2016-12-16 - The Golden Bough by Sir James George Frazer ========================================================= Golden bough image Book notes from January, 2009. Reading this was like drinking from a fire hose. It cast new light on some fantasy books that I have read before. It was interesting to read that taboos came to exist not because something was holy or unclean, but because it was considered dangerous or in danger. Making it taboo secluded the spiritual danger and prevented it from spreading. The theme of a sacred tree guardian defeated in combat by the new guardian reminds me of The One Tree by Stephen R Donaldson. The similarities are too clear to ignore. > Brinn, Covenant's Haruchai bodyguard, sacrifices himself in a > duel with the Tree's Guardian ak-Haru Kenaustin Ardenol. He is > regenerated as the new Guardian and leads the party to the Tree > itself. The One Tree @Wikipedia The book also discusses the idea of superstition being replaced by religion, and religion replaced by science. Many times it contrasts savages against modern Europeans. "No human being is so hide-bound by custom and tradition as your democratic savage; in no state of society consequently is progress so slow and difficult." "Thus the theory which recognises in the European Corn-mother, Corn-maiden, and so forth, the embodiment in vegetable form of the animating spirit of the crops is amply confirmed by the evidence of peoples in other parts of the world, who, _because they have lagged behind the European races in mental development_, retain for that very reason a keener sense of the original motives for observing those rustic rites which among ourselves have sunk to the level of meaningless survivals." "The heathen origin of Christmas is plainly hinted at, if not tacitly admitted, by Augustine when he exhorts his Christian brethren not to celebrate that solemn day like the heathen on account of the sun, but on account of him who made the sun." Several passages in the book describe natural beauty. "For at the dawn of history Europe was covered with immense primaeval forests, in which the scattered clearings must have appeared like islets in an ocean of green." "Nowhere apparently are the alternations of the seasons more sudden and the contrasts between them more striking than in the deserts of Central Australia, where at the end of a long period of drought the sandy and stony wilderness, over which the silence and desolation of death appear to brood, is suddenly, after a few days of torrential rain, transformed into a landscape smiling with verdure and peopled with teeming multitudes of insects and lizards, of frogs and birds. The marvellous change which passes over the face of nature at such times has been compared even by European observers to the effect of magic; no wonder, then, that the savage should regard it as such in very deed." "For at Aphaca there was a famous grove and sanctuary of Astarte ... The site of the temple has been discovered by modern travellers near the miserable village which still bears the name of Afka at the head of the wild, romantic, wooded gorge of the Adonis. ... A little way off the river rushes from a cavern at the foot of a mighty amphitheatre of towering cliffs to plunge in a series of cascades into the awful depths of the glen. The deeper it descends, the ranker and denser grows the vegetation, which, sprouting from the crannies and fissures of the rocks, spreads a green veil over the roaring or murmuring stream in the tremendous chasm below. There is something delicious, almost intoxicating, in the freshness of these tumbling waters, in the sweetness and purity of the mountain air, in the vivid green of the vegetation. ... Across the foam and roar of the waterfalls you look up to the cavern and away to the top of the sublime precipices above. So lofty is the cliff that the goats which creep along its ledges to browse on the bushes appear like ants to the spectator hundreds of feet below. Seaward the view is especially impressive when the sun floods the profound gorge with golden light, revealing all the fantastic buttresses and rounded towers of its mountain rampart, and falling softly on the varied green of the woods which clothe its depths." author: Frazer, James George, Sir, 1854-1941 detail: LOC: BL310 .F7 source: tags: ebook,history,non-fiction title: The Golden Bough Tags ==== ebook history non-fiction