We live in an age of magical thinking and the sovereignty of sentiment above reason. This is not a new condition, and in fact it is probably closer to the natural state of humanity for the greater part of our existence as a species. However, at least for those of us who have lived all or most of our lives under the influence of Western Civilization (and treasured rather than scorned it) some of us have striven to apply logic and reason to our examination of and interaction with ourselves, our fellow humans, and the world around us.
These take many forms and, as human endeavors, are necessarily limited. But they should be recognized as self-conscious efforts at understanding, not domination or “colonialism,” as is the spurious fashion now to call them, and so far are the best answers we have. No other system allows us to arrive at answers to questions with such consistency; to bring a sense of order from so much chaos. And, if ever we needed order from chaos, it is now.
The capacity for reason is universally human, but the reverence for reason is cultural and far from universal. Its exercise is personal, rare, and a constant struggle to upkeep in the face of so many seductive fantasies, delusions, and deceptions.
As ever, the critical mind should want to understand the source of its misapprehensions, its unfounded notions, and to look into the dark places it most fears. And it should acquaint itself to the best of its ability with those of its fellow man, past and present, however incomplete or flawed those efforts may be.
However, in a time of mounting chaos, irrationality, subjective truth, emotional fragility, puritanism, moral inquisitions, fatalism, climate disaster, mass migration, and global pandemic, I’ve grown tired of reading books about history and politics. They lay out the machinery, create plausible narratives, but none of them seem to really get at the deeper cause: why since forever have the vast majority of human beings everywhere, in every age, been so batshit crazy? Are we doomed forever to suck this badly? My short answer is yes, but the reason might surprise you.
I recently decided to finally revisit the classic work of comparative religion and mythology by Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough. It may seem like an antithetical choice. Having first read it as a teen when most of it was probably beyond my grasp, I have been wanting to reread it for years, mostly out of curiosity, partially for entertainment, partially for research. Being home cleaning horse stalls in the mornings, I decided to listen to the work on audiobook while I muck as a way to tackle the immense volume of material with my otherwise unoccupied attention. Shoveling shit doesn’t generally require deep concentration.
I have “clipped” this particular passage below (along with many others) because it was a novel idea for me and one that had not occurred to me as likely, much less possible, until I heard it articulated in this way.
IV. Magic and Religion
THE examples collected in the last chapter may suffice to illustrate the general principles of sympathetic magic in its two branches, to which we have given the names of Homoeopathic and Contagious respectively. In some cases of magic which have come before us we have seen that the operation of spirits is assumed, and that an attempt is made to win their favour by prayer and sacrifice. But these cases are on the whole exceptional; they exhibit magic tinged and alloyed with religion. Wherever sympathetic magic occurs in its pure unadulterated form, it assumes that in nature one event follows another necessarily and invariably without the intervention of any spiritual or personal agency. Thus its fundamental conception is identical with that of modern science; underlying the whole system is a faith, implicit but real and firm, in the order and uniformity of nature. The magician does not doubt that the same causes will always produce the same effects, that the performance of the proper ceremony, accompanied by the appropriate spell, will inevitably be attended by the desired result, unless, indeed, his incantations should chance to be thwarted and foiled by the more potent charms of another sorcerer. He supplicates no higher power: he sues the favour of no fickle and wayward being: he abases himself before no awful deity. Yet his power, great as he believes it to be, is by no means arbitrary and unlimited. He can wield it only so long as he strictly conforms to the rules of his art, or to what may be called the laws of nature as conceived by him. To neglect these rules, to break these laws in the smallest particular, is to incur failure, and may even expose the unskilful practitioner himself to the utmost peril. If he claims a sovereignty over nature, it is a constitutional sovereignty rigorously limited in its scope and exercised in exact conformity with ancient usage. Thus the analogy between the magical and the scientific conceptions of the world is close. In both of them the succession of events is assumed to be perfectly regular and certain, being determined by immutable laws, the operation of which can be foreseen and calculated precisely; the elements of caprice, of chance, and of accident are banished from the course of nature. Both of them open up a seemingly boundless vista of possibilities to him who knows the causes of things and can touch the secret springs that set in motion the vast and intricate mechanism of the world. Hence the strong attraction which magic and science alike have exercised on the human mind; hence the powerful stimulus that both have given to the pursuit of knowledge. They lure the weary enquirer, the footsore seeker, on through the wilderness of disappointment in the present by their endless promises of the future: they take him up to the top of an exceeding high mountain and show him, beyond the dark clouds and rolling mists at his feet, a vision of the celestial city, far off, it may be, but radiant with unearthly splendour, bathed in the light of dreams.
The fatal flaw of magic lies not in its general assumption of a sequence of events determined by law, but in its total misconception of the nature of the particular laws which govern that sequence. If we analyse the various cases of sympathetic magic which have been passed in review in the preceding pages, and which may be taken as fair samples of the bulk, we shall find, as I have already indicated, that they are all mistaken applications of one or other of two great fundamental laws of thought, namely, the association of ideas by similarity and the association of ideas by contiguity in space or time. A mistaken association of similar ideas produces homoeopathic or imitative magic: a mistaken association of contiguous ideas produces contagious magic. The principles of association are excellent in themselves, and indeed absolutely essential to the working of the human mind. Legitimately applied they yield science; illegitimately applied they yield magic, the bastard sister of science. It is therefore a truism, almost a tautology, to say that all magic is necessarily false and barren; for were it ever to become true and fruitful, it would no longer be magic but science. 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.
-James George Frasier, The Golden Bough
The very real and human need to bring order from chaos, and exercise control over the uncertainties of the world with systematic practices, seems so rational that one can hardly fault practitioners of magic and magical thinking—ancient or modern—for the desire to create such regulatory systems, or for the failure in every case to recognize their lack of objective effectiveness.
The magical mind is not failing to reason or lacking in a system of thought, it is reasoning incorrectly because it is asking the wrong questions. Of course, being ignorant and arrogant beasts, we all think we’re smarter than we are, and assume we’ve got it figured out until convinced otherwise. We can twist ourselves in knots justifying all kinds of contradictory evidence. Divorcing an old familiar idea and searching for a brand new one is way harder than it sounds—especially when you still like the old idea. Worse still, perhaps, is the fervor of the recent convert who has fallen in love with a newfangled idea that is as equally incorrect as an old disproven one. There is no dissuading a proselyte once “saved.”
But that shift in perspective yields verifiable, reproducible answers to many of the most pressing questions plaguing mankind, and a system for addressing them embodied in the scientific method. Lacking in the necessary rigor and the correct formula for testing these questions, even the most educated and rational-minded of us can still fall victim to the occasional magician’s impulse. The early practitioners referred to by Frazer, through enormous trial and error, careful observation of cause and effect, and in the face of probably a good deal of resistance, managed to slowly transform magic into science. But their success depended upon its broad acceptance across time and space within the population. We may be losing that now: our social institutions are ruled by belief and emotion far more than evidence and logic. When we’re told hot weather will magically burn away a plague, some of us believe it because we want to, not because science tells us it’s fact.
Despite their outsized influence on several generations of anthropologists and artists alike, Frazer and his work have been largely out of academic favor since The Golden Bough’s publication for a variety of reasons, most notably because of Christian grievances opposing his treatment of the Christ myth as part or descendent of a larger pagan continuum, which several critics found/find personally offensive, but which seems natural and intuitive to us now. Others take issue with his archaic notions and language, which can be jarring to the modern ear, but were, as might be expected, commonplace in the late 1800s. But I won’t rehash all the academic criticisms leveled against his work here, many of which are simply petty. Interestingly, the work still shows up in numerous academic citations in books and peer-reviewed papers, so clearly it maintains some relevance despite the disfavor it has been subject to in certain quarters.
A work of its magnitude first published in 1890 is bound to require revisions and updates as our knowledge, sources, and even values change over the succeeding century since it was first written. However, it is difficult to deny what a feat of scholarship it truly is when all assembled and taken together, particularly when considering how revolutionary some of the ideas within were at the time in which they were written (e.g., the controversial Christian ideas referenced above.) Frazer is sometimes critical of practices or beliefs in what he deems primitive cultures in foreign lands, but he is equally harsh on primitive practices and beliefs documented from contemporary Europe. His guiding criteria, once understood, are applied evenhandedly throughout the work and one senses his awareness of the challenges of ignorance and reason not only among magicians, but among the educated. In a paragraph from the same section defending the intelligence of the magicians who have not yet made the discovery of their error, he says:
The fallacy of this reasoning is obvious to us, because it happens to deal with facts about which we have long made up our minds. But let an argument of precisely the same calibre be applied to matters which are still under debate, and it may be questioned whether a British audience would not applaud it as sound, and esteem the speaker who used it a safe man—not brilliant or showy, perhaps, but thoroughly sensible and hard-headed. If such reasonings could pass muster among ourselves, need we wonder that they long escaped detection by the savage?
We all fall victim to the biases of familiarity, ignorance, and magical thinking from time to time, probably without ever realizing it. Certainly, even scientific minds are not immune from lapses. A veterinarian I used to take my dog to discovered through blood testing and clinical diagnosis the presence of a liver shunt requiring surgery. Brilliant. She then suggested I treat his condition with a diet based on Chinese medicine “to balance his Qi” And while we’re at it, maybe we could dab a little rhino horn on it. Needless to say, there were no studies to verify its effectiveness as a treatment, and plenty to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of Chinese medicine generally. A Western-trained medical doctor should know better, and I found a new veterinarian. Sadly, examples like this are not rare, and companies like Goop make fortunes off of it. No demographic of society or political group is immune. Humans just sometimes believe weird shit despite evidence to the contrary. We have to be forever vigilant against magical creep, and keep asking the right questions.
Of course, every work must be approached with thoughtful evaluation by the reader, but broadly, this remains a foundational work, and is one of the most impressive works of anthropology written in any age. In much the same way Freud and Jung have indelibly influenced the field of psychology and inspired so many to join its ranks, Frazer was a pioneer in anthropology, and like those early founding fathers, though over a century later some of his ideas may have fallen out of favor, become outdated, or required revision, it is impossible to imagine the field today without his contributions, however some may wish to try. Styles and ideas may change, but history itself does not. Anthropology as a field has been undergoing a radical revolution in recent years, and not all—in fact few—of these innovations have been especially constructive, but have been more like a mad scientist’s mutant thought experiments that escaped the lab. It would be a shame for early classic works like this to become victims of the revisionist onslaught.
Frazer’s work is full of surprises and insights for the intrepid reader willing to tackle the volume, brave the occasional politically incorrect turn of phrase which may fall harshly on a modern ear, and excuse (or appreciate) the lyrical romanticism with which he writes about the myths and cultures of the near and distant past. As with every work, academic or otherwise, no reader will agree with every sentiment expressed, nor should they; authors are not prophets and this is not scripture, it is a wrench-in-hand look under the hood of humanity—encompassing all the filth, the grit, and the wonder that drives us.