Illness: Recovery and Death
In a 'primitive' culture, a sick person lies on the ground while a 'witch doctor' wearing a painted face mask and straw wig, dances around him, while waving the bone of an animal, and singing. In a more advanced society, a young man is very ill. His distraught parents go to their church and ask the priest, and all of their friends to pray for him. One hundred years later, in a modern hospital, a man is saved from certain death by an operation performed on him by a team of trained medics.
Science, Magic and Religion
There is nothing remarkable about the three scenarios above. They are simply the different ways that societies have dealt with illness throughout the ages In the first scenario, we recognise how 'primitive' peoples dealt with illness in centuries past – and still do. In the second scenario, we recognise the people of religious faith behave when a loved one is desperately – or even mildly – ill. In the third, we recognise modern medicine at work. There is nothing exclusive about the three modes of practice. Many contemporary people blend the practice of a world religion with modern medicine when seeking a cure for an illness. We even make journeys to the shamans and witch doctors that survive in the remaining primitive societies about the globe, when modern medicine has failed.
James George Frazer
However, just over one century ago, controversy arose when a book was published, outlining the differences – and similarities – that exist between the practice of magic and religion, and of how both fitted into emerging discoveries in science. James George Frazer was born in Glasgow, in 1854. Although his father wanted him to practice law and he qualified for the bar, Frazer never practised. Instead, he entered Trinity College in Cambridge, England, and read anthropology. Here, he became a disciple of the Scottish orientalist, William Robertson Smith, and learned from him the comparative method, which he applied to his study of the customs and practices of primitive people.
The Golden Bough
From the mid-1880s, Frazer embarked on a program of research into the early history of mankind, and into the relationship between ancient cultures and those of the contemporary, non-Western world. His book, Totenism, was published in 1887, and his multi-volume The Golden Bough, in 1890. What drove Frazer's research was what he perceived as the universal similarity of the workings of the human mind, and his belief that this was the crucial factor in the evolution of society. He characterized anthropology as a science of human origin. By 1910, Totenism and Exogamy had grown from his 1887 work. After World War One, he traveled throughout Europe with his wife, an ethnographer. By 1930, he was blind from overwork, but continued writing with the help of an amanuensis. He died in 1941.
"Neither a Safe nor a Proper Book"
In his introduction to the 1990 edition of the book, editor Robert Fraser describes the outrage that the young Sean O'Casey was met with when he went looking for a copy of the book in the 1920s, in ultra-conservative Catholic Dublin. Why was a young man seeking a book in a library met with such hostility? I quote Robert Fraser: The Golden Bough is a dangerous book, which retains the ability to disconcert...it is a work whose essence lies in its challenge to received cultural attitudes. Victorian societies were filled with taboos or fences around cultures, as Robert Fraser describes them.
Magic and Religion
It seems extraordinary in our well-informed times, but Victorians did not know that people of other cultures were also adherents of religion, and exercised rituals every bit as structured and meaningful as daily prayer and weekly church-going. Nor did they take kindly to religion and magic being placed in the same volume. However, Frazer takes care to lay down the differences between the two. I quote him: religion assumes the world to be directed by conscious agents who may be turned from their purpose by persuasion. This, he explains, is diametrically in opposition to magic, whereby the mere chanting of a spell by a human agent (the witch doctor I describe above) is enough to work a charm to cure illness, or whatever.
Religion and Science
Frazer describes religion as being in fundamental antagonism to science, although I suspect that the average Victorian cared not so much for the perceived differences between these two, as for the twinning of religion with magic. However much I regard the book, I don't share all of Frazer's opinions. He was not a scientist himself, therefore unqualified to draw or discount parallels between scientific discovery and religious belief. For example, the Book of Genesis opens with a very accurate account of the birth of the universe, our planet, and our place on it, that is, as the 'highest' animal in the wake of a myriad of less intelligent species. Drawing parallels between science and religion is a subject for another time. I do recommend The Golden Bough, a book that transports the reader to other places and times, and an extraordinary lens through which to view history, religion and the natural world.
Sources
- The Golden Bough by James George Frazer, Oxford World's Classics, Oxford University Press, edited by Robert Fraser, 1994.
- The New Jerusalem Bible, Dartman, Longman & Todd, London 1990
Mary Phelan - I am an art historian, magazine editor, design philosopher and fiction writer. I am also a sometime artist and photographer.
