James Frazer - The Golden Bough (1890)

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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
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 — from a tree in the sacred grove.

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

James Frazer
The world cannot live at the level of its great men.

James Frazer
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
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
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
The advance of knowledge is an infinite progression towards a goal that ever recedes.

James Frazer
We must remember that at bottom the generalisations of science or, in common parlance, the laws of nature are merely hypotheses devised to explain that ever-shifting phantasmagoria of thought which we dignify with the high-sounding names of the world and the universe.

James Frazer
The moral world is as little exempt as the physical world from the law of ceaseless change, of perpetual flux.

James Frazer
Some of the old laws of Israel are clearly savage taboos of a familiar type thinly disguised as commands of the Deity.

James Frazer
But once a fool always a fool, and the greater the power in his hands the more disastrous is likely to be the use he makes of it. The heaviest calamity in English history, the breach with America, might never have occurred if George the Third had not been an honest dullard.

James Frazer
The natives of British Columbia live largely upon the fish which abound in their seas and rivers. If the fish do not come in due season, and the Indians are hungry, A Nootka wizard will make an image of a swimming fish and put it into the water in the direction from which the fish generally appear. This ceremony, accompanied by a prayer to the fish to come, will cause them to arrive at once.

James Frazer
Ancient magic was the very foundation of religion.

James Frazer
When all is said and done our resemblances to the savage are still far more numerous than our differences from him.

James Frazer
In the ages to come man may be able to predict, perhaps even to control, the wayward courses of the winds and the clouds, but hardly will his puny hands have strength to speed afresh our slackening planet in its orbit or rekindle the dying fire of the sun. Yet the philosopher who trembles at the idea of such distant catastrophes may console himself by reflecting that these gloomy apprehensions, like the earth and the sun themselves, are only parts of that unsubstantial world which thought has conjured up out of the void, and that the phantoms which the subtle enchantress has evoked today she may ban tomorrow. They too, like so much that to the common eye seems solid, may melt into air, into thin air.

James Frazer
The notion that we can transfer our guilt and sufferings to some other being who will bear them for us is familiar to the savage mind. It arises from a very obvious confusion between the physical and the mental, between the material and the immaterial.

James Frazer
Man has created gods in his own likeness and being himself mortal he has naturally supposed his creatures to be in the same sad predicament.

James Frazer
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
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
The custom of burning a beneficent god is too foreign to later modes of thought to escape misinterpretation.

James Frazer
For when a nation becomes civilized, if it does not drop human sacrifices altogether, it at least selects as victims only such wretches as would be put to death at any rate. Thus the killing of a god may sometimes come to be confounded with the execution of a criminal.

James Frazer
If any of my readers set out with the notion that that all races of men think and act much in the same way as educated Englishmen, the evidence of superstitious belief and custom collected in this work should suffice to disabuse him of so erroneous a prepossession.

James Frazer
If the test of truth lay in a show of hands or a counting of heads, the system of magic might appeal, with far more reason than the Catholic Church, to the proud motto, Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus [always, everywhere, and by all], as the sure and certain credential of its own infallibility.

James Frazer
If mankind had always been logical and wise, history would not be a long chronicle of folly and crime.

James Frazer