What is religion? Animism and Magic: Frazer

Here is the second half of the first theory of religion paraphrased from D.L. Pals work Eight Theories of Religion. James George Frazer (1854-1941) provides the compliment to Tylor. Frazer was the kind of scholar who theorized about the truth of the world from the comfort of his chair and a warm cup of tea. A comfortable way to live, but perhaps one that leads to all kind of endless logomachy (a dispute over words). His most important work was The Golden Bough. The book seeks to resolves a pagan ritual of human sacrifice from an old roman myth.

In order to resolve the puzzle, Frazer examines the origins of religion and magic. To understand the old stories, one has to understand magic. Using a comparative study, Frazer argues that magic works by sympathy. The primitive mind believed that nature functioned by “sympathetic magic,” i.e. the primitive mind would mentally associate two things, which were thought to correlate with physical reality. “Mental connections mirror physical ones” (36). Magic was thought to affect things because of an imitative principle or a contagious principle. It is imitative if two entities are connected due to a similarity or contagious if the two entities are connected by contact.

Pals cites several examples here and it is worth noting several for clarification. For example, when someone plunges a pin into a voodoo doll adorned with the hair of his enemy, he imagines that by contagious transmission he can inflict suffering upon his foe. Or when Pawnee Indians sacrificed a maiden to their field tools, they believed that merely by contact with her blood, the life-giving properties of the maiden would be transmitted to their tools. In certain villages in India, during periods of drought, the people would perform a rain ritual. They chose a boy who wore nothing but leaves and nominated him Rain King.  He would then visit each house so the residents could sprinkle water on him and the rains would return.

Frazer like Tylor sees these rituals as both magic and proto-science. The practice of magic offered a kind of certainty about the natural world. The people who had this knowledge, the magician, the medicine man, the witch doctor, etc.,  usually held a great deal of social power. They  would ally with the King or the chief who would use their services. Sometimes the possessor of magic knowledge became king, wielding magical powers for the whole community.

Being a secular man, Frazer states that magic is a false science that people eventually see through, and in its place arises religion. He adopts a definition similar to Tylor: religion is a belief in spiritual beings. Religious people do not use spells to change the course of nature but use pleadings and prayers to supernatural beings to their preferred spirits or gods.They ask for help and favors and in return they promise to give loyalty, love, and obedience. Like Tylor, Frazer believes in the evolution of human thought and culture; thus he holds that magic and religion are stages of human consciousness.

Where magic sought to manipulate nature, religion is in the hands of the gods. And who knows the will of the gods? Indeed, we are at their mercy. In the political realm, the magician-king becomes the priest-king. Of course, there are endless variations. In ancient sedentary societies, people began to worship seasonal cults and vegetation gods. Out of this came the fertility cults based on the cycle of birth and death, often linked to sexuality. For example, in ancient Cyprus, the god Adonis was paired with Aphrodite around rituals of prostitution and a law that required virgins to sleep with a stranger at the temple before their marriage. The ritual was supposed to encourage the gods to mate so that nature would be reborn. This was a combination of magic and religion, an appeal to the gods through the principle of imitation.

Magic provided the first attempt to explain and control the power of nature. As magic declined religion took its place, but it too was found wanting. With the decline of religion, science has come to the fore. Welcome to the new age…

What is religion? Animism and Magic: Tylor

As a point of exercising the memory, I will paraphrase while determined to keep each entry short,  Daniel L. Pals’ book Eight Theories of Religion (2006).  For those that study religion, the answer to the question “what is religion?”, is an elusive one. The fact that there are eight major theories suggests that pinning the concept down is a tricky endeavor.

The first theory is given by Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917), who was a pioneer in religious studies for his emphasis on “ethnography” and “ethnology,” terms perhaps familiar to those who have taken an anthropology course. He took these terms to be the “description and scientific analysis of an individual society, culture, and racial group within all of its many component parts” (20).  A completely secular man, he sought to understand religion without reference to the supernatural.

Tylor held that humanity is united by psychic uniformity and intellectual evolution. This meant his explanation would have universal application. Best to always aim big…  Further, he holds that humanity is more or less rational and we use our rationality to explain the universe by making (often faulty) connections between causes.  This is the origin of magic. For example, those who practiced primitive agriculture may have beaten someone to tears to douse the soil and associated these tears as a way to bring forth rain. Magic was a rational effort to influence the world.

For Tyler, religion is “belief in spiritual beings” who act and behave similarly to human beings.  He thinks this is the common factor among all religions. This is essentially animism, the “belief in living, personal powers behind all things” (26). Be it one or many spirits, this is the unifying principle behind all religious practice and belief.

Tyler theorizes that the shadowy landscape of dreams and the confrontation with a self-hood annihilating death inspired people to believe in a soul and in a  reality separate but in contact with our own. This dreamlike reality showed that the person was animated by a spiritual principle or soul. This animism was then extended to other forces in nature.

The world animated by spirits would evolve into certain great spirits being those of Gods, and these gods of the Sun or the planets or the ocean became embodied in stories and mythologies. Animism led to polytheism and then to monotheism. Showing the nineteenth-century penchant for evolution, Tylor says that the continual rationalization of animism led to Judaism and Christianity from a process that started with the first “savage philosopher.”  Higher civilizations led to higher religions.

Ultimately animism is a false interpretation of reality, and Tylor sees the arrival of science as a secular force that exposed religion as an atavistic philosophy. However, animism is a natural parallel to science. It sought to explain and make sense of nature, but it was fundamentally mistaken.

Tylor saw religion and animism as a husk to be thrown off, something that had outlasted its usefulness.