The Golden Bough

by James George Frazer

Frazer thought of religion in Tylorian terms as essentially a philosophic system built on mistaken premises,

Frazer concluded that the coercion of supernatural powers had everywhere preceded their propitiation: ‘the order of evolution, then, of human thought and practice is magic–religion–science’.

In 1899 Marett advanced the notion of a ‘pre-animistic’ phase in human religious evolution based upon ‘the feeling of awe’ rather than any intellectual theorizing.

arguing that magic should be understood not as misguided ‘savage science’ but as an act of ‘imperative willing’.

The object of this book is, by meeting these conditions, to offer a fairly probable explanation of the priesthood of Nemi.

Charms based on the Law of Similarity may be called Homoeopathic or Imitative Magic. Charms based on the Law of Contact or Contagion may be called Contagious Magic.

short, magic is a spurious system of natural law as well as a fallacious guide of conduct; it is a false science as well as an abortive art. Regarded as a system of natural law, that is, as a statement of the rules which determine the sequence of events throughout the world, it may be called Theoretical Magic: regarded as a set of precepts which human beings observe in order to compass their ends, it may be called Practical Magic.

Both branches of magic, the homoeopathic and the contagious, may conveniently be comprehended under the general name of Sympathetic Magic, since both assume that things act on each other at a distance through a secret sympathy, the impulse being transmitted from one to the other by means of what we may conceive as a kind of invisible ether, not unlike that which is postulated by modern science for a precisely similar purpose, namely, to explain how things can physically affect each other through a space which appears to be empty.

For more mischief has probably been wrought in the world by honest fools in high places than by intelligent rascals.

The fatal flaw of magic lies not in its general assumption of a sequence of events determined by law, but in its total misconception of the nature of the particular laws which govern that sequence.

If magic is thus next of kin to science, we have still to enquire how it stands related to religion.

But unless the belief leads to a corresponding practice, it is not a religion but merely a theology;

Are the forces which govern the world conscious and personal, or unconscious and impersonal? Religion, as a conciliation of the superhuman powers, assumes the former member of the alternative.

Thus in so far as religion assumes the world to be directed by conscious agents who may be turned from their purpose by persuasion, it stands in fundamental antagonism to magic as well as to science, both of which take for granted that the course of nature is determined, not by the passions or caprice of personal beings, but by the operation of immutable laws acting mechanically.

In ancient Egypt, for example, the magicians claimed the power of compelling even the highest gods to do their bidding, and actually threatened them with destruction in case of disobedience. Sometimes, without going quite so far as that, the wizard declared that he would scatter the bones of Osiris or reveal his sacred legend, if the god proved contumacious.

There is a saying everywhere current in India: ‘The whole universe is subject to the gods; the gods are subject to the spells (mantras); the spells to the Brahmans; therefore the Brahmans are our gods.’