CivilWar’s Reviews > The Golden Bough: A New Abridgement > Status Update

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Goddamn vro the entire stuff with the Corn/Vegetation Spirit makes the book's quality rapidly go down, this is so outdated lol.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.

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