The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion

“In antiquity this sylvan landscape was the scene of a strange and recurring tragedy. In order to understand it aright we must try to form in our minds an accurate picture of the place where it happened; […] crimes which after the lapse of so many ages still lend a touch of melancholy to these quiet woods and waters, like a chill breath of autumn on one of those bright September days ‘when not a leaf seems faded.’”

Frazer’s lyrical descriptions of Italy contrast to his treatment of the other, non-European settings of the text, which the author had not actually visited. His suggestion that the natural world carries the memory of the violent crimes committed on the site in the past is charged with romanticism and, thus, is subjective rather than purely empirical. This relates to the theme of Christianity and Its Prehistory, as these descriptions form the basis of the text’s arguments about Christianity’s evolution from ancient religions.

“If we analyse the principles of thought on which magic is based, they will probably be found to resolve themselves into two: first, that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and, second, that things that have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after physical contact has been severed.”

Here, Frazer outlines the two forms of sympathetic magic: homeopathic and contagious magic. The former assumes that magical influence can be exerted through objects with which the object of the spell was once in contact, while the latter is based on the principle that events can be produced by enacting or replicating them. This introduces the theme of The Evolution of Belief in Magic to Science.

“Both branches of magic, […] assume that things act on each other at a distance through a secret sympathy, the impulse being transmitted from one to the other by means of what we may consider as a kind of invisible ether, not unlike that which is postulated by modern science for a precisely similar purpose, namely, to explain how things can physically affect each other through a space which appears to be empty.”

Here, Frazer discusses the shared features of homeopathic and contagious magic to link them to the same principles that underly scientific inquiry. Throughout the text, Frazer repeatedly suggests that modern science has more in common with magic than with religion.