James George Frazer

Sir James George Frazer, a Scottish social anthropologist and folklorist, helped shape the early study of mythology and comparative religion. Born in Glasgow on 1 January 1854 to Katherine Brown and Daniel F. Frazer, a chemist, he attended Springfield Academy and Larchfield Academy in Helensburgh. He studied at the University of Glasgow and Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating with honours in classics; his dissertation later appeared as *The Growth of Plato's Ideal Theory*. He remained a Classics Fellow at Cambridge for life, was elected to a Trinity Fellowship four times, and also studied law at the Middle Temple without ever practising. Apart from a year at the University of Liverpool (1907–1908), he spent most of his career at Cambridge. Knighted in 1914, a public lectureship in social anthropology was established in his honour at Cambridge, Oxford, Glasgow, and Liverpool in 1921. From 1930 he was severely visually impaired, if not blind. He and his wife, Lilly, died within hours of each other in Cambridge on 7 May 1941 and are buried at the St Giles (Ascension Parish Burial Ground) there. Frazer is often seen as an atheist due to his criticism of Christianity—especially Roman Catholicism—in *The Golden Bough*, though later writings and unpublished material suggest an ambivalent engagement with Neoplatonism and Hermeticism. In 1896 he married Elizabeth "Lilly" Grove, a writer from Alsace who later adapted *The Golden Bough* into a children's book, *The Leaves from the Golden Bough*. His sister Isabella Katherine Frazer married mathematician John Steggall.

Frazer specialised in myth and religion, but he rarely travelled beyond Italy and Greece. His main sources were ancient histories and questionnaires sent to missionaries and imperial officials worldwide. His interest in social anthropology was sparked by reading E. B. Tylor's *Primitive Culture* (1871) and encouraged by his friend, biblical scholar William Robertson Smith, who compared Old Testament elements with early Hebrew folklore. Frazer was the first to detail the links between myths and rituals, though his idea of an annual Year-King sacrifice has not been confirmed by fieldwork. Nonetheless, *The Golden Bough*—his study of ancient cults, rites, and myths, including parallels in early Christianity—remained influential for decades among mythographers for its detailed information. The first edition (two volumes) appeared in 1890; a second (three volumes) in 1900; the third edition finished in 1915, running to twelve volumes, with a supplemental thirteenth in 1936. A single-volume abridged version, largely compiled by his wife, came out in 1922, omitting some controversial material on Christianity. The work reached beyond academia, inspiring psychologists and psychiatrists: Sigmund Freud frequently cited Frazer's *Totemism and Exogamy* in his own *Totem and Taboo*. The symbolic cycle of life, death, and rebirth Frazer discerned in myths captivated artists and poets, most notably T. S. Eliot in *The Waste Land* (1922). Late-20th-century scholars criticised Frazer's pioneering work. In the 1980s, social anthropologist Edmund Leach wrote critical articles, including a lead piece in *Anthropology Today* (vol. 1, 1985), faulting *The Golden Bough* for broad comparisons across widely separated cultures, though he often relied on the abridged edition, which lacks supporting archaeological detail. In 1973, J. D. Hawkins, reviewing a book on Hittite cultus, approvingly noted its methodical use of documentary evidence, unlike Frazer's approach. More recently, *The Golden Bough* has been criticised for imperialist, anti-Catholic, classist, and racist elements, including Frazer's view that European peasants, Aboriginal Australians, and Africans represented fossilised, earlier stages of cultural evolution. Another major work is his six-volume commentary on the Greek traveller Pausanias' 2nd-century AD description of Greece. Though archaeological excavations have since expanded knowledge of ancient Greece, scholars still value his detailed historical and topographical discussions and his eyewitness accounts of late-19th-century Greece.

Among the most influential parts of the third edition of *The Golden Bough* is Frazer's theory of cultural evolution and the roles he assigned to religion and magic. This theory was not absolute and could reverse, but broadly described three (or possibly four) spheres through which cultures were thought to pass over time: from magic, to religion, to science. Frazer's classification diverged from earlier anthropological models, such as Auguste Comte's, because he saw magic as initially separate from religion and not invariably preceding it.