Should We Bow to The Golden Bough?

But that doesn’t mean that The Golden Bough was an insignificant achievement. Eliot mentions it as one of the influences that gave birth to “The Waste Land,” so that alone makes the book immortal. Yeats and other literary types were also deeply influenced. But, curiously for a book that was so influential among the artists of the day, anthropologists never took the book seriously.

The curiosity increases when you look at the publication history of The Golden Bough. The first edition was two volumes published in 1890. The second edition added a third volume. The third edition was twelve (twelve!!) volumes published between 1911 and 1915. Since the twelve-volume edition was far too long for the intended audience, the author and his wife hacked it down to a single abridged edition, which, not coincidentally, took out all the controversial parts. There is now a newer abridged version of the twelve-volume work put out by Oxford, which has all the parts the editor thinks anyone reading it today would want to read.

After reading it, I perfectly understood the very different reactions to the book. The book is interesting from a literary perspective and not very good from a social science perspective. It is a much faster read than I was expecting. Quick, easy theory, followed by a ton of examples and pseudo-examples. There are parts that are pure poetry. I see why Eliot, Yeats, et al were enraptured by the book. It is a portrait of this amazingly fantastical world where all these rituals are pointing to some mystical greater truth about the human mind. It’s like a giant Just So story. I loved Kipling’s Just So Stories when I was young (still do). The Golden Bough is an extended version of “How the Rhinoceros got its Skin.”

In one way, this book reminds me of reading Jules Verne. I remember reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and thinking it was massively dull. The problem—a huge part of the book is describing what they saw in a submarine under the ocean. I watched a lot of Jacques Cousteau movies when I was in school; I had seen a ton of videos of what it looked like under the sea. So why did I want to read Verne’s speculations about what it looked like? But, at the time Verne’s book was published, if I imagine someone who had no idea what it looked like under the sea, then his book would be exciting. Similarly, if I imagine a time when nobody really had any idea about tribal practices, then Frazer’s descriptions would be way more interesting.

The book falls into the category of a theory that explains every tribal practice in every society throughout all of history. As a work of anthropology, it is such an obvious mess that it is no wonder that nobody would take the book seriously at that level. So, why is it so long? I can just imagine how people would roll their eyes every time he was in a room and started to explain his theory. And so he kept adding to it, thinking, “With just four dozen more examples, they will all believe!” I really do wonder if Frazer ever heard of a cultural custom and thought, “I don’t need to include that one in my book.”

The thing that I would love to ask him is why all these cultures all over the world have exactly the same historical path. So much of his argument hinges on the idea that some tribe in India and some tribe in Africa and some tribe in northern Germany are all fundamentally doing exactly the same thing for exactly the same reason. Why should this be? Why would every culture develop in exactly the same way? At one point, he explains how he knows an aspect of his theory is true: “That theory, in the absence of direct evidence, must necessarily be based on the analogy of similar customs practiced elsewhere.” There is a nice circularity there. “We don’t have any way of figuring out why Tribe A has a certain practice, but we can understand why Tribe A has this practice by comparing it to a very different practice in Tribe B because Frazer knows that all tribal practices are equivalent, and then the fact that Tribes A and B are the same proves that all tribal practices are equivalent.”

For example, the idea of magic came first in human history, then died out as people realized it didn’t work. After a while, people invented religion and then they kept believing in religion until Frazer can come along and show them that religion is fake. It’s a very cute theory; if this was a work of fantasy about some other planet, I would thoroughly enjoy the story. But I have a hard time taking it seriously as an accurate historical discussion. Beliefs in religion and magic seem to coincide all over the place, and he has to waffle a lot in his chronological history by later arguing that it is just smart people who have figured it all out (“a mind of more than common acuteness”—I love that phrase), while stupid people still are fooled (“Small minds cannot grasp great ideas”—this is the kind of arrogance that is just a pleasure to read). I am also amused by how he simply asserts every cultural practice is an example of his theory—it reminds me a lot of Freud, who is also fun to read for exactly the same reason.

Returning to the question above: why are there enough similarities in all these traditions that Frazer can torture them all into his grand narrative? I get the idea that all these traditions came from a unitary earlier source, but that means that they all had to start back when there was just one tribe. That seems improbable. Even so, why would all these traditions evolve in such a similar fashion? This isn’t a problem if they are all just separately originating traditions that are not all identical to one another. I guess the question is: are there bonfires all over the place simply because bonfires are cool or because there is some similar mythical idea about bonfires.

But, a great many of the traditions are truly fun to read. Take the Corn traditions. At reaping time, there was a tradition of passing around an old corn doll to whomever hasn’t finished reaping yet — the goal was to not finish last so you don’t get stuck with the Old Wife corn doll. But then everyone wants to keep their Maiden corn dolls, because the Maiden corn dolls are in the “buxom form of her daughter.” Primitive Barbie dolls! I also love that they make fun of the person who was the slowest at harvesting. All this sounds fun, but Frazer thinks it is all a deep and disturbing example of social ostracism. What I really wonder, though, is whether the ridicule was serious social shame or just playful. You can’t tell from The Golden Bough.

There are also innumerable great lines like this: “The rule that the king must be put to death either on the appearance of any symptom of bodily decay or at the end of a fixed period is certainly one which, sooner or later, the kings would seek to abolish or modify.” Sooner or later? Ya think?

But my absolute favorite story: the marriage ceremony for trees! I need to try to convince The Long Suffering Wife of Your Humble Narrator (TLSWOYHN) that some of the trees in our yard would be a lot happier if we had a marriage ceremony for them. Interestingly, this relates to a new theory TLSWOYHN has been reading a lot about that trees are actually carrying on extensive conversations and trade with each other via the fungal underground network. Science meet Frazer!

Related Posts:
Eliot, T. S. Christianity and Culture “Preserving a Culture”
Martin, Thomas Ancient Greece “How to Teach About the Greeks”