Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941) was a pioneering (if armchair) anthropologist, who first published The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion in 1890. It was a hit and later re-subtitled A Study in Magic and Religion in its second and third editions. The original two volumes eventually stretched to twelve by 1915 with popular one-volume abridgements beginning in 1922 that have never gone out of print. It was a classic bestseller with an impact deep and wide upon many emergent academic disciplines and literary movements in the early twentieth century with a pervasive if subliminal influence upon later popular belief and scholarly inquiry, not least in Classical Studies. The Golden Bough popularized a set of tenacious hypotheses about ancient myth and ritual which the contributors to this volume hope to conjure back into the light of day for closer scrutiny, some of them hoping to expose and exorcize these persistent half-truths from academic discourse and their reflexive acceptance which has inspired a number of contemporary religious movements as well.
Frazer’s title refers, of course, to the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid where the Cumaean sybil instructs the hero Aeneas to pluck a branch of golden leaves from her sacred grove as a gift to Proserpina if he wishes to consult with his dead father Anchises in the underworld and safely reascend to the land of the living. Another golden branch grows immediately in its place as a good omen, signifying the eternal return of life to earth after its death in the soil. The golden bough is thus figured by Frazer as a talismanic master key to the seasonal mysteries of winter and spring, death and life, mortality and rebirth. He saw his comparative method as an analogy, a similar master key to the mythologies of the ancient world and of “primitive” societies in general, enabling us to unlock their meanings and common purpose.
The ultimate agenda of Frazer’s cross-cultural comparison, however, was to demystify the Christian religion in the minds of his Victorian readers. As he predicts in the second edition of The Golden Bough (1900), the “battery” of his comparative arsenal would ultimately “break those venerable walls” of the Christian faith (cited in chapter two by Ronald Hutton, “Sir James Frazer and The Golden Bough,” 22). For Frazer, the crucified Christ of the Gospels was to be exposed as simply another “dying god” like so many others before him—Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, Dionysus, Attis, Zagreus, et al. Hutton goes on to pinpoint the interpretive technique at the core of Frazer’s wide-ranging comparisons:
The lynchpin of The Golden Bough is one unique, ancient Roman custom, observed at a single sacred grove at Nemi in the mountains near Rome. It was dedicated to the goddess Diana and served by a priest who took office only by killing the previous man to hold the job. Frazer claimed to have found the explanation for this bizarre tradition in a formerly universal human custom of being ruled by sacred kings representing the spirit of vegetation on which farming depended. These kings were, according to Frazer, ritually killed and replaced, either when their natural powers began to wane or after a fixed number of years, such as seven. It was pretty obvious from the start that one obscure Roman rite was not the real focus of Frazer’s interest. Instead, he was gunning for Christianity, by suggesting that Jesus Christ had been identified with one of these sacred kings, and that the whole story of the Crucifixion and Resurrection arose out of a misunderstanding of this bloodthirsty, ignorant, and pointless ancient pagan tradition. (23)
Frazer was no friend of the “savage” customs and beliefs he was offering to explain in his powerful prose style. He was not a sympathetic spokesman for the worldviews and value systems of peoples whom he believed human progress had left behind, the sooner and more completely, the better. For all the wealth of detailed comparanda from around the world that he gathered into his monumental compilation, the editors and several contributors suggest that Frazer evinces a strongly top-down, even leveling impulse, a kind of intellectual imperialism, consonant with his own time and place, subsuming the whole of human history past and present into its teleological embrace. The sun of late Victorian rationalism never set on Frazer’s global empire in which he extrapolates universal principles from highly disparate, fragmentary, and often anomalous pieces of evidence, expropriating these multiple supposed analogues in trimmed or adapted forms to confirm his perceived patterns. This volume thus represents an effort to “decolonize” the history of religions from the remnants of Frazer’s hegemonistic hermeneutic.
As part of his agenda, Frazer seems also to have sought to startle, perhaps even titillate his readership by describing the salacious rites which lie behind myths of the dying god’s sacrifice and resurrection in which female sexuality was celebrated in a hieros gamos between a voluptuous fertility goddess and a mortal human monarch. This “sacred marriage” was enacted in formal religious ceremonies and institutionalized in cultic prostitution in order to promote the prospering of crops and herds and human offspring, a process which periodically required the ritual slaughter of the divine queen’s human consort. As Jesus says in the Gospel of John 12:24: “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” Ironically, Frazer’s supposed revelation of these pagan origins of the Christian religion fed not only the growing skepticism toward traditional religious belief in twentieth-century academic circles, but conversely, as the editors aver, his work helped inspire a host of popular neopagan revivals prompted by Frazer’s memorable if imperfectly sourced dramatizations of fertility religion in his book.
Some of these neopagan cults, the editors point out, are thriving today in explicitly antinomian or anti-Christian forms, some with an eco- or earth-friendly resonance, like the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) with its “Gnostic Mass,” feminist Wicca with its “Drawing Down the Moon” and the Church of Satan with its “Messe Noir.” And despite the prominence of female priestesses and adepts in most of these new cults, the editors dryly note that many contemporary neopagan communions were founded not by women, but by men (Aleister Crowley, Gerald Gardner, Anton LaVey) who brought nineteenth-century Frazerian ideas of “ancient paganism” to their creations, including the trope of fertility, sexual promiscuity—hence nudity—as exemplifying pre-Christian “primitive” religion. In OTO’s Gnostic Mass, after disrobing for the invocation of the goddess, the priestess re-robes if the Mass is being performed in “a savage country,” Crowley showing his approval for what has been considered “savage” or “primitive” in Western culture, i.e. nakedness, and turning it on its head; clothing now being a sign of savagery in contemporary Pagan religion. In both the OTO and the Church of Satan, the male members even remain clothed while the females are naked, thus reproducing the traditional historical associations of the male with concepts like reason, virtue, and culture, and the female with the body, matter, and nature. (3)
In the editors’ view, these modern appropriations of Frazer’s ideas, only now with a reversed polarity of value, opportunistically exploit and replicate the sexist and retrograde paradigms of his binary view of gender roles. According to Alessandro Testa in chapter eighteen, who is friendlier to these permutations of “popular Frazerism,” the fertility goddess or Earth Mother ideology has become nativized or normalized as a modern “folk theory,” a potent interpretive lens that legitimizes the new religions’ recruitment of local traditions and contemporary secular “-isms,” imbuing them with an aura of antiquity and fostering an experience among their adherents “of novel, ‘re-enchanted’ forms of religiosity” (303), yielding a communal, perhaps even therapeutic response to the anomie and social fragmentation of modern life.
It comes as no surprise to this reviewer that a scholarly project in comparative religion conceived and executed well over a century ago in advance of modern field studies and refined interpretive models should require some serious correction and revision—shaking the tree, to be sure, but not snapping off the bough completely. Some features of Frazer’s ground-breaking comparisons have proven provocative and heuristic, if in need of further contextualization. Strong similarities between myths and rituals can be illuminating, if only to highlight their differences in sharper definition. The strongest essays in this collection do just that. They are less general and more specific, showing where Frazer’s comparative approach identified key questions and proposed possible answers for which the evidence was then and has often remained partial and inadequate. These are studies on the Ancient Near East and early Aegean and Classical world, a few of which this review will now highlight as the most ground-breaking, corrective, or confirmative of earlier conclusions.
Martti Nissinen examines the goddess “Ištar’s Sexual Agency in Akkadian Love Literature,” surveying that divinity’s multiple roles in Mesopotamian texts where she appears as a mother and daughter as well as a lover and spouse of human kings. Her roles transcend the goddess’s own sexual activity, taking an interest in the romantic lives of her mortal subjects, both men and women, in their various social roles and relationships throughout life. In poems and prayers, Ištar is invoked more as a friendly facilitator or matchmaker, “playing Cupid,” than as a sexually interested party herself.
Stephanie Lynn Budin complains about “The Fads that Drive Us: From Frazer, Freud, and Foucault to Butler and Connell,” each of these theorists producing interpretive formulas which could become domineering prisms, magnifying and distorting at the same time, especially in the area of her own expertise, the ancient Near East. Like Nissinen, Budin believes Frazer’s “fertility paradigm” has flattened our understanding of the goddess Ištar, just as Sigmund Freud’s notion of passive female sexuality has encumbered an understanding of the dynamic relations between the god Enlil and his spouse Ninlil. Michel Foucault’s binary of masculine penetration versus female reception similarly skews the study of ancient homosexuality, just as Judith Butler’s theory of gender as performance has clouded studies of the Mesopotamian assinnu, a non-binary figure who may appear among female cultic attendants, but is of a third gender.
Caroline Ward Smith challenges the supposed figure of “The Hebrew Bible Scapegoat: Complicating a Frazerian Typology.” Smith observes that the supposed scapegoat of Leviticus, an innocent victim blamed for the sins of others and suffering harm or death on their behalf, is a chimera. The Levitican scapegoat is not a victim: it is not blamed, punished or actually harmed, but serves a healing function. Frazer was thus barking up the wrong tree when he stressed this particular example, but the pattern he adduces does have some biblical precedent in the destruction of Jericho described in the Book of Joshua where people and animals pay with their lives for the deeds of others, benefitting the people of Israel who are thus enabled to enter their Promised Land.
Isabel Köster contributes “Reading about Nymphs and Roman Soldiers with and without Frazer,” comparing that scholar’s theories with what we can learn from votive inscriptions to local divinities by soldiers in Roman Britain. Köster begins with naiads, whom Frazer largely restricts to their role as fertility agents. However, the invocations of nymphs in Roman Britain express a more general piety, a desire to be on good terms with all the local genii of land and water, reiterating a theme of this collection as a whole, that Frazer emphasized one particular aspect of the traditions he examined, always seeking to provide a universally applicable explanation for their purpose, thus oversimplifying the religious complexity and functional overdetermination of ancient praxis and belief.
The editors and contributors have offered a searching critique of the quality and influence of Frazer’s classic work—its biases and blind-spots, its methodological weaknesses, especially his extrapolation from decontextualized instances and conflation of similar comparanda into the larger patterns he infers. And it is interesting, even amusing to observe that the most lasting influence of this staunch Victorian rationalist, who disdained the backward mentality of his subjects, is his one contribution that still has serious “legs” in the twenty-first century in popular neopagan revivals on Frazerian principles.
Table of Contents
Caroline Tully and Stephanie L. Budin, “Introduction”
Part 1: Preliminaries
- Tim Parkin, “The Golden Bough: Setting the Scene”
- Ronald Hutton, “Sir James Frazer and The Golden Bough”
- Federico Delgado Rosa, “‘Off with His Head!’ Wilhelm Mannhardt’s Wald- und Feldkulte at the Roots of The Golden Bough”
- Julia Phillips, “The Golden Bough and the Press”
- Ryan C. Chester, “Hypothesis as Theory: The Golden Bough and the Obstinate Nostrums in Religious Studies and the Humanities”
Part 2: Ancient Near East
- Martti Nissinen, “Ištar’s Sexual Agency in Akkadian Love Literature”
- JoAnn Scurlock, “Dying and Rising Gods in Ancient Mesopotamian Religion and the Frazerian Paradigm of Fertility Religion”
- Stephanie Lynn Budin, “The Fads that Drive Us: From Frazer, Freud, and Foucault to Butler and Connell”
- Caroline Ward Smith, “The Hebrew Bible Scapegoat: Complicating a Frazerian Typology”
Part 3 Aegean and Classical
- Christine Morris, “Embracing the Goddess: Evans and the Minoan Feminine Divine”
- Stephen O’Brien, “Guess Who’s Back, Back Again? Graeber and Wengrow’s Resurrection of Minoan Matriarchy in The Dawn of Everything”
- Saskia Moorrees, “Same Same, but Different: Frazer’s Sympathetic Law of Similarity and the Study of Greco-Roman Defixiones”
- Isabel Köster, “Reading about Nymphs and Roman Soldiers with and without Frazer”
Part 4 Pagan Studies
- Helen Cornish, “Surviving Frazerisms: Twenty-First Century Witchcraft and the Eternal Return”
- Caroline Tully, “Moon and Huntress: Frazer’s Arician Diana in Italian-American Witchcraft”
- Vanessa Toupin-Lavallée, “Lilith, from Demoness to Mother Goddess: A Frazerian Legacy in French Luciferian Wicca?”
- Ive Brissman, “Contemporary Tree Lore and the Ancient Worship of Trees: The Contributions of James Frazer to the Contemporary Study of Religion and Ecology”
Part 5 The Modern World
- Alessandro Testa, “Derivative and Associative Popular Frazerism: A Cultural Complex at Work in Late Modern Europe”
- Fritz Lampe, “Frazer and the Magical Oath”
Part 6 Coda
- Robert Fraser, “Diana’s Mirror: The Reflective Surface of Frazer’s The Golden Bough”