James Frazer quotes - page 2

James Frazer was a Scottish social anthropologist renowned for his pioneering work in the study of mythology and comparative religion. His most famous book, "The Golden Bough," had a profound influence on anthropology, literature, and psychology. He explored the connections between magic, religion, and science, shaping modern understanding of human belief systems. Here are 58 of his quotes:

We seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Thus it comes about that the endeavour of primitive people to make a clean sweep of all their troubles generally takes the form of a grand hunting out and expulsion of devils and ghosts. They think that if they can only shake off these their accursed tormentors, they will make a fresh start in life, happy and innocent; the tales of Eden and the old poetic golden age will come true again.

James Frazer

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.

James Frazer

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

James Frazer

Ancient magic was the very foundation of religion.

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

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.

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

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

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.

James Frazer

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.

James Frazer

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.

James Frazer

The second principle of magic: things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.

James Frazer

The man of science, like the man of letters, is too apt to view mankind only in the abstract, selecting in his consideration only a single side of our complex and many-sided being.

James Frazer

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

James Frazer

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 true or golden rules constitute the body of applied science which we call the arts; the false are magic.

James Frazer