I enjoyed listening as rituals and myths mutate slowly from one form to another.
Clearly Durant was greatly influenced by this book as were many, many, others.
Frazer golden bough plus#
This was well worth listening to understand the similarity of myths across a variety of cultures plus I saw how influential this book was on western literature. The author uses a few outdated terms, like “savages”, to describe tribal people and beliefs, but the author was clearly trying to be unbiased and respectful to each of the cultures he covers. The book demonstrates a wide spread and repeating pattern of ritual and myth regarding the killing and resurrection of a god. The book follows the slow path of belief from simple magical thought, to rituals, to myths explaining the rituals, and finally to religions. This book is intentionally very repetitive, retelling very slightly different rituals and myths from one culture after another, for hours. In many forms and guises, Frazer's ideas have flourished from his day to the present. Though clearly open to criticism from a modern perspective, it opened pathways of thought and interpretation that enabled later thinkers to explore perspectives that would not have been available otherwise. The Golden Bough quickly took its place in the fields of mythology, anthropology and comparative religion as a classic. Read reviews and buy The Golden Bough - (Dover Thrift Editions) Abridged by James George Frazer (Paperback) at Target. Starting from the image of the lonely, doomed high priest, prowling his precinct night and day, sword in hand, hardly daring to sleep as he awaited the assault of the man who would kill him and take his place, Frazer roams the world of ancient and modern religious and ceremonial practice in search of the underlying universals of human thought. Frazer brings us into a worldwide survey of religion, folklore, culture, symbolism, and ritual using the Priest of Nemi as his starting point. Just as Proust derives an entire world of feeling, people and events from the taste of a madeleine, James G.
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