There is nothing quite so annoying as dealing with someone who is wrong but refuses to admit it.
We’ve all had to deal with this at one time or another — just look at the last few years in American politics, for heaven’s sake — but it never becomes easier. I once had to deal with a woman who was absolutely 100% convinced that the first reference to patchwork in Europe was in Gulliver’s Travels (published in 1726) despite me repeatedly quoting a Breton poem (La Lai del Desir, 13th century), a French memoir (the Chronique de Metz of Phillippe de Vignuelles, 1527), and household inventories compiled between the 14th and early 16th centuries. It wasn’t until I linked to a picture of the Impruneta Cushion (terminal date 1477) that she finally shut up, and even then she kept muttering that no no no, it really didn’t count because it wasn’t quilted even though quilts and patchwork are not synonymous.
How she would have reacted to the 14th century Anjou Textile (which was both pieced and quilted) I have no idea, but I suspect the answer would have been “not well.”
It wasn’t the only time this has happened to me, either. My entire career as a quilt historian stems from someone telling me in 1991 or thereabouts that “they didn’t have quilts in the Middle Ages” (spoiler: they did), while a hiking tour ten years later was nearly ruined when a woman tried to tell me that “the Amish invented patchwork” (spoiler: they didn’t) and then had a meltdown when I pointed out that the earliest examples only date from the 1880’s. Just a couple of days ago a re-enactor from Canada who’d proudly boasted of her brand new PhD went off on a friend of mine who asked an innocent question about early foundation garments, then said “well, I think the museum is wrong” when I provided a link to an exhibit card from, my hand to God, the Medici burial garments in the Palazzo Pitti supporting my friend’s statement (spoiler: the museum is not wrong).
It’s always puzzled me why some people are so quick to reject anything that challenges their beliefs, even the most trivial. I can understand the newly hatched PhD to a certain extent — she clearly wanted to show that she knew what she was talking about even though she specializes in 18th century costume, not 16th century — but the woman on the hiking trip wasn’t a quilter, fashion designer, or textile historian. Why did she blow up so quickly? Why did she even care about when Amish quilts were made? I was the one who’d spent over a decade studying old quilts, but she acted as if I had just personally murdered a litter of innocent newborn grypflychs in front of her, even after I quoted a respected art historian who’d just published a book on the subject (spoiler: it was Robert Hughes). I’m still trying to figure out exactly what had happened, and why, even though it’s been over twenty years.
As for the re-enactor who launched my glorious, fulfilling, and utterly non-lucrative career as a quilt historian...I’m pretty sure he quietly dropped out of the SCA a few years later. That means his one major contribution is motivating me to become a Mistress of the Laurel and a published author, which is pretty much the dictionary definition of “ironic” and/or “pwned,” whichever you prefer.
These examples aside, one thing I have most definitely learned over the years is that what we call “history” is as much a process as a set of facts and dates. that knowledge continues to accumulate, and that it’s very likely that what we now consider immutable fact will eventually need to be modified or even discarded. Refusing to expand one’s knowledge base is a terrible idea regardless of the field, and I simply don’t understand why so many people go crazy at the mere idea.
Even worse, though, are people who seek to expand their knowledge base using books that are out of date, badly researched, and just plain wrong.
Tonight I bring you only one book, but it’s a doozy. Hugely influential, still in print after 133 years, this book has literally shaped Western culture since the late Victorian era. Novelists, poets, playwrights, filmmakers, musicians, pop psychology, public television hosts, cripes, even a whole religious movement — so much can be traced to this book one can argue that it’s among the most important books of our time.
That its thesis was questioned at the time and has been almost completely rejected by professionals in its field hasn’t made a bit of difference. The ideas it advanced still can be seen in everything from superhero movies to fantasy novels, comic books to popular songs:
The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (later “A Study in Magic and Religion”), by Sir James Frazer — on the surface, Sir James George Frazer, OM, FRS, FRSE, FBA, could not have been more respectable. Born to a well-off family, educated at the University of Glasgow and Trinity College, Cambridge, he passed the bar with ease, then enjoyed a distinguished career as a folklorist and anthropologist. A knighthood, chaired professorships and annual lectures in his name, a bestselling and extremely influential book that inspired some of the greatest minds of the day and did much to shape the cultural life of the early twentieth century — in some ways he seemed to have a charmed life.
Even his marriage was exemplary; his wife, Elizabeth, a French widow who preferred to be known as Lilly, was an accomplished author in her own right who helped to popularize his work by writing a children’s version. So devoted were they to that they died within hours of each at the ripe old age of 87. The only flaw in his personal life was failing eyesight that rendered him all but blind when he was in his early 70’s, but he continued to dictate articles and books until he was nearly 80.
So why was his major work, his greatest contribution to scholarship, the stuff of scandal? Why do modern anthropologists wince when his theories are mentioned? Why have later generations excoriated him for cultural appropriation, imperialism, and an unsavory blend of classism, racism, and just poor scholarship?
At first glance The Golden Bough seems straightforward enough, at least when one allows for Frazer’s densely written Victorian prose. Beginning with a Roman myth about the ritual sacrifice of a religious leader/ruler by his successor, Frazer analyzed myths, legends, and religious practice around the world in an attempt to tease out a core group of beliefs that all human cultures subscribed in their earliest days. Chief among these was the idea that primitive humans identified the vigor of their (male) leader with the fertility of their lands, that the male leader functioned as a surrogate for the leader of the gods (always identified with the sun), and that the practice of ritually sacrificing the leader when he became too old to lead was the source of literally dozens of stories of dying and resurrected gods, from Tammuz to Adonis to Jesus Christ. Eventually this barbaric practice would be replaced by the symbolic sacrifice of a religious service (like, say, the Roman Catholic Mass), and then in turn by reason, enlightenment, and the scientific method.
I think you can see how the average Victorian might find this just a teensy bit of offensive.
This is almost certainly why Frazer eventually removed the whole “Jesus is a version of Tammuz” discussion from the main body of the work and moved it to an appendix. He excluded it entirely from the one volume abridged edition published in 1922, which is the version most people are familiar with today. He also claimed that the whole book was speculative, and never mind that the unabridged version stretched to twelve volumes and took him several decades to write. “Books like mine...will be superseded sooner or later (the sooner the better for the sake of truth) by better induction based on fuller knowledge,” he wrote, and anthropologists took him at his word.
Oh, how they took him at his word!
For it seems that despite the erudition, extensive footnotes, and learned analysis of myth after myth, religion after religion, Frazer himself had done no fieldwork beyond a couple of trips to the classical homelands of Italy and Greece. He relied instead on ancient Latin and Greek texts, secondary sources, and requests for information mailed to British missionaries and postal clerks throughout the Empire, and never mind that asking someone trying to get the non-Christian locals to accept baptism, respectable British clothing, and regular attendance at the local Anglican/Methodist/Baptist church to give an accurate or objective account of their existing religion is not a good idea.
Worse, Frazer insisted on using Judeo-Christian terms and concepts when describing non-Christian religion. The most egregious example is probably referring to the Dalai Lama as “the Pope of Tibet” (!!!!), but The Golden Bough is replete with similar gross misinterpretations despite repeated efforts by some of his colleagues to correct him. Pioneering Australian ethnologist Walter Baldwin Spencer, who spent years studying Aboriginal religion and folklore, must have felt like he was beating his head against Uluru when Frazer blithely dismissed his assertion that no, Aboriginal totemism was not the same thing as reconciliation in Christianity, please please please stop saying that! with a simple “nah, it is too,” and pored over another letter from Mrs. Micklethwaite-Cakebread-Halliwell describing how similar the quaint customs of the Machi-MaNeato people of the darkest Limpopsicle Territory were to Anglican schoolgirls going a-Maying.
Later generations have been less than kind to Frazer and The Golden Bough. Complaints about equating Jesus with Tammuz aside, scholars began critiquing Frazer’s magnum opus almost as soon as it was published, especially after the Great War when they had time to do something other than worry about the slaughter in Flanders’ fields (like, oh, the fieldwork had Frazer had eschewed in favor of his beloved questionnaires). No less a figure than Ludwig Wittgenstein commented that “Frazer is much more savage than most of his ‘savages’ [since] his explanations of [native] observances are much cruder than the sense of the observances themselves,” and he was far from the only person to notice that Frazer seemed to take inordinate pleasure in reducing just about everything he mentioned to yet another fertility ritual based on human sacrifice.
Classicists in particular pointed out that the foundation myth of The Golden Bough, the Rex Nemorensis or “king slain by his successor,” was a) a real cult that survived into classical times, with several near-contemporary sources attesting to its historicity, b) considered extremely peculiar by virtually every one of these sources, and c) the “sacred king” himself was not a young, vigorous tribesman who was killed in his dotage to refresh the land but an escaped slave who lived every moment in mortal terror of being replaced by another escapee.
He also wasn’t Roman, and alas for Frazer, Rome wasn’t in the habit of sacrificing its kings (of which it had none for, oh, about half a millennium). Nor was ancient Judaism, or much of classical Greece, or ancient Egypt, or even all the Middle Eastern cultures that worshipped Tammuz/Adonis/etc. Human sacrifice absolutely existed — there’s plenty of archaeological evidence — but evidence for actual rulers or chief priests being the victims is pretty scant. Then there’s the whole idea that “the sun is always male and the moon is always female,” which would be news to the Japanese royal family, who claim descent from the sun goddess Amaterasu, or the Egyptians, or a whole lot of other cultures.
Later anthropologists accused him of sloppy research, cultural bias, misapplication of evolution (a biological concept) to culture and society (human constructions), anti-Catholicism, and forcing all those nifty stories of dying kings and substitute sacrifices and suchlike to support his theories instead of looking at the data and going from there. If anything, modern anthropologists are more embarrassed by The Golden Bough and its author than otherwise.
The same, alas, cannot be said of a truly stunning number of artists, writers, poets, musicians, and non-anthropologists.
Whether this is because of poor training, scientific ignorance, or simply because creative types love love LOVE them a juicy story idea, the intelligentsia of Europe read The Golden Bough, loved The Golden Bough, and began churning out books, poems, operas, paintings, etc., based on the idea of the Dying and Resurrected King almost as soon as the ink was dry on the first edition. And we’re not talking hacks looking for something juicy to sell to Simplicissimus or McClure’s or Lippicott’s, or dilettantes who got tossed from the Order of the Golden Dawn or another occult group. Just look at this partial list of writers, artists, philosophers, etc., whose work influenced or inspired by The Golden Bough, and then think of all the people they in turn influenced:
- Robert Graves, especially in The White Goddess
- William Butler Yeats and his fellow Golden Dawn members, ditto most of the Irish and Celtic literary revivalists
- H.P. Lovecraft
- James Joyce, especially in Finnegans Wake but also in Ulysses
- Ernest Hemingway and his obsession with emasculating war wounds
- Katherine Kurtz in her World War II thriller Lammas Night
- Francis Ford Coppola in Apocalypse Now, which might be based on Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness but makes sure the viewer sees Colonel Kurtz’s very own copy of The Golden Bough in his hooch
- Joseph Campbell, especially in The Masks of God and Myths to Live By
- Jessie L. Weston in From Ritual to Romance, a Frazerian analysis of the Grail legend which inspired an unbelievable number of Arthurian knock-offs (and still does)
- T.S. Eliot, whose seminal poem “The Waste Land” draws on both Frazer and Weston (as well as virtually everything else in Western culture to that date)
- Jim Morrison, who drew not only on The Golden Bough per se, but on its table of contents, and no, I am not making this up
- Virtually every “Celtic folk rock” revivalist, from Ian Anderson to Loreena McKennitt to Clannad (particularly their work on the soundtrack of Robin of Sherwood)
- Camille Paglia, who claimed The Golden Bough was a major influence on Sexual Personae, and hoo boy does that explain a lot*
- Terry Gilliam, especially in The Fisher King
- Carl Jung and his entire school, and please don’t tell me this surprises anyone
- Sigmund Freud, which did surprise me given how he all but came to blows with Jung over their approach to psychology
And then there are the literally thousands (or more) of writers, musicians, philosophers, psychologists, composers, filmmakers, and just plain ordinary folk who’ve picked up a copy of The Golden Bough at the local Tomes-a-Trillion, said “this looks interesting,” and found it plausible and intellectually stimulating despite its myriad flaws, misinterpretations, and poor reputation among actual genuine for-real mythologists, folklorists, theologians, archaeologists, and anthropologists.
Frazer himself seems to have realized that The Golden Bough was neither comprehensive nor necessarily complete (see above), nor was it his sole contribution to scholarship. He wrote numerous other books, at least one of which (Pausanias, and other Greek sketches), is still well regarded by scholars. His influence, however pernicious, is enormous — just try to imagine modern poetry without “The Waste Land,” or modern fantasy without a good dose of Westonized Arthurianism — and even his detractors still have to grapple with his work to one degree or another.
And then there was his influence on a respected Egyptologist named Margaret Murray, whose fine work with Sir Flinders Petrie became almost completely forgotten in the wake of her Frazeresque trilogy about witchcraft...but you’ll have to wait a few weeks for that. Believe me, though, it will be well worth the wait.
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Have you ever slogged through The Golden Bough? Been forced to read “The Waste Land”? Spotted the Dying King myth in a novel/comic book/film/song/opera and thought “gee, that seems familiar”? It’s a chilly night here at the Last Homely Shack, so huddle by the fire and share….
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*True story: one of my dormmates in college was Camille Paglia’s younger sister, a stunningly talented artist who’s worked extensively as a conservator. I don’t recall her sister ever coming to visit her, but it’s not like anyone knew from Camille Paglia back then so who knows?