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The Golden Bough

lpetrich

lpetrich

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 The Golden Bough
The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (retitled The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion in its second edition) 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 1906–1915. It has also been published in several different one-volume abridgments.

razer attempted to define the shared elements of religious belief and scientific thought, discussing fertility rites, human sacrifice, the dying god, the scapegoat, and many other symbols and practices whose influences had extended into 20th-century culture. His thesis is that old religions were fertility cults that revolved around the worship and periodic sacrifice of a sacred king. Frazer proposed that mankind progresses from magic through religious belief to scientific thought.

Frazer's thesis was developed in relation to an incident in the Aeneid, in which Aeneas and the Sibyl present the golden bough taken from a sacred grove to the gatekeeper of Hades to gain admission. ... The lake of Nemi, also known as "Diana's Mirror", was a place where religious ceremonies and the "fulfillment of vows" of priests and kings were held.

Frazer based his thesis on the pre-Roman priest-king Rex Nemorensis by the shore of Lake Nemi, who was ritually murdered by his successor. The king was the incarnation of a dying and reviving god, a solar deity who underwent a mystic marriage to a goddess of the Earth. He died at the harvest and was reincarnated in the spring. Frazer claims that this legend of rebirth was central to almost all of the world's mythologies.
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How good is that work?

There are at least two parts of it that one can assess.

The first is his collection of folklore and mythology and magical and religious practice.

The second is his thesis that many societies go through a phase of regularly selecting and then killing sacred kings.

The first one could well be good, while the second one is doubtful at best. My reason for skepticism is the wide range of societies that literate people have discovered and documented, especially over the last half millennium. Societies that range from Paleolithic (small bands of nomads) to Mesolithic / Epipaleolithic (larger sedentary communities) to Early Neolithic (similar-sized communities of farmers) to Late Neolithic (sizable cities), to the Copper Age then the Bronze Age then the Iron Ages, and finally to literate large-scale societies.

So if societies go through some phase of regularly killing sacred kings, then some of them ought to have been caught in the act.
 
I recall that James Frazier tried to make a distinction between magic and religion, but I found it unconvincing, and I still do.

Two main types:
 Theurgy - "god working" - making or convincing some deity or similar entity to do what one wants
 Thaumaturgy - miracle working

 Magic (supernatural) --  History of magic -- is a very widespread belief in premodern societies, with many people in fear of malicious magic. That means that this pseudotechnology is likely as old as our species. I consider it very unlikely that people started doing it around when people started writing about them.

There are several kinds like  Divination and  Apotropaic magic (keeping away bad things) and  Sympathetic magic - I recall JF mentioning it and "contagious magic". SM is based on similarity, and CM on contact. Voodoo dolls are a form of SM, for instance.

The Wikipedia article mentioned speculations about Paleolithic cave paintings as a form of SM. The oldest known ones are some 40,000 years old, and if the SM hypothesis is even partially correct, that means that this pseudotechnology has been practiced over much of the existence of our species.


Pseudotechnology - like pseudoscience
 
How good is it? It is largely responsible for launching the modern field of folkloristics. Such works are difficult to assess; they are important as much for the influence they wielded over the development of their area of inquiry than for any of their specific data or insights.
 
So his work was good in that, even if his big thesis doesn't hold up, his thesis of regularly-killed sacred kings.

 List of largest cities throughout history and  List of largest European cities in history and  Historical urban community sizes - to give numbers to what I'm saying.

Examples of my classification:
  • Paleolithic (nomadic): Australia, far northern latitudes: Canada, Alaska, Greenland
  • Mesolithic (sedentary): Pacific Northwest
  • Early Neolithic (small communities): New Guinea, eastern North America
  • Late Neolithic (relatively large cities): Aztecs, Mayans, Incas, Cahokians, Cucuteni-Trypillia
  • Bronze Age: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Crete, Harappans
At this point, the more technologically advanced societies are either literate or else have literate neighbors, with more recent ones all being literate.
 
lpetrich said:
So his work was good in that, even if his big thesis doesn't hold up, his thesis of regularly-killed sacred kings.

 List of largest cities throughout history and  List of largest European cities in history and  Historical urban community sizes - to give numbers to what I'm saying.

Examples of my classification:
  • Paleolithic (nomadic): Australia, far northern latitudes: Canada, Alaska, Greenland
  • Mesolithic (sedentary): Pacific Northwest
  • Early Neolithic (small communities): New Guinea, eastern North America
  • Late Neolithic (relatively large cities): Aztecs, Mayans, Incas, Cahokians, Cucuteni-Trypillia
  • Bronze Age: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Crete, Harappans
At this point, the more technologically advanced societies are either literate or else have literate neighbors, with more recent ones all being literate.
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An exception to your generalisation could be the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucuteni–Trypillia_culture (which you do mention, sometimes also referred to as Tripolye in the literature after the Russian name variant of Trypillia in Ukraine) - with settlements that were by some estimates larger than contemporary Sumerian cities but no literate culture anywhere in sight, unless we make a big leap and include Vinča symbols as a form of writing.
 
Yes,  Cucuteni–Trypillia culture - Maidanets grew to size 10,000 – 29,000 – 46,000 people.

Human population dynamics in Europe over the Last Glacial Maximum | PNAS - the highest densities were in southern bits of Europe, about 0.2 people per square kilometer, and a tenth as much in central Europe.

Estimations of Population Density for Selected Periods Between the Neolithic and AD 1800 - 56680286.pdf

 Linear Pottery culture (LBK; approx. 5500 - 4500 BCE) - first farmers in central Europe: 0.6 p/km^2

Iron Age (early Celts; approx. 1200 BCE - 1 CE): 1.2 - 2.3 p/km^2

Roman Empire (approx. 1 CE - 450 CE): 10.8 - 17.9 p/km^2

Merovingian (450 CE - 751 CE): 0.9 - 1.3 p/km^3

Early modern (preindustrial): 80 p/km^3
 
 Three-age system -  Stone Age,  Bronze Age, and  Iron Age - classification developed in the 19th cy.

That article has a section on "The End of the Iron Age". Strictly speaking, the Iron Age continues to the present day - All the Metals We Mined in 2021: Visualized - Visual Capitalist - iron is the most-mined metal. But there is a convention that it ends when a society becomes well-documented, either by itself or by others, though there are departures from that convention in various places.
The date when it is taken to end varies greatly between cultures, and in many parts of the world there was no Iron Age at all, for example in Pre-Columbian America and the prehistory of Australia. For these and other regions the three-age system is little used. By a convention among archaeologists, in the Ancient Near East the Iron Age is taken to end with the start of the Achaemenid Empire in the 6th century BC, as the history of that is told by the Greek historian Herodotus. This remains the case despite a good deal of earlier local written material having become known since the convention was established. In Western Europe, the Iron Age is ended by the Roman conquest. In South Asia the start of the Maurya Empire about 320 BC is usually taken as the endpoint; although we have a considerable quantity of earlier written texts from India, they give us relatively little in the way of a conventional record of political history. For Egypt, China and Greece "Iron Age" is not a very useful concept, and relatively little used as a period term. In the first two prehistory has ended, and periodization by historical ruling dynasties has already begun, in the Bronze Age, which these cultures do have. In Greece, the Iron Age begins during the Greek Dark Ages, and coincides with the cessation of a historical record for some centuries. For Scandinavia and other parts of northern Europe that the Romans did not reach, the Iron Age continues until the start of the Viking Age in about 800 AD.
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Between the Stone and Bronze Ages is the  Chalcolithic or Copper Age or Eneolithic.

The Stone Age is usually divided into
 
Wikipedia has  Sacred king
In many historical societies, the position of kingship carries a sacral meaning; that is, it is identical with that of a high priest and judge. The concept of theocracy is related, although a sacred king does not need to necessarily rule through his religious authority; rather, the temporal position itself has a religious significance behind it.
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Like  Divine right of kings
The Golden Bough scandalized the British public when first published, as it included the Christian story of the resurrection of Jesus in its comparative study. Critics thought this treatment invited an agnostic reading of the Lamb of God as a relic of a pagan religion. For the third edition, Frazer placed his analysis of the Crucifixion in a speculative appendix; the discussion of Christianity was excluded from the single-volume abridged edition.
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Jesus Christ as a sacrificed sacred king. That does seem to fit.

James Frazier himself conceded that "Books like mine, merely speculation, will be superseded sooner or later (the sooner the better for the sake of truth) by better induction based on fuller knowledge." So he may well concede that his scenario of regularly-sacrificed sacred kings is very rare, and not anywhere close to universal for any stage of development of human society. Not the Paleolithic, not the Mesolithic, not the Early Neolithic, not the Late Neolithic, not the Bronze Age, and not the Iron Age.
 
lpetrich said:
So his work was good in that, even if his big thesis doesn't hold up, his thesis of regularly-killed sacred kings.
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Darn right. Without The Golden Bough, there would never have been The King Must Die. 😭
 
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