Sir James Frazer still casts a long shadow. The wonderful intellectual fugue that is Frazer’s Golden Bough, the 12 volumes of its definitive edition published mostly in the years leading up to the First World War, continues to influence the terms in which great tracts of cultural history are understood – not least in its celebrated genealogy of magic, religion and science. Human culture advances from the magical world-view, explored in such loving (if disapproving) detail by Frazer, towards religion, in which the crudities of magic begin to be purged by moral maturity, en route to the triumph of science.
There is still an assumption in popular writing about religion and science that this is our best way of understanding intellectual history: as a journey from ignorant and inept ways of comprehending how the world works, and how best we manipulate it, towards the objective explanatory scheme of modern scientific analysis. Yet matters are not so simple, as Frazer himself recognised. In practice, “magic” and “religion” as Frazer defines them are inseparably intertwined, to the degree that both assume the existence of invisible agencies that may perhaps be persuaded or coaxed into acting in a particular way. At the same time, magic is more like science in also taking for granted a scheme of things in which effects infallibly follow causes. To this extent at least, “magic has paved the way for science”, says Frazer; and (in the unmistakable voice of Victorian-Edwardian Cambridge) he also argues that it helped to save the world from the tyranny of the uneducated multitude by making a place for the independence and power of the expert – even if this wasn’t the right sort of expertise to win a Trinity prize fellowship in the 1890s.
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