Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941) was a Scottish classical scholar and anthropologist, born in Glasgow and educated at the University of Glasgow and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he held a fellowship for most of his life. Trained in classics and law, he turned to the comparative study of religion under the influence of E. B. Tylor's Primitive Culture and his friend William Robertson Smith. He did no fieldwork himself, but corresponded with missionaries, travellers and officials around the world and read enormously. Besides The Golden Bough he published a translation and commentary on Pausanias, Totemism and Exogamy and Folk-Lore in the Old Testament; he was knighted in 1914.
Frequently Cited
“He was a priest and a murderer; and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead.”
“first, that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and, second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.”
The Golden Bough sets out to explain one strange rule. In the sacred grove of Diana at Nemi, in the Alban Hills near Rome, the priest, called the King of the Wood, held office until a runaway slave broke a bough from a certain tree and killed him in single combat, becoming priest in turn.
