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Books So Bad They're Good: The Non-Sacred King [1]

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Date: 2025-03-08

Victorian academics have much to answer for.

Not all of them, of course. Some of them did genuinely good work in a variety of fields, from philology to history to the sciences, and if a goodly chunk of their scholarship is forgotten, well, that is the nature of research. What looks like The Answer to one generation is almost always superseded or expanded upon as more data becomes available, new methods of analysis are applied, and new questions are asked. Any good scholar knows this and accepts it, and anyone who doesn’t is either a charlatan, a fanatic, or plain delusional; I know very well that some of my work on early quilting will be remember but some won’t, and if someone challenges my conclusions and can support it, fine by me.

So it is with the Victorians and their immediate successors, the Edwardians. Much of what passed for cutting edge research in the long 19th century seems quaint to us today, but without it modern scholarship simply would not exist. Modern biology, historiography, literary studies, archaeology — these and many other fields owe an enormous debt to the scholars and academics, professional or amateur, who worked under gaslight instead of LEDs. Even now-ignored antiquarians and collectors did a tremendous amount of basic research into local history, botany, manuscripts, folklore, and material culture; much of the corpus of medieval English literature survived thanks largely to editions published by the Early English Text Society, including classics like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Alas, this good work is balanced by an equal (or possibly greater) amount of work that was questionable in its time and now seems utterly ridiculous. To name just one example from my own field of historic textiles, the notorious Mrs. Charles Ashdown and her husband, hereinafter referred to as “Mr.,” toiled for decades documenting every medieval brass rubbing, tomb monument, and misericord they could find in hopes of preserving the lost knowledge of how the arms, armor, and clothing of that mysterious and romantic time were constructed. Mr.’s work was decent enough as far as I know, but Mrs. Charles, who boasted of her work outfitting aristocrats for what she called “The Great Pageants” in at least one book, was responsible for an allegedly authentic costume book where the models are visibly corseted and wear headdresses so big a sneeze would have broken their necks. What she didn’t realize is that those insane headdresses on the misericords were deliberately exaggerated to make fun of contemporary fashions. No one actually wore them, at least at the scale she thought they did, but thanks to her book a whole of bunch of later costumers and re-enactors tried to reconstruct her work.

Mrs. Charles wasn’t alone in working very hard and completely missing the mark. Dentists have gotten very rich thanks to needle workers and costume historians gnashing their teeth over all the earnest, thoroughly illustrated, and finely written books on dress, textiles, underwear, needleworking tools, shoes, hats, etc., authored by earnest, thoroughly well-meaning, and untrained 19th century amateurs who misinterpreted, misdated, and mislabeled everything they’d spent years documenting. And it’s not just costume historians, oh no no no. Archaeologists, art historians, museum curators, specialists in material culture from furniture to armor to glassware to pottery — all have had to contend with the legacy of enthusiastic Victorians who did groundbreaking work finding the raw materials of history and then completely botched the write-up.

To quote one of my favorite comic characters, Modesty Blaise, “Sometimes you can do all your sums right and still get the wrong answer.”

The problem is particularly acute for folklorists, song/game collectors, historic dancers, and anyone else who tries to document rural or folk customs, particularly of the seasonal persuasion. There are whole libraries of 19th century books that see pagan gods behind every stained glass window of a Green Man, fertility customs behind every village fete or harvest supper, brutally suppressed matriarchy behind every clever girl chucking a potential murderer off a cliff in a popular ballad. That many of the ballads began life as 17th and 18th century broadsides, the Green Men were Renaissance decorations called “foliate heads,” and the harvest suppers a way to feed the threshing teams does not seem to matter. Thanks to reprint publishers like Dover and Friends of the Library sales that feature battered copies of Jessie Weston, Cecil Sharp, and Sabine Baring-Gould, the idea that everything is based on Ye Ancient Antique Rites of Springsummerwinterfall is firmly embedded in the public consciousness no matter what modern researchers say.

As for how this idea became so deepy rooted in the first place, follow me below the fold into the deep places of the High Library of the Heights, to the shelves housing the Books That Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, and learn….

Tonight I bring you only book from the riches of Badbookistan, but it’s a doozy. Enormously influential, still in print and readily available despite being thoroughly debunked by scholars, this classic has inspired thinkers for generations. For good or ill, it’s one of the most important books of its time, and we ignore its legacy at our peril:

The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, by Sir James Frazer — in many ways Sir James Frazer perfectly epitomizes the problem with Victorian scholarship. A Classics graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, he did genuinely groundbreaking work on mythology, ritual, and folklore that laid the groundwork for what we now call social anthropology. He wrote commentaries on classical works that still hold up, and the data he collected from contacts in the British imperial bureaucracy and the missionary community preserved a great many folk tales and myths that might otherwise have been lost. He was among the first generation of scholars to treat the Bible as a source of myth instead of sacred writ, with enormous consequences to the study of religion and ultimately Christianity itself.

Finally, Frazer wrote one of the most culturally important books of the 19th century, a true masterwork of comparative religion that was the taproot for some of the greatest literary, cinematic, and artistic achievements of the 20th and early 21st centuries. It is literally impossible not to see his influence on modern scholarship and popular culture, and thanks to cheap reprints, there is no sign that this will ever change.

Alas for scholarship, art, culture, and Sir James Frazer’s reputation, this hugely important book, this cultural touchstone, was almost completely wrong.

This is not apparent at first glance, which is one of the reasons why generations of intellectually curious readers have kept The Golden Bough in print for over 130 years. A sweeping, expansive look at myths, legends, and rituals from antiquity to the 19th century, the book is nothing less than an attempt to trace the common elements of human religious thought across all cultures and races. By doing so, Frazer believed that he could show how our thinking about nature and our place in the natural world had gradually evolved from the primitive magic of pre-industrial societies through organized religion to the evidence-based scientific worldview of the Victorian world.

The result, first published in 1890, was both exhaustive (the third edition stretched to twelve volumes published over nine years) and exhausting (twelve volumes, do I need to say more?). Beginning with a passage from The Aeneid where the titular hero and one of those annoying Sibyls that keep cropping up in classical writing snitch a golden bough from a sacred grove and use it to gain admission to the underworld, Frazer draws upon myth after myth across culture after culture to tease out the connections, similarities, and motifs shared by humans across the ages, continents, and races.

The densely written result, which makes Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God look like one of Robert Benchley’s trifles about the perils of spending a good old-fashioned Christmas in East Russet, Vermont, eventually concludes that all human religion — cripes, all human thought — leads back to primitive fertility cults that attempted to ensure good crops, prosperity, and strong, healthy babies by the periodic sacrifice of a Sacred King whose blood symbolically fertilizes the soil and restores its fertility. That includes Christianity, as Frazer pointed out that the story of Jesus’ passion, death, and resurrection bore a striking similarity to that of several other gods and cultural figures, most notably Osiris.

Needless to say, this part of Frazer’s analysis did not go over all that well with the Victorian reading public. Clerics were outraged, respectable readers both titillated and somewhat appalled, and radicals intrigued. Frazer was eventually forced to move his comparison of the New Testament to one of the appendices in the monstrous final edition of The Golden Bough to placate his critics, while the whole discussion is omitted from the one volume abridged edition that can still be purchased in print and e-format. That Continental scholars, especially in Germany, had danced around similar conclusions in what is known as The Quest for Historic Jesus, did not seem to register with the British public, but then again the Germans had not claimed that Jesus was a blood sacrifice like Osiris, Attis, Dionysus, Quetzalcoatl, etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum et ad nauseam .

Nor did it register with the literary and artistic community. Curious, skeptical of Christianity, and fascinated by fringe ideas such as spiritualism, ritual magic, and what they were convinced were pure and uncorrupted folk ideas, the intelligentsia of late 19th and early 20th century Britain seized upon The Golden Bough with hosannas of delight. The idea of a Sacred King, ritual sacrifice, fertility magic, and a dying and resurrected god struck a real nerve in an increasingly mechanized world, and soon Frazer’s ideas were bubbling up in some of the most important, popular works in the English-speaking world. T.S. Eliot, Robert Graves, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, William Butler Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, J.R.R. Tolkien — every single one of them was influenced in some ways by The Golden Bough and its ideas about ritual sacrifice, wounded/dying kings, and a depleted land restored by sacrifice.

It wasn’t only literature that was influenced by Frazer. Mythologist Joseph Campbell, anthropologist Margaret Murray, occultist Dion Fortune, cultural critic Camille Paglia — every single one of them drew on Frazer to one extent or another. Murray even wrote an entire book attempting to prove that the British royal family was secretly pagan and regularly sacrificed its kings to keep Britain fertile (including, for some reason, Joan of Arc, who was neither British nor pagan).

Then there were the folklorists, who began finding fertility rites in local celebrations that, say, commemorated Lord Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar (he died on the deck! BLOOD SACRIFICE!) or the new asparagus crop (green vegetables = GREEN MAN!). Ditto the novelists and filmmakers who read Frazer (The Wicker Man, Midsomer) or Joseph Campbell (the entire Star Wars mythos) or Margaret Murray (Katherine Kurtz’s Lammas Night). Modern neo-paganism can be traced at least in part to The Golden Bough, especially Gerald Gardner’s original Wicca, and so can the strain of modern atheism that sees Jesus as just another Middle Eastern fertility god.

And then there’s Carl Jung, who was, if anything, more influential than Frazer himself, especially on the Continent.

The anthropological and historical community began moving beyond The Golden Bough around the time that authors, psychiatrists, and artists were busily mining it for inspiration. Frazer did little to no field work, relying instead on reports sent to him by missionaries and bureaucrats whose research was relegated to their less than copious free time. That these sources might have been — how do I put this without being rude? — biased to one extent or another became increasingly evident as more and more scholars found that The Golden Bough was Eurocentric, based largely on Victorian attitudes toward Greco-Roman antiquity, and simply not accurate. By the time he died in 1941, Frazer’s theories were largely considered obsolete, and by the 1980s the critics were out in force. What had seemed fresh and exciting in 1890 now was stuffy, badly researched, and both racist and sexist, with a shocking lack of evidence. Anthropologists today read the book, if at all, for its historiographic important, not its scholarship.

It’s hard to know what Frazer would have thought of all this. He insisted to his dying day that his book, massive and seemingly comprehensive as it was, was merely speculative, and that he fully expected that subsequent scholars with access to more sources and better research would render his life’s work obsolete. He was well aware of his limitations, and publicly hoped that the lecture series established in his honor 1922 “should be used solely for the disinterested pursuit of truth, and not for the dissemination or propagation of any theories or opinions of mine.”

That The Golden Bough is still in print might well have pleased him. He might even be pleased that modern authors draw on some of his ideas. That far too many people with no training and no acquaintance with modern anthropology take him at face value, though — that’s another matter entirely. Somehow I don’t think he would be nearly so please at that.

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Is there a copy of The Golden Bough in your knotty pine rumpus room? A copy of The Masks of God? A well-thumbed student edition of The Wasteland? A complete set of Star Wars VHS tapes, appropriately faded from too many viewings? It’s a windy night at the Last Homey Shack East of the Manhan, so hurry inside, pour yourself a hot cup of tea, and share….

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