Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

James Frazer, aka James George Frazer

British Anthropologist, Folklorist and Classical Scholar

"The old view that the principles of right and wrong are immutable and eternal is no longer tenable. The moral world is as little exempt as the physical world from the law of ceaseless change, of perpetual flux."

"Ancient magic was the very foundation of religion."

"A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier."

"Dwellers by the sea cannot fail to be impressed by the sight of its ceaseless ebb and flow, and are apt, on the principles of that rude philosophy of sympathy and resemblance which here engages our attention, to trace a subtle relation, a secret harmony, between its tides and the life of man, of animals, and of plants. In the flowing tide they see not merely a symbol, but a cause of exuberance, of prosperity, and of life, while in the ebbing tide they discern a real agent as well as a melancholy emblem of failure, of weakness, and of death."

"By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life. Thus defined, religion consists of two elements, a theoretical and a practical, namely, a belief in powers higher than man and an attempt to propitiate or please them. Of the two, belief clearly comes first, since we must believe in the existence of a divine being before we can attempt to please him. But unless the belief leads to a corresponding practice, it is not a religion but merely a theology."

"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."

"Even the recognition of an individual whom we see every day is only possible as the result of an abstract idea of him formed by generalization from his appearances in the past."

"Fear of the human dead, which, on the whole, I believe to have been probably the most powerful force in the making of primitive religion."

"For extending its sway, partly by force of arms, partly by the voluntary submission of weaker tribes, the community soon acquires wealth and slaves, both of which, by relieving some classes from the perpetual struggle for a bare subsistence, afford them an opportunity of devoting themselves to that disinterested pursuit of knowledge which is the noblest and most powerful instrument to ameliorate the lot of man."

"For ages the army of spirits, once so near, has been receding farther and farther from us, banished by the magic wand of science from hearth and home, from ruined cell and ivied tower, from haunted glade and lonely mere, from the riven murky cloud that belches forth lightning, and from those fairer clouds that pillow the silvery moon or fret with flakes of burning red the golden eve."

"For myth changes while custom remains constant; men continue to do what their did before them, though the reasons on which their fathers acted have been long forgotten.The history of religion is a long attempt to reconcile old custom with new reason, to find a sound theory for an absurd practice."

"For strength of character in the race as in the individual consists mainly in the power of sacrificing the present for the future, of disregarding the immediate temptations of ephemeral pleasure for more distant and lasting sources of satisfaction. The more the power is exercised the higher and stronger becomes the character; till the height of heroism is reached in men who renounce the pleasures of life and even life itself for the sake of winning for others, perhaps in distant ages, the blessings of freedom and truth."

"For there are strong grounds for thinking that, in the evolution of thought, magic has preceded religion ."

"For the present we have journeyed far enough together, and it is time to part."

"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."

"From time immemorial the mistletoe has been the object of superstitious veneration in Europe."

"Hence the strong attraction which magic and science alike have exercised on the human mind; hence the powerful stimulus that both have given to the pursuit of knowledge. They lure the weary enquirer, the footsore seeker, on through the wilderness of disappointment in the present by their endless promises of the future: they take him up to the top of an exceeding high mountain and show him, beyond the dark clouds and rolling mists at his feet, a vision of the celestial city, far off, it may be, but radiant with unearthly splendor, bathed in the light of dreams."

"From the earliest times man has been engaged in a search for general rules whereby to turn the order of natural phenomena to his own advantage, and in the long search he has scraped together a great hoard of such maxims, some of them golden and some of them mere dross. The true or golden rules constitute the body of applied science which we call the arts; the false are magic."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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 to-day she may ban to-morrow. They too, like so much that to the common eye seems solid, may melt into air, into thin air."

"Indeed the influence of music on the development of religion is a subject which would repay a sympathetic study."

"Intellectual progress, which reveals itself in the growth of art and science and the spread of more liberal views, cannot be dissociated from industrial or economic progress, and that in its turn receives an immense impulse from conquest and empire. It is no mere accident that the most vehement outbursts of activity of the human mind have followed close on the heels of victory, and that the great conquering races of the world have commonly done most to advance and spread civilization, thus healing in peace the wounds they inflicted in war."

"If their king is their god, he is or should be also their preserver; and if he will not preserve them, he must make room for another who will."

"In general terms we ask how the presence of superstitions in a society continue to have access to a higher level of culture, natural among people the answer to this question, we find universal and indestructible in inequality. Only different races intelligence, courage is not provided in varying degrees of diligence and similar matters; they vary greatly in terms of persons belonging to the same race innate capacities and qualities. No other doctrine is false and baseless than the doctrine of human equality. Anyone acting as an equal of that law is correct, because the necessary laws are general and can be made ??to suit the individual situation in an infinite number. But people cannot even think they are equal before the law says in essence...The wit and the strength of character leads the survivors and people who have shaped patterns that are formed in at least the contours of the society. The number of people in such countries where the majority of the executive power for the leadership they have relatively fewer so-called numerical majority is managed by the community, even on the basis of the will of an enlightened minority scanned. So whatever we try to hide the fact, human management aristocratic essence is always and everywhere...Although it may seem like the majority of leadership it is also scarce traces of intelligent quick-witted minority in the end. This is the secret of liberation and advancement of minorities. If the mind how people give dominion over animals, which are superior to human intelligence in directing further down. Title holder of managers determine the direction of the society that kings, I do not say that the state or law enforcement officials. Real ruler of men are thinkers who advance science; If the mind is not how people establish domination by force over the other animals, which is more direct and control social forces in the long term among the people...The struggle for existence in the mental space is severe and deadly as in physical space, better ideas prevail in the end we call reality."

"In point of fact magicians appear to have often developed into chiefs and kings."

"In course of time the slow advance of knowledge, which has dispelled so many cherished illusions, convinced at least the more thoughtful portion of mankind that the alterations of summer and winter, of spring and autumn, were not merely the result of their own magical rites, but that some deeper cause, some mightier power, was at work behind the shifting scenes of nature."

"In primitive society the rules of ceremonial purity observed by divine kings, chiefs, and priests agree in many respects with the rules observed by homicides, mourners, women in childbed, girls at puberty, hunters and fishermen, and so on. To us these various classes of persons appear to differ totally in character and condition; some of them we should call holy, others we might pronounce unclean and polluted. But the savage makes no such moral distinction between them; the conceptions of holiness and pollution are not yet differentiated in his mind. To him the common feature of all these persons is that they are dangerous and in danger, and the danger in which they stand and to which they expose others is what we should call spiritual or ghostly, and therefore imaginary. The danger, however, is not less real because it is imaginary; imagination acts upon man as really does gravitation, and may kill him as certainly as a dose of prussic acid."

"It is a common rule with primitive people not to waken a sleeper, because his soul is away and might not have time to get back; so if the man wakened without his soul, he would fall sick. If it is absolutely necessary to rouse a sleeper, it must be done very gradually, to allow the soul time to return."

"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."

"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."

"It is not a new opinion that the Golden Bough was the mistletoe. True, Virgil does not identify but only compares it with the mistletoe. But this may be only a poetical device to cast a mystic glamour over the humble plant."

"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."

"Primitive people did not think of supernatural beings superior to man; because the gods, could be forced intimidated to fulfill the people's wishes. The world is seen as a huge platform for democracy in this idea stage; Want to get a moderate equality of all beings like ordinary supernatural believed to be based there. But they know the nature of human beings with the increase in size and the inability of its nature is clearly out of the grip. But to realize the helplessness, the weakness does not bring with it a belief in supernatural beings that place of imagination in the universe. On the contrary, it strengthens the belief in the power of these assets. Because, according to the world's fixed and immutable laws of thought is a system of impersonal forces acting does not exactly lighting is dim or mind. There are of course a vague feeling that thought and not only in the magical arts moves based on these shares most of the work in everyday life. But it does not develop thinking and a will to live in the world to explain're working and think of the world as evidence of consciousness of a personal presence. What if he so weak and entities that control the huge mechanism of nature, if it considers to be incapable of seeing how big and mighty! So the idea that even the gods do not slowly, while that with anyone without help power loses his hope to control the flow of nature with magic and gods start to see once the only source of supernatural power he thought he share with them. So, the equivalent of magic as a legitimate located next to the prayers and offerings to the advancement of knowledge increasingly pushed into the background and falls into a dark art level. Now the magic is regarded as an attack on both eyes in vain in the kingdom of God as infidels and encountered increasing or decreasing the influence of constant opposition of the clergy with their gods. So now comes along at a time when the distinction between superstition and religion by religious vows and prayers of the community and the support of intellectuals, we see that the magic of the superstitious and ignorant sections of the refuge. But at a later period, the forces of nature when it opened the way for recognition of the idea of natural law as personal assets grow, indirectly, is based on the idea of an independent essential and constant cause-effect flow of personal will fall as discredited and marginalized position of getting rid reappears and the nature of the causal sequence by examining directly It opens the way to true science. Alchemy will pave the chemistry."

"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."

"No human being is so hide-bound by custom and tradition as your democratic savage; in no state of society consequently is progress so slow and difficult. The old notion that the savage is the freest of mankind is the reverse of the truth. He is a slave, not indeed to a visible master, but to the past, to the spirits of his dead forefathers, who haunt his steps from birth to death, and rule him with a rod of iron. What they did is the pattern of right, the unwritten law to which he yields a blind unquestioning obedience."

"So in Scotland witches used to raise the wind by dipping a rag in water and beating it thrice on a stone, saying: I knock this rag upon this stain. To raise the wind in the devil?s name, It shall not lie till I please again."

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

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

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

"The ablest man is dragged down by the weakest and dullest, who necessarily sets the standard, since he cannot rise, while the other can fall."

"The consideration of human suffering is not one which enters into the calculations of primitive man."

"The abundance, the solidity, and the splendor of the results already achieved by science are well fitted to inspire us with a cheerful confidence in the soundness of its method."

"The fear of the human dead, which, on the whole, I believe to have been probably the most powerful force in the making of primitive religion."

"The Athenians regularly maintained a number of degraded and useless beings at the public expense; and when any calamity, such as plague, drought, or famine, befell the city, they sacrificed two of these outcast scapegoats."

"The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology."