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One FRAZER's EXPLANATION of MYTH, MAGIC, and RELIGION

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One FRAZER's EXPLANATION of MYTH, MAGIC, and RELIGION One FRAZER’S EXPLANATION OF MYTH, MAGIC, AND RELIGION James George Frazer presents his monumental account and explanation of Myth, Magic, and Religion as a scholarly “voyage of discovery.” Its point of embarkation is Virgil’s description of the priest-king of the grove of Diana awaiting his own murder under sacred oaks. He begins his explanation with a highly charged description of J. M. W. Turner’s picture of this event: “The scene is suffused with the golden glow of imagination . a dream-like vi- sion of the little woodland lake of Nemi- ‘Dianna’s mirror,’ as it was called by the ancients.” On the northern shore of this lake by the Alban hills near Rome, he tells, was the sacred grove and sanctuary of Dianna of the Wood, sometimes known also as the lake and grove of Aricia. In it grew a certain tree, round which prowled a man with a drawn sword, expecting at every in- stant to be set upon by an enemy: “He was a priest and a murderer; and a man for whom he looked was eventually to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary,” Frazer tells.1 After relating the gruesome tradition to several myths and rituals of magic from which the priest emerges as king, Frazer asks two questions: “Why had Diana’s priest at Nemi, the king of the Wood, to slay his predeces- sor?” and “Why before doing so had he to pluck the branch of a certain tree which the . ancients identified with Virgil’s Golden Bough?”2 To answer these questions, he invites his readers to sail along with him on a very long scholarly voyage to ancient cultures in “strange foreign lands with strange foreign peoples,” where strange and horrifying myths were told and strange and horrifying rituals of magic and religion were practiced. His description of myth, magic, and religious practices throughout the world, which he arranges according to kinds by their similarities and purposes, is astonishing, over- whelming and very impressive. Frazer explains the similarity between ancient myths and rituals in dif- ferent cultures by postulating a historical relationship of influence. Eventual- ly, he also answers the question he posed about the priest-king of Nemi by noting that ancient kings were often priests who were revered as being, in some way, gods. Such kings, he explains, were expected to provide rain and sunshine in due season, to make the crops grow. Strange as it may seem to us, he claims: a savage hardly conceives the distinction commonly drawn by more ad- vanced peoples between the natural and the supernatural. In a world 156 WITTGENSTEIN ON THE HUMAN SPIRIT so conceived he sees no limit to his power of influencing the course of nature to his own advantage.3 Frazer then goes on to explain the elaborate ritual of the priest-king of the grove of Diana awaiting his own murder as a rite of spring, the succession of the priest-kings being designed to secure the succession of the crops. He ex- plains many other rituals and ceremonies in a similar manner, describing them as the use of magic to bring about desired ends, and he explains magic as simple-minded science. One might wonder why people in ancient cultures availed themselves of magic, since it is not efficacious. Frazer’s answer is that to them, it always seemed to work: A ceremony intended to make the wind blow or the rain fall, or to work the death of an enemy, will always be followed, sooner or later by the occurrence it is meant to bring to pass. Similarly, rites observed in morning to help the sun rise, and in the spring to wake the dreaming earth from her winter sleep, will invariably appear to be crowned with success. Hence the practical savage, with his conservative instincts, might well turn a deaf ear to the subtleties of the theoretical doubter…4 Frazer traces the principles of magic to two ideas: first, that like produc- es like, or that an effect resembles its cause; second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a dis- tance after the physical contact has been severed. He calls the first the Law of Similarity and the second, the Law of Contact, or Contagion.5 He also claims that when the principles of thought in magic replace legitimate explanations, they yield a science. Illegitimate explanations yield magic, “the bastard sister of science.” He suggests that the thinking behind religion is similar, but ap- plied in a theoretical and not just a practical context, providing “a belief in powers higher than man and an attempt to propitiate them.”6 Religion, Frazer explains, assumes that we can persuade the mighty be- ings who control the course of nature to deflect it for our benefit. This view of nature is opposed to the principles of magic as well as of science, both of which assume that the processes of nature cannot be turned from their course by pleading, threats or intimidation. Perhaps this is because unlike gods, they are not taken to constitute beings that are able to understand human speech acts. Thus, the distinction between the two conflicting views of the universe turns on whether the forces governing the world are conscious and personal or unconscious and impersonal.7 Frazer adds that this explanation accounts for the strong hostility ex- pressed in many religions toward magic, as it denies the existence of supreme beings that control nature. In response to possible counterexamples, he notes that magic also deals with spirits, which are personal agents of the kind that .
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