With the advance of knowledge, therefore, prayer and sacrifice assume the leading place in religious ritual; and magic; which once ranked with them as a legitimate equal, is gradually relegated to the background and sinks to the level of a black art.

James G. Frazer

Categorized in : Art Prayer Religious

The second principle of magic: things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.

James G. Frazer

distance magic principles

The advance of knowledge is an infinite progression towards a goa... by James G. Frazer

The advance of knowledge is an infinite progression towards a goal that ever recedes.

James G. Frazer

progression infinite goal

In point of fact magicians appear to have often developed into ch... by James G. Frazer

In point of fact magicians appear to have often developed into chiefs and kings.

James G. Frazer

chiefs kings facts

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 G. Frazer

men order art

The question whether our conscious personality survives after death has been answered by almost all races of men in the affirmative.

James G. Frazer

afterlife race men

By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life.

James G. Frazer

human-life men religion

It is a common rule with primitive people not to waken a sleeper, because his soul is away and might not have time to get back.

James G. Frazer

soul science people

For when a nation becomes civilized, if it does not drop human sacrifices altogether, it at least selects as victims only such wretches as would be put to death at any rate. Thus the killing of a god may sometimes come to be confounded with the execution of a criminal.

James G. Frazer

criminals sacrifice doe

In course of time the slow advance of knowledge, which has dispelled so many cherished illusions, convinced at least the more thoughtful portion of mankind that the alterations of summer and winter, of spring and autumn, were not merely the result of their own magical rites, but that some deeper cause, some mightier power, was at work behind the shifting scenes of nature.

James G. Frazer

autumn summer spring

Small minds cannot grasp great ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their purblind vision, nothing seems really great and important but themselves.

James G. Frazer

vision mind ideas

The slow, the never ending approach to truth consists in perpetually forming and testing hypotheses, accepting those at which at the time seem to fit the facts and rejecting the others.

James G. Frazer

fit accepting facts

Yet it would be unfair to the generality of our kind to ascribe to their intellectual and moral weakness the gradual divergence of Buddhism and Christianity from their primitive patterns. For it should not be forgotten that by their glorification of poverty and celibacy both these religions struck straight at the root not merely of civil society but of human existence. The blow was parried by the wisdom or the folly of the vast majority of mankind, who refused to purchase a chance of saving their souls with the certainty of extinguishing the species.

James G. Frazer

buddhism roots blow

The abundance, the solidity, and the splendor of the results already achieved by science are well fitted to inspire us with a cheerful confidence in the soundness of its method.

James G. Frazer

splendor cheerful inspire

The old notion that the savage is the freest of mankind is the reverse of the truth. He is a slave, not indeed to a visible master, but to the past, to the spirits of his dead forefathers, who haunt his steps from birth to death, and rule him with a rod of iron.

James G. Frazer

savages iron past

Some of the old laws of Israel are clearly savage taboos of a familiar type thinly disguised as commands of the Deity.

James G. Frazer

atheism israel law

This doctrine of transmigration or reincarnation of the soul is f... by James G. Frazer

This doctrine of transmigration or reincarnation of the soul is found among many tribes of savages

James G. Frazer

doctrine savages soul

Dwellers by the sea cannot fail to be impressed by the sight of its ceaseless ebb and flow, and are apt, on the principles of that rude philosophy of sympathy and resemblance... to trace a subtle relation, a secret harmony, between its tides and the life of man... The belief that most deaths happen at ebb tide is said to be held along the east coast of England from Northumberland to Kent.

James G. Frazer

sight men philosophy

Man has created gods in his own likeness and being himself mortal he has naturally supposed his creatures to be in the same sad predicament.

James G. Frazer

predicaments creatures men

In primitive society, where uniformity of occupation is the rule, and the distribution of the community into various classes of workers has hardly begun, every man is more or less his own magician; he practices charms and incantations for his own good and the injury of his enemies.

James G. Frazer

practice class men

The man of science, like the man of letters, is too apt to view mankind only in the abstract, selecting in his consideration only a single side of our complex and many-sided being.

James G. Frazer

two-sides views men