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# 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: 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 | |
# Tags | |
ebook | |
history | |
non-fiction |