2016-12-16 - The Golden Bough by Sir James George Frazer
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Golden bough image
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2016-12-16-the-golden-bough-by-sir-james-george-frazer/
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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
<gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/The_One_Tree>

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: <gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/The_Golden_Bough>
LOC:    BL310 .F7
source: <gopher://gopher.pglaf.org/1/3/6/2/3623/>
tags:   ebook,history,non-fiction
title:  The Golden Bough

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