James Frazer Biography and List of Works

British anthropologist, historian of religion and classical scholar, whose best-known study THE GOLDEN BOUGH: A STUDY IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION traced the evolution of human behaviour, ancient and primitive myth, magic, religion, ritual, and taboo. The study appeared first in two volumes in 1890 and finally in 12 volumes in 1911-15. It was named after the golden bough in the sacred grove at Nemi, near Rome. Frazer did much to popularise anthropology and made its agnostic tendencies acceptable, although his conclusions are now outdated.

James Frazer was born in Glasgow, Scotland, into a pious middle-class family, as the eldest of four children of Daniel K. Frazer, a pharmacist, and Katherine (Brown) Frazer. He was educated at Larchfield Academy, Helensburgh, and University of Glasgow and then at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became a classics fellow from 1871 until his death. Except for one year, 1907-08, spent at the University of Liverpool as professor of social anthropology, Frazer remained from 1908 most of his life in Cambridge.

Frazer also studied law because of his father's wishes. He was called to the English Bar in 1879, but he never practiced. His wife, Elisabeth Grove Frazier, whom he married in 1896, devoted herself into guarding his peace of writing and research. As a scholar Frazer started first with a translation and commentary of Pausanias, a Greek travel writer of the second century. The work was finally published in six volumes in 1898.

Frazer's interest in social anthropology was aroused by reading E.B. Taylor's Primitive Culture (1871) and encouraged by his friend W. Robertson-Smith. In Golden Bough he argued, that everywhere in human mental evolution a belief in magic preceded religion, which in turn was followed in the West by science. In the first stage a false causality was seen to exist between rituals and natural events. Religion appeared in the second stage and the third stage was science. Customs deriving from earlier periods persisted as survivals into later ages where they were frequently reinterpreted according to the dominant mode of thought.

Golden Bough stimulated a number of writers, including D.H. Lawrence an T.S. Eliot, whose The Waste Land (1922) is perhaps the best example of its literary influence, where, for example, the Fisher King and Waste-Land shape the motifs. An abridged, one-volume edition was published in 1922. Its influence can be found in the writings of Synge, Yeats, and Joyce. Frazer himself did not write much fiction. These works, including THE QUEST OF THE GORGON'S HEAD (1920) were assembled in SIR ROGER DE COVERLEY AND OTHER LITERARY PIECES (1920). Freud used in his mythological studies Frazer's report that primitives often called the afterbirth brother, sister or twin, and even fed it and took care of it for a while.

"The killing of the god, that is, of his human incarnation, is therefore a merely a necessary step to his revival or resurrection in a better form. Far from being an extinction of the divine spirit, it is only the beginning of a purer and stronger manifestation of it."
(from The New Golden Bough, ed. by Theodor H. Gaster, 1959)

The Golden Bough has given inspiration to many fantasy stories, among them the myth of Diana and the sacrificial killing of the Year King by his successor in a rite of renewal. When the vigour of the king begins to decline, he must die so that - in fantasy terms - the land can begin to experience the healing. Frazer believed that the ritual derived from a universal psychic impulse. In this view he drew parallels between the death and resurrection of Christ and ancient beliefs. However, anthropologists have criticized Frazer's theories and fieldwork has shown that similar institutions have widely dissimilar origins.

Today Frazer's books are still considered a storehouse of ethnographic information, although his theories belong rather in the history than current orientation of anthropology. Frazer travelled little and did not have time to do field work. His knowledge of primitive societies was entirely second-hand, gathered largely from questionnaires sent to missionaries among primitive people. Frazer's notions of totemism were finally destroyed by Lévi-Stauss.

Among Frazer's other works are PSYCHE'S TASK (1909), TOTEMISM AND EXOGAMY (1910), which was a primary source for Freud's Totem und Taboo, THE BELIEF IN IMORTALITY AND THE WORSHIP OF THE DEAD (1913-24), FOLKLORE IN THE OLD TESTAMENT (1918). He published commentary on Pausanias (1898), edition of Ovid's Fasti (1929), and other works on classical and literary topics.

Frazer was knighted in 1914. Aside from occasional trips to Greece and the Continent, he and Lady Frazer rarely left Cambridge. In 1931 he went blind but continued his work with the aid of secretaries and amanuenses. Frazer died in Cambridge on May 7, 1941.

Quote: "It is said, too, that sailors, beating up against the wind in the Gulf of Finland, sometimes see a strange sail heave in sight astern and overhaul them hand over hand. On she comes with a cloud of canvas - all her studding-sails out - right in the teeth of the wind, forging her way through the foaming billows, dashing back the spray in sheets from her cutwater, every sail swollen to bursting, every rope to strained to cracking. The sailors know that she hails from Finland."
(from The New Golden Bough, ed. by Theodor H. Gaster, 1959)

For further reading: James George Frazer: The Portrait of a Scholar by R.A. Downie (1940); The Tangled Bank by S.E. Hyman (1962); Frazer and the Goden Bough by R.A. Downie (1970); The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough by J.B. Vickery (1973); J.G. Frazer by R. Ackerman (1987); Sir James Frazer and the Literary Imagination, ed. by R. Frazer (1991); Myth, Rhetoric, and the Voice of Authority by M. Manganaro (1992)

TOTEMISM, (1884)