this practice is not one of the anecdotes from "The Golden Bough," but it illustrates the character of similar customs perfectly.
In terms of magic the first major class is sympathetic magic, or the belief that like causes produce like effects. In the book, page after page are devoted to showing how those who wish to bring rain will sprinkle water through sieves at rituals, or dunk things in rivers, or wade in them with their bare feet. How rituals for rain might involve sacrificing a black sheep or other dark-colored animal resembling a rain cloud. And the opposite cases are laid out beside them, where if people wish for the rain to abate then they sacrifice a white sheep, or are forbidden to go out of the hut, or near the river, or must stay indoors, near the fire.
Another type of magic discussed is the taboo, or numa, where a chief or a shaman is believed to be invested with a special power which can be dangerous to ordinary people. The interesting property of this power is that it is contagious. A touch is believed to transmit it to another person or object. Sometimes in order to maintain one's magic power they must be insulated from the ground. If a contamination occurs then a ritual purification may be called for. Frazier uses the analogy of electricity, but in some cases described I am reminded more of radiation, and, of-course contagion appears to reference the spread of disease germs.
The interesting thing about these examples is, how much do the modern concepts of contagion, conduction, insulation, etc. derive from the same instincts that give rise to these magical beliefs, and how much of it is derived from our real understanding, drawn from experimentation with the phenomena of disease, electricity and radiation?
There is a bit of a chicken and egg problem here.
Another conclusion I came to from Frazier's book: There is no naturalistic explanation of a majority of these magical practices and folk beliefs.
I was a fan of the old Dr. Who, and in those stories a folktale or myth would often form the inspiration for a tale of terror involving a monster invading the Earth or something. But there would be a naturalistic explanation given for, for instance why salt was an effective weapon against a monster from folklore that was said to be thwarted by salt. Or think of another story, like the 80's British movie, "Life Force", about something like a vampire that comes out of hibernation on a platform in Earth's orbit and feeds on humans, but can be killed by a stake through its mid-section. In such stories there is a tendency to try to harmonize a supernatural monster that does not fit our modern worldview by naturalizing it, making a cause and effect mechanism, and bring the fear and dread associated with a monster into the story, to ultimately be defeated by the scientist. (Captain Nemo in a phone booth.) Frazier doesn't leave much room for that approach. It appears that these primitive beliefs that we've left behind really are mistaken, and baseless. There is no efficacy to be found in almost anything he catalogs. We are not looking at disciplines that give us access to under-utilized human ability, nor potent botanical medicines or hints at penicillin in a witches brew, or, for the most part, practices that give protection from disease. Many of the rituals are as likely to do harm as good, particularly to one’s health. People chosen as llamas or sacred kings can rarely be supposed to have been picked on the basis of any real merit. Taboos complicate life severely, and sometimes dictate episodes of real peril, and do not confer benefits. I see almost all of it as waste.
But considering how common these practices are, rituals, taboos and sacrifices, I must conclude that there is no society anywhere in the world or throughout history, no matter how primitive, how precarious, barely above subsistence, which is not spending a part of its meager wealth on such waste in practices mistakenly believed to have beneficial effects.
This waste, I have to wonder about. Has it pushed human biological and civilizational development into paths that would not have been taken if our motivations were more strictly and ultimately utilitarian? Does it not mean that even in the situations of most precarious subsistence there must always have been an excess of wealth or time, or mental capacity which was available beyond that which was needed for mere survival? What are the implications of that?
A few months back I read James Burnham's "The Managerial Revolution" and then the 80's era expansion of the theory by Samuel Francis, "Leviathan and its Enemies" to get an understanding of what this term, "managerialism" meant, which commentators and scholars I follow online had been talking about. This formed a major turning point in my understanding of politics and economics, notably that there is an ever-present element of waste in economics and war. Until then I had grown to understand the free market as fundamentally vastly more efficient than planned economies, such as the Russian or mid-century German state, but Burnham turned this conception on its ear, identifying symptoms of inefficiency in capitalism, and pointing to a rising standard of living, a more energetic, motivated and expansionist culture in the countries with the supposedly inefficient and ridiculous command economies. It dawned on me that economic systems that could shock the developed world with their rapid buildup of modern weapons of war, and expand into orbit a full decade ahead of the supposedly more advanced and efficient ones may not have been characterized completely accurately.
Burnham in discussing the criticism of these states as having "a war economy" answers by pointing out that war is an ever-present factor in all human civilizations, and one in which failure can spell the end of a culture's ability to continue to exist as a unit with independence and self-determination. This is as true, he says, when the conventional weapons of war are swords and arrows as it is when the weapons of war are tanks and bombers. In all cases the nations that can best produce and provision for the contemporary methods of combat will subdue the others.
This was a surprising revelation to me, because my libertarian understanding leads me to see war as a waste, and an alternative claim on the wealth that could provide people with a better standard of living. Burnham seems to be saying that you can have both at the same time, and anyway, that preparing for war is an absolute necessity that has a superior claim on the wealth that we might otherwise enhance our lives with.
So, there is more than one ever-present interest which claims the resources that could otherwise support survival at the most basic level.
The patterns of belief in magic laid out in "The Golden Bough" also make me wonder about the psychology of supporting personal choices like changing lightbulbs to fight global warming. There is a sense in which I think it might be natural for people to see themselves unequal to the challenge of changing the temperature of the world, particularly if their house has fewer than six bedrooms, and they own at most two cars, and no boat or private jet, and their loudest protests against military action goes unheeded. (Since any military maneuver will involve more fuel burned or metal smelted than even their largest consumer choices.) That is, I would think folks would see their personal choices holding back rising sea levels as no more likely to have effect than King Canute ordering the waves to withdraw, yet, it seems that small personal acts of devotion as a certain method of ensuring the continuity of sun and rain, of the fertility of crops, and abundance of game may actually be the more common, more natural attitude. Such an ideal may be prevalent because it appeals powefully to our instincts.
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