James George Frazer came from a well-to-do Scottish family, and spent his whole life in academic study and research, chiefly as a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. His reputation was first as a classicist, then as social anthropologist, folklorist, and theorist of comparative religion. His central achievement was The Golden Bough, a collection in twelve volumes (1906-1915) blending all these disciplines. The one-volume abbreviation of 1922 brought the work to a wide public of non-specialist readers.

The underlying assumption of The Golden Bough is typical of its era of early positivism and faith in progress: it was that magic is illusionary and religion obsolete, both belonging to earlier phases of human evolution. In Frazer’s metahistorical scheme, magic, when it proved not to work very well, was succeeded by religion, which appealed to a higher power; and when that did not work, science showed how and why things really happen.

It is tempting to psychologize a scholar whose imaginative world was filled with tales and images, beliefs and practices, that he considered outdated and misguided. Frazer resembles the obsessive collector who must possess every variety of postage stamp or butterfly. In his first major work, a six-volume commentary on Pausanias’s Description of Greece (1897), he put every topographical reference under the microscope and evaluated its accuracy in the light of more advanced knowledge. But he himself hardly explored the Hellenic world, and (like the stamp collector) never set foot in most of the lands from which The Golden Bough was gathered. He relied on learned publications and the reports of missionaries and explorers. The disciplines of which he was a founding contributor now regard his methods as dated, and moralize over his attitudes. Yet Frazer’s narratives, written in superb English style, can still delight the armchair traveler in time and space, evoking the world of our ancestors and the strange practices that survive in distant places.

Although he might not have welcomed the comparison, Frazer belongs with those scholars parodied in George Eliot’s Middlemarch in the person of Mr. Casaubon, who is writing A Key to All Mythologies. Formerly the only permissible key had been the absolute veracity of the Bible, but once that had been discarded, and the classical sources supplemented by information flooding in from travelers and colonists, the gates were opened to such as Court de Gébelin (Le monde primitif), Johann Gottfried Herder (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit), Charles-François Dupuis (Origine de tous les cultes), Godfrey Higgins (Anacalypsis), and James Forlong (Rivers of Life). Their first principle tended more to Deism (the belief that God exists, but does not intervene in world affairs) than to atheistic or agnostic scientism, and to an evolutionary outlook in which primitive fears and superstitions developed into the established cults.

Against this was another strain in the history of ideas, equally averse to biblical literalism but open to currents such as Neoplatonism and Kabbalah, and to the occult sciences of astrology, alchemy, divination, and ceremonial magic: in short, what is now known as the Western Esoteric Tradition. In the later nineteenth century, first Spiritualism and then Theosophy opened other gates to belief in, and claimed experience of, non-material realities. H. P. Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888) were also “keys to all mythologies,” but in the light of what Frazer regarded as atavistic magic. In the twentieth century, followers of the Traditionalist current (associated with René Guénon, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, and Julius Evola) took the contrarian view that ancient peoples had capabilities and sources of knowledge that have been lost to us, and that humanity has undergone more of a devolutionary than an evolutionary process. Moreover, troubling to positivists, in the decades around 1900, magic proved to be alive and well, and not just among superstitious peasants and other relics of humanity’s infancy.