James Frazer: King

James Frazer was Scottish social anthropologist. Explore interesting quotes on king.
James Frazer: 100 quotes1 like

“In point of fact magicians appear to have often developed into chiefs and kings.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 6, Magicians as Kings.

“In primitive society the rules of ceremonial purity observed by divine kings, chiefs, and priests agree in many respects with the rules observed by homicides, mourners, women in childbed, girls at puberty, hunters and fishermen, and so on. To us these various classes of persons appear to differ totally in character and condition; some of them we should call holy, others we might pronounce unclean and polluted. But the savage makes no such moral distinction between them; the conceptions of holiness and pollution are not yet differentiated in his mind. To him the common feature of all these persons is that they are dangerous and in danger, and the danger in which they stand and to which they expose others is what we should call spiritual or ghostly, and therefore imaginary. The danger, however, is not less real because it is imaginary; imagination acts upon man as really does gravitation, and may kill him as certainly as a dose of prussic acid.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 21, Tabooed Things, § I : The Meaning of Taboo.

“If in the present work I have dwelt at some length on the worship of trees, it is not, I trust, because I exaggerate its importance in the history of religion, still less because I would deduce from it a whole system of mythology; it is simply because I could not ignore the subject in attempting to explain the significance of a priest who bore the title of King Of the Wood, and one of whose titles to office was the plucking of a bough — the Golden Bough”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

from a tree in the sacred grove.
Preface, 1 Brick Court Temple, London, June 1922.
The Golden Bough (1890)

“If their king is their god, he is or should be also their preserver; and if he will not preserve them, he must make room for another who will.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 17, The Burden of Royalty

“The temple of the sylvan goddess, indeed, has vanished, and the King of the Wood no longer stands sentinel over the Golden Bough.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 69, Farewell to Nemi.