Before there was Jung’s archetype, before Campbell’s hero, before Joseph of Egypt and his Technicolor Dreamcoat became Broadway’s favorite mythological mashup, there was James George Frazer, Victorian gentleman, Cambridge classicist, and high priest of comparative mythology. His masterpiece, The Golden Bough, was not so much a book as a sprawling, opium-dream encyclopedia of sex, death, sacrifice, and sacred kingship—a volume that scandalized the clergy, delighted modernists, and planted the seeds of half the psychological and literary theories of the 20th century.To understand Frazer is to stand at the edge of a fading empire and peer into the jungle. He is the bridge between Enlightenment rationalism and Romantic fascination with the primitive. He tried to catalogue the irrational, and in doing so, became a founding father of the irrationalism that would consume modernity. This is what Camille Pahlia understands. For her, Frazer is not just a precursor to Freud and Jung, he is the great excavator of the pagan substratum beneath the polished marble of Western civilization. He reveals the chthonic slime beneath Apollo’s golden temple.Pahlia, like Nietzsche, saw the classical world not as an ideal of order and reason, but as a battleground between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. And Frazer—though never claiming to be a philosopher—documented the rites of Dionysus with the meticulous, prurient eye of a Victorian man horrified and titillated by fertility cults. In The Golden Bough, the dying god is not a metaphor; he’s a sweaty, bloodied priest being strangled by his successor under the sacred oak. It is ritual murder as calendar maintenance, sacrifice as seasonal reboot. Frazer traces the myth of the god who dies and is reborn—Osiris, Adonis, Attis, Christ—through countless cultures. And in doing so, he reveals how the sacred and the savage are intertwined.Freud read Frazer with a mixture of admiration and condescension. In Totem and Taboo, he borrows freely from The Golden Bough to support his theory of the primal horde, the murder of the father, and the birth of civilization through repression. But whereas Frazer saw in myth the anthropological record of man’s passage from magic to religion to science, Freud reinterprets myth as the psychic residue of neurosis. Myth, for Freud, is a screen memory—a distorted trace of something darker. He appreciated Frazer’s evidence, but not his conclusions. Where Frazer thought humanity had grown up, Freud suspected we were still hiding under the blankets.Nietzsche would have laughed at both. He would have seen in Frazer’s monumental work the last gasp of a dying civilization trying to rationalize its own decay. The Golden Bough is itself a myth—a myth of progress, of Enlightenment, of the triumph of science over superstition. But what Nietzsche teaches us, and what Pahlia hammers home with ecstatic fury, is that the irrational cannot be tamed. Dionysus always returns. Frazer may have tried to box him in with footnotes, but Dionysus slips out in a laugh, a moan, a scream.And yet Frazer’s work had a strange afterlife. It inspired poets more than scientists, artists more than anthropologists. T.S. Eliot lifted its corpse-sacrifice imagery wholesale for The Waste Land. D.H. Lawrence turned its fertility cults into erotic gospels. Yeats, Pound, and Joyce found in its pages the machinery of myth they needed to construct modernist temples. It is no accident that The Golden Bough opens with a painting: Turner’s vision of Aeneas fleeing the ruins of Troy. The image is Romantic, catastrophic, regenerative. It sets the tone: this is not science, this is myth masquerading as scholarship, or perhaps scholarship realizing it was always a form of myth.What Pahlia so loves about Frazer—and why he belongs in the Mad Genius pantheon—is that he understood, perhaps unconsciously, that civilization is a mask. A beautiful mask, yes, but beneath it is the face of the sacrificial king, the scapegoat, the bloody victim that keeps the social order running. Frazer doesn’t flinch. He records the incest rituals, the castrations, the bloodlettings. He does not moralize. Like the best modernists, he lets the horror speak for itself.In the end, Frazer tried to climb out of the pit. He believed in progress, in science, in the steady march toward rationality. But his work betrays him. The more he tried to map the transition from savagery to civilization, the more he exposed their continuities. As Pahlia might put it, Frazer wanted to be Apollo but kept slipping into Dionysus. His pages are filled with ghosts and shadows, masks and mirrors, all dancing around the primal fire.Frazer may have catalogued the world’s myths, but he left us a myth of his own: that by naming the gods, we can escape them. That by dissecting ritual, we transcend it. But as Nietzsche warned, reason is a flame that burns the hand that holds it. And as Pahlia shows, the irrational is not the past—it is the current that pulses beneath all our sterile institutions. Frazer didn’t cure us of myth. He reawakened it.So welcome to The Golden Bough, a haunted text, a reliquary of human terror and transcendence. It is the Bible of the mad genius anthropologist, the one who knew too much and believed too little. It is the poem that pretends to be a chart. And as every mad genius knows, the map is never the territory. Especially when the territory is the human soul.

Episodes

Simon on Fraser