The Golden Bough

Here is a book, The Golden Bough by Sir James Frazer, that I have been vaguely aware of for many years without having any idea what it was about. I am fortunate that an audio version exists thanks to Librivox.org. I could read it, of course, but it is a massive book (well over 800 pages) and I doubt I would be motivated enough to read it through without something else to hope for from the effort than a little enlightenment.

So here is the book: it is about a Roman priesthood, succession to which was determined by challenging and killing the existing priest. That's right, you remained priest as long as someone else didn't kill you. This curious priesthood existed into Imperial times, and Frazer sets out to explain why it had such a curious means of choosing new leaders.

With that introduction out of the way, most of the rest of the book is not about this particular priesthood at all, but about magic and religion in primitive societies in general. I say "primitive societies" meaning those that are less developed, and Frazer doesn't hesitate to call them "savage," although he doesn't seem to mean it in a pejorative way. In fact, one of the virtues of the books is that he details beliefs very sympathetically no matter how ridiculous they are. And they are often pretty ridiculous. Just imagine a catalogue of every ridiculous magical belief that you've ever heard of, and many that you haven't heard of, all catalogued carefully by Frazer. It amazes me to think that societies could have believed these things for so many centuries; even though I knew abstractly that this must have been the case, it is entirely different to be confronted by such a massive list of the most incorrect ideas of how the world works. It is a wonder that humanity survived at all.

Now, this first stage of primitive societies Frazer calls "magical," because people believed that there was a direct causal relationship between performing some act (e.g., burning a piece of nail or hair from another person) and some consequence (such as that person suffering an illness). It was almost a scientific belief, or anyway a materialistic one, which required no outside intervention to occur and no special talent to invoke. Everyone was capable of performing this "magic," and society was correspondingly democratic.

At some point, people began to recognize that these magical formulas don't work all the time, or even at all. There is something else going on that causes rain and thunder and sunshine, and nothing the people do can force the weather to behave the way they want. The people conclude that there must be far greater beings, which they can't see, who are controlling the weather (and other aspects of existence). Thus, although no one can force it to rain by performing magic, one can request the being in charge of rain to allow it to happen. It might work, it might not, but that was the best you could hope for.

The idea of separate beings created the notion that some people might have a special relationship with these beings. Whereas magic was always supposed to be effective and would work for anyone, appeasing a deity was something that certain people could do better than others. Hence, the rise of priest-kings, who performed rituals for the benefit of the whole community. Whereas a more or less democratic, consensual form of government had been the rule under magic, in the next stage (which Frazer calls "religion"), some people began to rule over others because they had to power to make it rain or to withhold rain (and so on for many other desirable and undesirable effects such as sickness).

Up to this point, Frazer has been largely a neutral narrator, but he surprised me by suddenly weighing in on the merits of this change. In short, he says that the earlier egalitarian system was terrible because everyone was bound by custom. The existence of a kingship based on spiritual ability, on the other hand, would attract the smartest and most ambitious people in the tribe to pursue it. Even though their motives might have been of the worst sort originally, once they became rulers they would naturally tend to do things to benefit the whole society to which they belonged. Since they were generally the smartest in the tribe, they would be in a position to help everyone progress.

I don't necessarily disagree with the argument thus far, but he goes on to say that, being the smartest tribe members, these rulers would be the least likely to believe the kind of religious magic that they actually practiced. He doesn't deny that some of them would have believed it, although he thinks that they would have been among the most vulnerable as rulers because they wouldn't understand the limitations of what they were practicing and therefore would be likely to fail without adequate explanation. This seems to be extraordinarily unlikely.

It is difficult to argue with a scholar who has done so much research on the subject of human societies and their magical beliefs, but I think Frazer is simply wrong about the way the human mind works. I don't think it is at all likely that people raised in these primitive societies would make the intellectual leap from magic to scepticism on their own. Moreover, I don't think a person who had no faith in what he was practicing would be at all the sort of person to delude his subjects effectively over time. I don't deny it is possible, but I think it is far more probably that the people who achieved priest-kingship would accept the religious framework into which they were born and raised. They may not have accepted it fully; they probably found weaknesses and limitations in how their predecessors practiced rulership, and made changes to accommodate what they themselves believed and learned on the job. But I find it difficult to accept that the leaders of most tribes were cynically manipulating their fellows for their own gain. Is there exactly one cynic in each tribe? Does a new priest-king arise when another person becomes cynical and outdoes the existing ruler? Surely some of these materialists would be discovered and we would have some record of them in the form of myths or traditions.

I think Frazer makes two mistakes here. One, he underestimates the human capacity for rationalizing. Just because a ritual didn't result in the hoped-for result doesn't mean that a clever person is going to doubt the ritual's effectiveness to do anything. I think it is much more likely that he will find something wrong with how the ritual was performed, or with the purity of the person who performed it, or perhaps something wrong with the whole tribe that causes the deity to judge them not worthy of answering their supplications. Second, he overestimates the flexibility of the human mind in these early societies. Our mind is extraordinarily flexible, but we tend to think along lines that are taught and shown us in our youth. For someone to step out of that framework completely and lose all belief would require an extraordinary mental leap.

I think of Lucien Febvre's "The Problem of Unbelief in the 16th Century," in which, as I understand it, he argues that a thoroughgoing atheism was simply not on the menu of options for people raised at that time. (I haven't actually read the book, so I may be mistating his thesis to a greater or lesser degree.) I don't actually believe that, but the 16th century was very different than these primitive societies. There was already a long tradition of materialism and atheism by the 16th century. It was a slender one, to be sure; not many writers in history had been solid atheists up to that point. Nevertheless, it existed. Europe was also familiar with many different kinds of faiths that could lead them to question their own beliefs. Someone growing up in a tribe would likely have very little interaction with other tribes, and most of those interactions would confirm the beliefs that he had already been taught. Therefore, there would be no chance for an atheist tradition to develope. If you were going to disbelieve all things about gods and spirits, you would have to make the whole leap on your own, in a single lifetime. (Unless, indeed, he wants to argue that leaders passed down their scepticism to favoured followers, which I find even more hard to believe.) That may have happened, but how often? And where it did happen, which sceptic would be so confident in his own abilities that he would be willing to manipulate the system to take over as chief priest, with all the responsibilities that that held, knowing that none of the existing rituals actually did anything useful? No matter how smart you are, you can't make it rain short of some very modern effort such as cloud seeding, which was entirely beyond anything these people could even dream of. Therefore, you would have to think that (a) the ritual was not going to make it rain, (b) people were going to expect you to make it rain, and (c) you could come up with a plausible enough explanation for your failures that they would go on believing you instead of (as often happened) killing you for your failure as a ruler. I have trouble believing that that could have been a common occurrence.