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The Golden Bough - Volume VI James George Frazer, scottish social anthropologist () This ebook presents «The Golden Bough - Volume VI», from.
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When they heard of the Christian God, they kept asking if he never died, and being informed that he did not, they were much surprised, and said that he must be a very great god indeed. He could not possibly have lived as long as this.

The Golden Bough A Study in Magic and Religion Volume VI of XII

His graves are generally to be met with in narrow defiles between mountains. The great gods of Egypt themselves were not exempt from the common lot.

They too grew old and died. For like men they were composed of body and soul, and like men were subject to all the passions and infirmities of the flesh. Their bodies, it is true, were fashioned of more ethereal mould, and lasted longer than ours, but they could not hold out for ever against the siege of time. Age converted their bones into silver, their flesh into gold, and their azure locks into lapis-lazuli. When their time came, they passed away from the cheerful world of the living to reign as dead gods over dead men in the melancholy world beyond the grave.

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Even their souls, like those of mankind, could only endure after death so long as their bodies held together; and hence it was as needful to preserve the corpses of the gods as the corpses of common folk, lest with the divine body the divine spirit should also come to an untimely end. At first their remains were laid to rest under the desert sands of the mountains, that the dryness of the soil and the purity of the air might protect them from putrefaction and decay.

Every province then had the tomb and mummy of its dead god. The mummy of Osiris was to be seen at Mendes; Thinis boasted of the mummy of Anhouri; and Heliopolis rejoiced in the possession of that of Toumou. One of the most famous stories of the death of a god is told by Plutarch. It runs thus. In the reign of the emperor Tiberius a certain schoolmaster named Epitherses was sailing from Greece to Italy.

The ship in which he had taken his passage was a merchantman and there were many other passengers on board. At evening, when they were off the Echinadian Islands, the wind died away, and the vessel drifted close in to the island of Paxos. Most of the passengers were awake and many were still drinking wine after dinner, when suddenly a voice hailed the ship from the island, calling upon Thamus. The crew and passengers were taken by surprise, for though there was an Egyptian pilot named Thamus on board, few knew him even by name.

Twice the cry was repeated, but Thamus kept silence. At last Thamus resolved that, if the wind held, he would pass the place in silence, but if it dropped when they were off Palodes he would give the message. This strange story, vouched for by many on board, soon got wind at Rome, and Thamus was sent for and questioned by the emperor Tiberius himself, who caused enquiries to be made about the dead god. On the whole the simplest and most natural would seem to be that the deity whose sad end was thus mysteriously proclaimed and lamented was the Syrian god Tammuz or Adonis, whose death is known to have been annually bewailed by his followers both in Greece and in his native Syria.

At Athens the solemnity fell at midsummer, and there is no improbability in the view that in a Greek island a band of worshippers of Tammuz should have been celebrating the death of their god with the customary passionate demonstrations of sorrow at the very time when a ship lay becalmed off the shore, and that in the stillness of the summer night the voices of lamentation should have been wafted with startling distinctness across the water and should have made on the minds of the listening passengers a deep and lasting impression.

An Arab writer relates that in the year or a. Again, in the year or a. If the high gods, who dwell remote from the fret and fever of this earthly life, are yet believed to die at last, it is not to be expected that a god who lodges in a frail tabernacle of flesh should escape the same fate, though we hear of African kings who have imagined themselves immortal by virtue of their sorceries. Naturally, therefore, they take the utmost care of his life, out of a regard for their own.

But no amount of care and precaution will prevent the man-god from growing old and feeble and at last dying. His worshippers have to lay their account with this sad necessity and to meet it as best they can. The danger is a formidable one; for if the course of nature is dependent on the man-god's life, what catastrophes may not be expected from the gradual enfeeblement of his powers and their final extinction in death?

A Study in Magic and Religion

There is only one way of averting these dangers. The man-god must be killed as soon as he shews symptoms that his powers are beginning to fail, and his soul must be transferred to a vigorous successor before it has been seriously impaired by the threatened decay. The advantages of thus putting the man-god to death instead of allowing him to die of old age and disease are, to the savage, obvious enough. For if the man-god dies what we call a natural death, it means, according to the savage, that his soul has either voluntarily departed from his body and refuses to return, or more commonly that it has been extracted, or at least detained in its wanderings, by a demon or sorcerer.

Even if they could arrange to catch the soul of the dying god as it left his lips or his nostrils and so transfer it to a successor, this would not effect their purpose; for, dying of disease, his soul would necessarily leave his body in the last stage of weakness and exhaustion, and so enfeebled it would continue to drag out a languid, inert existence in any body to which it might be transferred.

Whereas by slaying him his worshippers could, in the first place, make sure of catching his soul as it escaped and transferring it to a suitable successor; and, in the second place, by putting him to death before his natural force was abated, they would secure that the world should not fall into decay with the decay of the man-god.

Every purpose, therefore, was answered, and all dangers averted by thus killing the man-god and transferring his soul, while yet at its prime, to a vigorous successor. Some of the reasons for preferring a violent death to the slow death of old age or disease are obviously as applicable to common men as to the man-god. Hence they burn the body of a murderer and scatter the ashes to the winds, thinking that this treatment will prevent his spirit from assuming human shape in the other world. This forms a powerful motive to escape from decrepitude, or from a crippled condition, by a voluntary death.

They believe that persons enter upon the delights of their elysium with the same faculties, mental and physical, that they possess at the hour of death, in short, that the spiritual life commences where the corporeal existence terminates. With these views, it is natural that they should desire to pass through this change before their mental and bodily powers are so enfeebled by age as to deprive them of their capacity for enjoyment. To this motive must be added the contempt which attaches to physical weakness among a nation of warriors, and the wrongs and insults which await those who are no longer able to protect themselves.

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When therefore a man finds his strength declining with the advance of age, and feels that he will soon be unequal to discharge the duties of this life, and to partake in the pleasures of that which is to come, he calls together his relations, and tells them that he is now worn out and useless, that he sees they are all ashamed of him, and that he has determined to be buried. It was considered a disgrace to the family of an old chief if he was not buried alive. Among the Chiriguanos, a tribe of South American Indians on the river Pilcomayo, when a man was at the point of death his nearest relative used to break his spine by a blow of an axe, for they thought that to die a natural death was the greatest misfortune that could befall a man.

So, on a day appointed, his friends and neighbours assemble, and in their presence he is stabbed, strangled, or otherwise disposed of according to his directions. Among them, when a warrior dies a natural death, his nearest male relative takes a spear and wounds the corpse by a blow on the head, in order that the man may be received with honour in the other world as one who has died in battle.

The custom may have been a mitigation of a still older practice of slaughtering the sick. Preface With this third part of The Golden Bough we take up the question, Why had the King of the Wood at Nemi regularly to perish by the hand of his successor? Cambridge, 11th June Chapter I. For examples see M.

Dobrizhoffer, Historia de Abiponibus Vienna, , ii. Meyer, in Native Tribes of South Australia, p. Fison and A. Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kurnai, pp. Ridley, Kamilaroi, Second Edition Sydney, , p. Cambridge, pp. Barmen, pp. Brown, D.

Chapter I. The Mortality Of The Gods

The discussion of this and similar evidence must be reserved for another work. Meiners, Geschichte der Religionen Hannover, , i. Dodge, Our Wild Indians, p.


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Wiener geogr. Gesellschaft, , p. Sir James E. Alexander, Expedition of Discovery into the Interior of Africa, i. Callimachus, Hymn to Zeus, 9 sq. Plutarch, Isis et Osiris, 35; Philochorus, Fragm. Otto; J. Tzetzes, Schol. Compare Ch. Porphyry, Vit. Philochorus, Fr.

Maspero, Histoire ancienne des peuples de l'Orient classique: les origines, pp. On the mortality of the Egyptian gods see further A. Plutarch, Isis et Osiris, 21, 22, 38, 61; Diodorus Siculus, i.


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Wiedemann, Die Religion der alten Aegypter, pp. Indeed it was an article of the Egyptian creed that every god must die after he had begotten a son in his own likeness A. Wiedemann, Herodots zweites Buch, p. The influence of The Golden Bough on contemporary European literature and thought was substantial. Frazer attempted to define the shared elements of religious belief and scientific thought, discussing fertility rites, human sacrifice , the dying god , the scapegoat , and many other symbols and practices whose influences had extended into 20th-century culture.

Frazer proposed that mankind progresses from magic through religious belief to scientific thought. Frazer's thesis was developed in relation to J. Turner 's painting of The Golden Bough , a sacred grove where a certain tree grew day and night. It was a transfigured landscape in a dream-like vision of the woodland lake of Nemi , " Diana 's Mirror", where religious ceremonies and the "fulfillment of vows" of priests and kings were held. The king was the incarnation of a dying and reviving god , a solar deity who underwent a mystic marriage to a goddess of the Earth.

He died at the harvest and was reincarnated in the spring. Frazer claims that this legend of rebirth is central to almost all of the world's mythologies. Frazer based his thesis on the pre-Roman priest-king at the fane of Nemi , who was ritually murdered by his successor:. When I first put pen to paper to write The Golden Bough I had no conception of the magnitude of the voyage on which I was embarking; I thought only to explain a single rule of an ancient Italian priesthood.