Making lies into truths
Don Cupitt
THE MAKING OF THE GOLDEN BOUGH by Robert Fraser
Macmillan, £35, pp. 240
According to Magellan's cousin Duarte Barbosa, who was also a voyager, the Rajah of Quilicare was permitted to reign for only 12 years. At the end of that period he had to mount a specially pre- pared scaffold and publicly dismember himself, starting with his nose. His succes- sor was obliged to watch the entire pro- ceedings and thereby learn that to renew the life of the people, the king must die. One day he would himself have to perform the same ceremony.
In August 1953, a 19-year-old, I read J. G. Frazer's Golden Bough in a tent on the Isle of Wight. I remember vividly the impression the book made on me, and there are not many books of which one can say such a thing so long afterwards. The Golden Bough first appeared in two volumes in 1890, and grew to three in 1900. The Third Edition (1906-15 and 1936) eventually contained no less than 13 volumes, so a one-volume abridged edition was issued in 1922. Amazingly, the last two of these editions are Still in print. The academics have long called Frazer a prolix and musty armchair theorist, but he can still attract readers after 100 years. Which is why Robert Fraser's study is interesting and important.
When we read the Golden Bough, the Rajah of Quilicare and a thousand similar anecdotes accumulate to teach us much the same lesson as Nietzsche and Freud. The optimistic rationalist view of human nature that prevailed, by and large, from Plato to Marx is at an end. We are not the lucidly self-conscious beings, capable of seeing things as they really are and of acting rationally in accordance with our true interests, that we fancied we were. We are hag-ridden. We human beings have always lived in magic worlds, our lives dominated by terrifying mythic Powers, forces and equivalences that we have unknowingly projected out around ourselves. And if all this is now coming to an end at last, we can barely imagine what may take its place. Strange, that the Enlightenment by democratising itself should have under- mined itself. During the 19th century new ways of thinking, which previously had been restricted to a few men of letters and their aristocratic patrons, became entrenched in middle-class professions de- voted to 'subjects': history, biology, archaeology and the like. Each subject went through the same internal con- troversies: science versus religion, criticism versus dogma. Frazer himself was raised in Calvinism and Classics. The old culture had kept Revealed Truth and heathen fables quite separate from each other, but the new studies in anthropology and com- parative religion make it clear that you cannot build a wall between Christ's in- carnation, death, resurrection, ascension and so on, and their abundant pagan parallels. Set in their context in the history of religions, Christian doctrines cease to be privileged and become naturalised as pro- ducts of the human religious mind. But that only shows us what a very queer thing the human mind is. It seems that we are not lucid intelligences, but creatures who must live in and by myths. So the Enlight- enment undermines itself, as critical reason shows what strangely irrational creatures we are and cannot help but be.
Frazer's prose is Gibbonian and grand, but his doctrine is almost more than Nietzschean. He ends the Golden Bough by saying that all our world-views are just phantoms which thought has conjured up out of the void. But he was not himself prepared to live in the void. So he re- mained a sort of minimal Christian, even though he said that 'I reject the Christian religion as utterly false.' If there is no truth for us, and we cannot live in the void, then we must live by fictions in the knowledge that they are fictions. We must make our lies into our truths.
When people believed that they knew how to be more rigorous than Frazer, they could afford to ridicule his rambling inter- pretations. But now that we are more chastened, we may be ready to take him more seriously again. Robert Fraser's fine book rehabilitates a man who may be called the last great figure of the Scottish Enlightenment.
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