James Frazer

“{{gutenberg author| id=James+George+Frazer | name=James Frazer}}”

“Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges”

“Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves.”

“Frazer's account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory; it makes these views look like errors.”

“The temple of the sylvan goddess, indeed, has vanished, and the King of the Wood no longer stands sentinel over the Golden Bough.”

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

“It is probably not too much to say that the hope of progress--moral and intellectual as well as material--in the future is bound up with the fortunes of science, and that every obstacle placed in the way of scientific discovery is a wrong to humanity.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“To a modern reader the connexion at first sight may not be obvious between the activity of the hangman and the productivity of the earth.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The scapegoat upon whom the sins of the people are periodically laid, may also be a human being.”

“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.”

“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.”