Quotes from book
The Golden Bough

The Golden Bough

The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion is a wide-ranging, comparative study of mythology and religion, written by the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer. The Golden Bough was first published in two volumes in 1890; in three volumes in 1900; and in twelve volumes in the third edition, published 1906–15. It has also been published in several different one-volume abridgments. The work was aimed at a wide literate audience raised on tales as told in such publications as Thomas Bulfinch's The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes . The influence of The Golden Bough on contemporary European literature and thought was substantial.

“Small minds cannot grasp great ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their purblind vision, nothing seems really great and important but themselves. Such minds hardly rise into religion at all.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 4, Magic and Religion.

“In primitive society, where uniformity of occupation is the rule, and the distribution of the community into various classes of workers has hardly begun, every man is more or less his own magician; he practices charms and incantations for his own good and the injury of his enemies.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 5, The Magical Control of the Weather.

“It is a common rule with primitive people not to waken a sleeper, because his soul is away and might not have time to get back; so if the man wakened without his soul, he would fall sick. If it is absolutely necessary to rouse a sleeper, it must be done very gradually, to allow the soul time to return.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 18, The Perils of the Soul.

“When a tree comes to be viewed, no longer as the body of the tree spirit, but simply as its abode which it can quit at pleasure, an important advance has been made in religious thought.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 9, The Worship of Trees.

“By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 4, Magic and Religion.

“The Athenians regularly maintained a number of degraded and useless beings at the public expense; and when any calamity, such as plague, drought, or famine, befell the city, they sacrificed two of these outcast scapegoats.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 58, Human Scapegoats in Classical Antiquity.

“The consideration of human suffering is not one which enters into the calculations of primitive man.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 64, The Burning of Human Beings in the Fires.

“The old notion that the savage is the freest of mankind is the reverse of the truth. He is a slave, not indeed to a visible master, but to the past, to the spirits of his dead forefathers, who haunt his steps from birth to death, and rule him with a rod of iron.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 3, Sympathetic Magic (See also: the Noble savage).

“It may be suspected that the custom of employing a divine man or animal as a public scapegoat is much more widely diffused than appears from the examples cited.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 57, Public Scapegoats.

“The advance of knowledge is an infinite progression towards a goal that ever recedes.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

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

“It is not a new opinion that the Golden Bough was the mistletoe. True, Virgil does not identify but only compares it with the mistletoe. But this may be only a poetical device to cast a mystic glamour over the humble plant.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 68, The Golden Bough.

“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.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 1, The King of the Wood.

“The abundance, the solidity, and the splendor of the results already achieved by science are well fitted to inspire us with a cheerful confidence in the soundness of its method.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

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

“Indeed the influence of music on the development of religion is a subject which would repay a sympathetic study.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 31, Adonis in Cyprus.

“For the present we have journeyed far enough together, and it is time to part.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

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

“We seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 4, Magic and Religion.

“The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 18, The Perils of the Soul.

“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.

“It is for the philosophic student to trace the train of thought which underlies the magicians practice; to draw out the few simple threads of which the tangled skein is composed; to disengage the abstract principles from their concrete applications; in short, to discern the spurious science from the bastard art.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 3, Sympathetic Magic.

“I am a plain practical man, not one of your theorists and splitters of hairs and choppers of logic.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 4, Magic and Religion.

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