Folklore Man

At the time of Imperial Rome, in a sacred grove by Lake Nemi in the green Alban hills was a hoary oak. Around it day & night prowled a grim, wary figure with sword in hand. He was Diana's priest and the King of the Wood. He was also a murderer. He had succeeded to the priesthood by first plucking from the sacred oak a branch of mistletoe, the golden bough, then by slaying his predecessor. And in turn he would grow weak or unwatchful and himself be slain.

In Cambridge, England, last week died an old, old man whose work had left a lasting mark on science, literature and the history of Western thought. Those who put on mourning for Sir James Frazer could well reflect that doing so was a reversion to primitive custom, when survivors dressed in black so that returning ghosts might not find them and do mischief. For it had been Frazer's lifelong task to collect the magic, myth and folk lore of all peoples and times into a tumultuous, enthralling encyclopedia, The Golden Bough, one of the 20th Century's most influential books.

James George Frazer was born in Glasgow in 1854 on New Year's-- the day when Bohemian rustics fire guns into the air to frighten witches away; the day when Scotsmen once ran clamorously sunwise around their houses to assure a twelve month's bounty. At Cambridge he became a scholar of classical literature, a fellow of Trinity College. In Virgil he first found mention of the golden bough. He spent his life writing an interminable footnote on the passage.

Why, asked Frazer, did this priesthood of the oak grove devolve by mortal combat? And why did the challenger first have to wrest a bough from the sacred oak? Stepping into the sacred grove at Nemi, Frazer soon found himself lost in a vast, darkling forest of folk rites and superstitions which covered the whole planet.

In time he dimly perceived that the oak was identified with the sky god, hurler of lightnings, and the golden mistletoe contained his soul. Further, the mistletoe contained the spark which yearly rekindled the sun, and it was the seat of the mystery of fire. As Frazer's eyes opened, he realized that the sacrificial succession of priest-kings represented the annual death and resurrection of the vegetable world, the prime phenomenon of nature. The mystery of the golden bough was at heart the mystery of all sacrificed gods--Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Odin, the Aztec Texcatlipoco --and the mystery too of still higher religions.

The Golden Bough first appeared in 1890 as one slim volume, waxed into a sturdy 12-volume series by 1915, proliferated riotously until at Frazer's death his work filled some 284 books. Husky and bearded, he worked ten or twelve hours a day for 60 years. He explored primitive magic, tree worship, the divinity of kings, taboo, human sacrifice, the scapegoat, fertility rites, myths, festivals of fire. Into his chapters he crowded allusions to the Sioux, Bushmen, Greeks. Eskimos. Samoans, Saxons, Babylonians and dozens of other peoples. Sometimes his details were off, his random comments awry. But Frazer's pioneering and his endless heaping up of source materials make The Golden Bough and its offshoots the world's greatest work of cultural anthropology.

Frazer demolished the Rousseauist notion that primitive man was blithe and free. Harassed by taboos at every hand, besieged by demons, snarled in ritual, the savage was far more vexed than civilized man with traffic lights, time clocks, income taxes. And Frazer revealed that the customs and rituals of civilization are forest-rooted, that vestiges of magic are everywhere.

Like Freud, he helped destroy the 18th-and 19th-Century illusion that man is a rational creature. Like William Graham Sumner (Folkways), he disturbed civilization by disclosing the relativity of morals.

In 1922 The Golden Bough was abridged to one inexpensive volume. Gilbert Murray, famed classical scholar at Oxford, "with a thrill of alarm" hailed it as "a dangerous book." Said he: "Frazer tends to destroy [Christianity] by merely showing how old it is. ... The most mystical Christian doctrines . . . appear as commonplaces of savage superstition, sometimes revolting, sometimes in their way sublime. ..." Others were less upset. Wrote John Peale Bishop of The Golden Bough: "By extending [Christianity's] existence into the dark backward and abyss of time, it has gained not only the respectability of age, but another authenticity."

Frazer himself thought that his books contained "a melancholy record of human error and folly." One thing he was sure of: "the permanent existence of ... a solid layer of savagery beneath the surface of society. ... We move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below. From time to time a hollow murmur underground or a sudden spurt of flame into the air tells of what is going on beneath our feet."

He wrote this about 1890, lived long enough to see spurts of flame, among hollow murmurs, crumble Cambridge and all of Britain. A few hours after Sir James's death, by some curious magic, died frail, humorous, French-born Lady Frazer.

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