Status Updates From The Golden Bough: A New Abr...

I like this a lot so far

Boek 1 review

Fucking bien
leest wel echt zo traag lik wdym ik doe 35p op 2u. Deze man dropt wel insane veel lore over een enorm groot panorama aan stammen en rituelen over heel de wereld dus dat maakt het ongelofelijk interessant om te lezen. Also ondanks zijn nogal scherp taalgebruik raad ik alle haters om p217-219 te lezen want het redeemt hem lowkey wel nogal

i will never get the leisure to contemplate this book

Altho Frazer misses the point of most of it (though not always amusingly, lol, that the fire was meant to help the sun is very much true as the late Dumezil's analysis of the Matralia at Rome showed), the customs related to Baldr (tho only one has the name of the god de jeur) are absolutely eye opening for what the meaning of Baldr was in the Indo-European pantheon, a sort of Germanic Aryaman, tied to Good Faith...

Kinda funny that Frazer is somehow able tie Christ with random festival mock kings who are allegedly killed because they are allegedly scapegoats (allegedly) and fails to grasp the obviously soteriological character of Christ as compared with Dionysus, Attis, Isis (and her son Horus), even though he was unironically way ahead of the curve and already understood em as soteriological (idg why he didnt put 2+2 together)

Semiramis lowkey kinda hard and True but unfortunately the principles themselves are off and leads everything towards a very silly inane conclusion. The scapegoat part in this is really ass ngl, for a much better coverage of how such things may have started, see Blood Rites, and for a classic treatment on the matter see René Girard's The Scapegoat

Goddamn vro the entire stuff with the Corn/Vegetation Spirit makes the book's quality rapidly go down, this is so outdated lol. Though it remains useful just for the sheer amount of data Frazer collected, which is impressive for today but for the time is outright Herculean, he really is at his best when talking about magic... when we start confusing folk custom with religion and mythology things rapidly spiral.

Ja man dit is hella dense

Finally finished the enormous "Corn Spirit as Animal" chapter lol good god that was mind numbing

Finished the chapter Lityerses chapter, GB continues to spiral rapidly out of control as Frazer somehow fails to notice that the Lityerses story is a Greek etiological tale to explain a pre-existing custom, no different than Maneros or Linus, rather than representative of a previous, prehistorical custom of human sacrifice, and he ties it with actual human sacrifices which do not bear even a passing similarity to it.

I appreciate the humility on the origin of Demeter and Persephone tho, Mr. Frazer (it is in fact entirely wrong)

Comparing the ultra-petty kingdoms in Africa with the enormously complex Mycenaean-Minoan civilization is genuinely very very funny, like does Frazer think that such a society can afford to habitually kill its kings?

"Dionysus is a Thracian god" lmao how Linear B has dispelled such old prejudices

On the one hand, shout out to Frazer for already back then realizing that the Western "Oriental" Mystery Cults were soteriological religions no less than Christianity and had nothing to do crops even if their origin should come from that, on the other hand it is such a wholly delusional European supremacist and orientalist Cope wholly at odds with reality, it does feel like Frazer wants to excuse any fault of Evropa.

the more and more we get into mythology rather than customs the more does Frazer rapidly lose his composure and go positively off the rails. Shout out to that unhinged racist passage which invariably accompanies the part on the Cybele cult about how ROME & EUROPE was RUINED and LED ASTRAY from her (ALLEGEDLY) NATIVE CUSTOMS of COLLECTIVE GOOD towards INDIVIDUAL MYSTICISM by the ORIENTAL RELIGIONS

Frazer mostly is actually very based when talking about magic and taboo, genuinely foundational stuff, but when Adonis gets introduced and in general when we start bringing mythology in, things rapidly spiral out of control as Frazer totally loses his composure.