James G. Frazer Quotes
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With the advance of knowledge, therefore, prayer and sacrifice assume the leading place in religious ritual; and magic; which once ranked with them as a legitimate equal, is gradually relegated to the background and sinks to the level of a black art.
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In primitive society, where uniformity of occupation is the rule, and the distribution of the community into various classes of workers has hardly begun, every man is more or less his own magician; he practices charms and incantations for his own good and the injury of his enemies.
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Yet perhaps no sacrifice is wholly useless which proves there are men who prefer honour to life.
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For when a nation becomes civilized, if it does not drop human sacrifices altogether, it at least selects as victims only such wretches as would be put to death at any rate. Thus the killing of a god may sometimes come to be confounded with the execution of a criminal.
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The second principle of magic: 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.
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For no sooner had I begun to read this great work Frasier, The Golden Bough , than I became immersed in it and enslaved by it. I realized then that anthropology, as presented by Sir James Frazer, is a great science, worthy of as much devotion as any of her elder and more exact sister studies, and I became bound to the service of Frazerian anthropology.
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The natives of British Columbia live largely upon the fish which abound in their seas and rivers. If the fish do not come in due season, and the Indians are hungry, A Nootka wizard will make an image of a swimming fish and put it into the water in the direction from which the fish generally appear. This ceremony, accompanied by a prayer to the fish to come, will cause them to arrive at once.
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By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life.
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Even the recognition of an individual whom we see every day is only possible as the result of an abstract idea of him formed by generalization from his appearances in the past.
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The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.
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The abundance, the solidity, and the splendor of the results already achieved by science are well fitted to inspire us with a cheerful confidence in the soundness of its method.
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The Athenians regularly maintained a number of degraded and useless beings at the public expense; and when any calamity, such as plague, drought, or famine, befell the city, they sacrificed two of these outcast scapegoats.
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Man has created gods in his own likeness and being himself mortal he has naturally supposed his creatures to be in the same sad predicament.
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The consideration of human suffering is not one which enters into the calculations of primitive man.
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I am a plain practical man, not one of your theorists and splitters of hairs and choppers of logic.
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For extending its sway, partly by force of arms, partly by the voluntary submission of weaker tribes, the community soon acquires wealth and slaves, both of which, by relieving some classes from the perpetual struggle for a bare subsistence, afford them an opportunity of devoting themselves to that disinterested pursuit of knowledge which is the noblest and most powerful instrument to ameliorate the lot of man.
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For there are strong grounds for thinking that, in the evolution of thought, magic has preceded religion.
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The man of science, like the man of letters, is too apt to view mankind only in the abstract, selecting in his consideration only a single side of our complex and many-sided being.
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The question whether our conscious personality survives after death has been answered by almost all races of men in the affirmative.
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The old notion that the savage is the freest of mankind is the reverse of the truth. He is a slave, not indeed to a visible master, but to the past, to the spirits of his dead forefathers, who haunt his steps from birth to death, and rule him with a rod of iron.
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The scapegoat upon whom the sins of the people are periodically laid, may also be a human being.
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This doctrine of transmigration or reincarnation of the soul is found among many tribes of savages.
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From the earliest times man has been engaged in a search for general rules whereby to turn the order of natural phenomena to his own advantage, and in the long search he has scraped together a great hoard of such maxims, some of them golden and some of them mere dross. The true or golden rules constitute the body of applied science which we call the arts; the false are magic.
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Some of the old laws of Israel are clearly savage taboos of a familiar type thinly disguised as commands of the Deity.