James Frazer
Scottish social anthropologist and folklorist
1854 CE to 1941 CE
Sir James George Frazer OM FRS FRSE FBA (January 1, 1854 – May 7, 1941) is a Scottish social anthropologist and folklorist influential in the early stages of the modern studies of mythology and comparative religion.
His most famous work, The Golden Bough (1890), documents and details the similarities among magical and religious beliefs around the globe.
Frazer posits that human belief progresses through three stages: primitive magic, replaced by religion, in turn replaced by science.
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James Frazer, in The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (retitled The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion in its second edition), theorizes a natural progression from magical, to religious, to scientific belief systems.
A wide-ranging, comparative study of mythology and religion, written by the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough is first published in two volumes in 1890.
Frazer attempts 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 will extend into twentieth-century culture.
His thesis is that old religions were fertility cults that revolved around the worship and periodic sacrifice of a sacred king.
Frazer's thesis had been developed in relation to J. M. W. Turner's painting of The Golden Bough, a sacred grove where a certain tree grew day and night.
It was a transfigured landscape in a dream-like vision of the woodland lake of Nemi, "Diana's Mirror", where religious ceremonies and the "fulfillment of vows" of priests and kings were held.
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 is central to almost all of the world's mythologies.
Frazer bases his thesis on the pre-Roman priest-king at the fane of Nemi, who was ritually murdered by his successor.
The book's title is taken from an incident in the Aeneid, illustrated by Turner, in which Aeneas and the Sibyl present the golden bough to the gatekeeper of Hades to gain admission.