What to make of The Golden Bough in the 21st Century? It’s an amazing work of late Victorian anthropology examining ancient myths and fertility rituals all over the world. And it shows how some of them were the roots that became part of Judaism and Christianity.
All these rituals were designed to ensure the continuing fertility of the staple crops, the animals and the human population. They were early efforts at magic designed to ensure that the sun would return to strength at the end of winter, that rains would fall in season and that diseases of animals, plants and humans would be expelled.
The original work by the polymath Sir James Frazer ran to thirteen volumes. It profoundly influenced T S Eliot’s Waste Land, with its striking parallel of a collapsed moral culture after the First World War and a dead earth, both a spiritual and physical breakdown.
Frazer’s great survey of primitive beliefs has long been superseded by modern anthropology – which studies particular indigenous cultures in great depth. But it still contains riches for a modern reader.
I was lucky enough to pick up a copy in an Oxfam shop, The Illustrated GOLDEN BOUGH in an abridged edition published by Book Club Associates in 1978. It contains marvellous pictures, engravings and photographs from museums and global collections which bring these ancient human practices alive.
So what did Frazer discover? Early humans understood nature through animism, seeing trees and animals, crops, the sun, the moon and the sea as powerful living things, as spirits or gods. And they did not make an absolute distinction between the gods and powerful humans. A priest, a shaman or a king could become an embodied god, with the crucial power to keep nature living and fertile and the people fed.
But what happens when the priest king becomes old, diseased or feeble? And what happens when the crops fail and the animals die?
Frazer documents rituals across the continents where a human victim, an embodiment of a god, is sacrificed to ensure that a new vigorous god of fertility will return. Some of these sacrifices were extremely bloody – with the body of the victim cut into pieces and sprinkled over the land. Sometimes the body might be eaten. Or nailed to a tree.
Gradually (as priest kings became keen to avoid this fate) there would be a surrogate. It might be the king’s son, it might be a temple virgin, it might be a criminal or a captive of war or even an unlucky stranger.
The primitive societies who carried out these rites were hoping for a double payoff – a powerful god would be appeased and the victim would become a scapegoat for all the misdeeds of the community in the past year.
Sometimes a sacrificial victim would be exalted for the previous month or year, treated as a god, allowed to live in a palace, wear gorgeous clothes and sometimes even to sleep with the king’s wives. From rags to untold riches and then a grizzly, dramatic end.
These ceremonies followed the pattern of the agricultural year. Around Christmas time at the winter solstice, there was often a period of liberty and feasting, sometimes 12 nights where a Lord of Misrule held sway and the normal hierarchies of master and slave, man and wife were relaxed. The Romans called this the Saturnalia.
The other big festivals were around the spring equinox, midsummer and then the autumn harvest time, when there were often rituals of atonement to the last of the wheat or barley to be threshed in the barn.
In some areas ritual fires were lit, designed to purge diseases and drive out witchcraft, which was believed to be the cause of agricultural failures and birth defects.
Frazer keeps returning to a core myth in Virgil’s Aeneid, where a golden bough enables the hero to visit the underworld of the dead and then safely return. The bough came from a sacred grove he believed to be at Nemi near Rome. It was guarded by a priest king, venerated as the lover of the goddess Diana. Whenever a stronger man came and killed him, he took his place.
The book argues that the grove represents the sacred power of the Oak, often associated with the god of thunder and lightening, which strikes so many oak trees. And the bough itself is Mistletoe, a parasite which grows on oaks without roots (seemingly falling from heaven), turns yellow and gold in flower, and which occurs in myths as a weapon by which a god can be killed.
The animist ideas of the corn god and the oak god and the rest transformed into polytheist religions, such as the classical Gods of Greece and Rome, a more ethereal vision. The sacrifices became gentler, using animals or food and wine rather than human victims. The Romans were contemptuous of the Carthaginians who sacrificed babies and the Celts with their tradition of human sacrifice.
At the back of these extraordinary patterns of social behaviour was a theory of primitive magic. It involved the belief that everything had a soul, the source of life, which was not necessarily contained in the body. So the Red Indians who scalped their enemies thought the power of another warrior was now theirs.
If I make a wax image of you, and then tear off a leg – the action may seriously damage your ability to walk! If I sprinkle water and dance around it for hours chanting, this will influence the clouds to bring rain and renew the crops.
The Golden Bough doesn’t explicitly say that the Christian story of the Crucifixion, with Jesus the lamb of God atoning for the sins of the world, is a relic of an ancient folk myth. Or that the sacrifice of Isaac is the same. Or that the cult of martyrs in many religions has a similar origin. Or the burning of witches and heretics.
But the import of the book is clear. Fundamentalist Christianity is re-enacting an ancient fertility ritual. And perhaps more importantly to me – these old, indigenous myths reflect something deep in human nature.
As self-conscious beings we are bound to reflect and criticise ourselves when things go wrong. If we can’t blame someone else (the first temptation) we start to beat ourselves up. We are guilty – both for the mean things we do, the little lies we tell, and simply for our lack of success. So we may be driven to make some kind of personal sacrifice. “I won’t buy those lovely new clothes till I’ve got the promotion – or passed the exam.”
Another important aspect is that the ancient God of the Hebrews, like the god of thunder, the god of the sea and earthquakes, even the goddess of love – are worshipped because of their power, not their virtue. So in relating to these gods, the worshippers accept their relative powerlessness, rather than having any illusion of human omnipotence.
They also accept the reality that we are living in a world of both good and evil and blind chance. If they regularly give offerings and thanks for the nourishment the earth provides – that provides a positive outlook on life.
When audiences in the ancient Greek theatres watched stories of divine anger and jealousy, and the terrible fates of humans who flouted the traditional wisdom of the gods, perhaps they learned humility. And also a sense that these terrible violent emotions occur sometimes in all of us, and we need to be self-aware and on our guard.
With monotheism came a sea change away from local nature gods to a universal moral imperative, handy for running an expanding empire.
But the folk rituals in the Golden Bough point us back to times when humans felt themselves to be in a dialogue of equals with nature, not seeing themselves as superior beings free to extract whatever resources they wanted. The indigenous view of nature and our home landscapes still has much to teach us.