His Victorian readers were alarmed to see such festivals as the Roman Saturnalia, the Crucifixion of Christ, and Purim linked as rites of renewal. He argued that survivals of primitive religion(s), the result of diffusion, could still be found among farmers and other backward populations in Europe and could also be detected in some religious practices current in Christianity. He supported his thesis with multiple anecdotes, both ancient and modern. Its main topic was the Aryan myth of the dying king or priest, whose death reinvigorates life on earth. 1890, 2 vols.), carried the subtitle: A Study in Comparative Religion.
The purpose was for others to collect the data in a systematic manner everywhere, so that true comparatists (like Frazer himself) could analyze the whole, preferably from their armchairs.įrazer’s subsequent major work, The Golden Bough (first ed.
Especially the latter two topics pushed him further into the direction of anthropology, and in 1887, he created a list of questions for those going into the field: Questions on the Manners, Customs, Religion, Superstitions, etc., of the Uncivilized or Semi-Civilized Peoples. Frazer wrote the entries for Penates, Priapus, Proserpina, Pericles, Taboo, and Totem. He invited Frazer to submit some articles, all on the letter “P” and beyond. However, at that time, he worked as an editor for the 9th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Robertson Smith was an ordained minister and worked on biblical subjects he was the (future) author of Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1889).
James frazer free#
Robertson Smith, a fellow Scotsman who had been hired by Cambridge after having been run out of the Free Church College at Aberdeen in 1881 because of his heretical views. Both works greatly influenced Frazer, whose methods were slow and meticulous: For instance, the work on Pausanias may have begun in 1884 but only reached publication 14 years later, in 6 volumes, totaling 3,000 pages. Pausanias lists “survivals” of earlier times, a phenomenon that had been extensively documented by Tylor in his Primitive Culture (1871). This guidebook, the Description of Hellas, lists objects worthy of visiting in Greece, adding legends, stories, and anecdotes about them.
Frazer, trained as a classicist and lawyer, first wrote on classical topics: the Roman historian Sallust (1884) and a six-volume edition on the 2nd century CE Greek antiquarian Pausanias (1898).
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