James George Frazer

Quotes

1. The notion that we can transfer our guilt and sufferings to some other being who will bear them for us is familiar to the savage mind. It arises from a very obvious confusion between the physical and the mental, between the material and the immaterial.

2. 

   Dwellers by the sea cannot fail to be impressed by the sight of its ceaseless ebb and flow, and are apt, on the principles of that rude philosophy of sympathy and resemblance...to trace a subtle relation, a secret harmony, between its tides and the life of man...The belief that most deaths happen at ebb tide is said to be held along the east coast of England from Northumberland to Kent.

3. 

   With the advance of knowledge, therefore, prayer and sacrifice assume the leading place in religious ritual; and magic; which once ranked with them as a legitimate equal, is gradually relegated to the background and sinks to the level of a black art.

4. 

   I am a plain practical man, not one of your theorists and splitters of hairs and choppers of logic.

5. 

   The scapegoat upon whom the sins of the people are periodically laid, may also be a human being.

6. 

   It is not a new opinion that the Golden Bough was the mistletoe. True, Virgil does not identify but only compares it with the mistletoe. But this may be only a poetical device to cast a mystic glamour over the humble plant.

7. 

   In point of fact magicians appear to have often developed into chiefs and kings.

8. 

   For ages the army of spirits, once so near, has been receding farther and farther from us, banished by the magic wand of science from hearth and home, from ruined cell and ivied tower, from haunted glade and lonely mere, from the riven murky cloud that belches forth lightning, and from those fairer clouds that pillow the silvery moon or fret with flakes of burning red the golden eve.

9. 

   Ancient magic was the very foundation of religion.

10. 

    For there are strong grounds for thinking that, in the evolution of thought, magic has preceded religion.

11. 

    The Athenians regularly maintained a number of degraded and useless beings at the public expense; and when any calamity, such as plague, drought, or famine, befell the city, they sacrificed two of these outcast scapegoats.

12. 

    The consideration of human suffering is not one which enters into the calculations of primitive man.