James Frazer

From Philosopedia

James George Frazer [Sir] (1 January 1854 - 7 May 1941)

Frazer, a Scottish social anthropologist, folklorist, and classicist, was born in Glasgow, Scotland. He studied at Glasgow and at Cambridge, spending most of his adult life as a fellow of Trinity College (from 1871 to 1941).

Frazer's major work was The Golden Bough (1890; rewritten in 12 volumes, 1911-1915).

He became professor of social anthropology at Liverpool in 1907 and was knighted in 1914.

According to NNDB,

The first published product of this work was Totemism, published by him in 1887. But in 1890 he produced The Golden Bough, an impressive tome which compiled a wealth of information on the myths, religions, social taboos, and customs of a broad array of cultures. It presented a rich, exotic diversity of customs and beliefs, whose novelty provoked startling new insights about the nature of society and humanity. But it also highlighted the existence of key themes - such as birth, growth, death, and rebirth – and it underscored their importance and their commonality across broad cultural divides.

Naturally, the impact on literature and the arts was huge, influencing James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Robert Graves, and Mary Renault to name but a few.

But it also tackled the subject of religion in a way that was relatively new – that is, as a subject for secular study. And it led readers to consider the parallels between earlier forms of Christianity and the rituals and beliefs of various primitive tribes. But it so scandalized the public that he should include the story of Christ and the crucifixion along side "heathen" tales with similar themes, that the material had to be removed to an appendix in later editions. And in fact an abridged version removed the offending material altogether.

But Sigmund Freud meanwhile found the work rich with literal and symbolic information relevant to his developing psychoanalytic theories. And Swiss psychologist Carl Jung was very impressed by Frazer’s observations, using them as a stepping-stone to the creation of his spiritually oriented theory of the collective unconscious, especially as it pertained to what he called the universal religious impulse within mankind. Joseph Campbell, the modern icon of comparative mythology, certainly drew on Frazer (along with Max Muller and Sir Edward Tylor) in formulating his influential insights into the role of mythology, for society and the psyche.

Meanwhile, philosopher René Girard built on Frazer’s The Golden Bough to create his theory of mimesis. And of course, whole generations of anthropologists have been inspired by the work of Frazer, in one way or another, to better document and study the religions, myths, and social forms of primitive peoples - in search of an ever more accurate picture of our differences and commonalities, and of the underlying forces that shape us and are shaped by us.

In the intervening years, since the publication of the Golden Bough and its later expanded editions (which at one point filled some 12 volumes), anthropology has disproved a good deal of Frazer’s treasured assumptions and conclusions. Archaeology refutes his claim for the annual killing of the “Year King” within ancient cultures. And cultural anthropology has shown that human societies do not follow one singular path of development - as the paradigm of Social Darwinism had led Frazer to assume. In addition, the ethnographic material upon which he based his various conclusions has shown to be prohibitively incomplete and skewed by the bias of the white colonialists who collected it. However, many of his ideas about the role and purpose of sympathetic magic remain in use today.

Beyond all of this however, Frazer’s magnificent undertaking, including The Golden Bough, must be acknowledged for the sheer brilliance and audacity of its scope, and for the ingenuity that underlay its inception. Frazer himself must further be acknowledged for having the willingness to scrutinize his own culture -- and hold it up for intelligent, sympathetic comparison to other belief systems -- at a time when the general opinion was that other customs and belief systems were merely inferior institutions in need of eradication.

Given the fervor with which Christian missionaries sought to wipe out other spiritual traditions, it is ironic then that it was Frazer’s work with The Golden Bough which aided and inspired the rebirth of paganism. Frazer’s detailed ethnography of non-Christian tribal cultures, along with his analysis of the ancient European rituals and customs once associated with nature and goddess worship, became primary source material for those seeking to reconstitute what the agents of Christianity had obliterated. Thus in the 1950s, years after Frazer’s passing, Gerald Gardner and Aleister Crowley (drawing also on the work of H. P. Blavatsky and of the The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn) laid the foundations for Wicca and other branches of neopaganism.

In 1931 Frazer went blind but continued his work with the aid of secretaries and amanuenses. Frazer died in Cambridge. His wife (Lilly, or Lady Frazer) died a few hours later. They were interred together, side by side, in St. Gile's Cemetery, Cambridge.