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James George FrazerThe Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1890A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Book 3, Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 3: “The Scapegoat”
Book 3, Chapter 1 Summary: “The Transference of Evil”
This chapter introduces the principle of “vicarious suffering,” whereby a burden of misfortune or sin can be unloaded onto another person, animal, or thing. He begins by describing beneficial transferences of human suffering onto inanimate objects, then he proceeds to illustrate ways in which these objects are used to transfer the suffering to a third party. In other cases, a functionary or priest voluntarily takes on the suffering or sin of a sick or dying individual.
In the second section, Frazer distinguishes the direct or immediate expulsion of ills, which are invisible and immaterial, and the indirect or mediate expulsion of ills through a scapegoat. The direct expulsion involves rituals or practices aimed at directly removing or banishing the negative forces or illnesses, whereas the indirect expulsion involves transferring these ills onto a scapegoat, which is then driven away or destroyed to carry the ills away from the community. This differentiation highlights the varied ways cultures attempt to purify themselves from harmful influences.
In the third section, Frazer provides examples of mediate expulsion, first through inanimate vessels and effigies and then in animal or human sacrifices. He concludes that the temporary bestowal of divine kingship always has this ultimate sacrificial purpose and that the idea of the messiah or Buddha (a sacrificial man-god) stems from these rituals.
In the fourth section, Frazer observes that these rituals are usually annual and tend to coincide with the onset of the season most likely to cause loss of life (the rainy season in tropical climates or the winter in arctic areas). It is often preceded or followed by a celebratory period, in which everyday social restraints are temporarily suspended. He further observes that the fact that the sacrificial god is also acting as a scapegoat might explain the ambiguities noted in such rituals as that of carrying out death, where the man-god is at once revered and feared.
Book 3, Chapter 2 Summary: “Ancient Scapegoats”
Moving on the consider scapegoats in classical antiquity, Frazer opens the first section of the chapter by describing the Roman Mamurius Veturius ritual. The Mamurius Veturius (“old Mars”) was ceremonially driven out of town to make room for his successor. Frazer observes that Mars was both a harvest god and god of the woods. The Roman old Mars was driven off by masked dancing priests, called Salii. Frazer notes parallels between these dancers, banishing disease and infertility, and similar figures in India, South America, Austria, and Germany.
In the second section of the chapter, Frazer shifts his attention to ancient Greece, where during periods of plague, a volunteer scapegoat was kept in luxury for a year before being ceremonially led outside the city and either banished into exile or stoned to death. Sometimes a man and a woman were sacrificed as representatives of the male and female members of the population. In Asia Minor and Thargelia, the scapegoat was beaten on his genitals with fig branches or squills (a plant with a bulbous root) before being burnt to death. This appears to have been a technique for liberating the reproductive powers of the scapegoat, identified with the spirit of vegetation, from demonic influences.
Book 3, Chapter 3 Summary: “Killing the God in Mexico”
Aztec culture in Mexico also contains examples of sacrificial human gods. Frazer cites various examples of men, women, and children being sacrificed in the character of gods after enjoying special privileges and veneration for a period. The sacrificial victims were immediately replaced by new temporary deities, and the resurrection of the deity was sometimes enacted by the celebrants skinning their victims and adorning themselves with their skin. Frazer cites the Aztec belief that, in constantly shedding their skins, serpents had eternally renewable life.
Based on this evidence, the practice of sacrificing venerated human representatives of gods was widespread globally. Frazer intends to return to Italy and prove that the custom was familiar there.
Book 3, Chapter 4 Summary: “Saturnalia”
The Roman festival of Saturnalia was an annual festival in honor of the reign of the god Saturn during the Golden Age. Saturn was the god of sowing and husbandry, and his mythical reign was characterized by peace and harmony. Under his rule, there was no private property or slavery. Accounts of the martyrdom of St. Dasius reveal that for a period, a soldier was appointed to play the part of Saturn during these festivities, at the end of which he was sacrificed.
The modern Italian Carnival may be a descendent of the Roman Saturnalia. Similarly, Lent may have evolved from a pre-Christian tradition of fasting during the early days of spring. Analogies with the Roman Saturnalia also exist in Ancient Greece, in particular, the Cronia, or Festival of Cronus. Like the Saturnalia, Cronia fell close to the Spring Equinox. Frazer cites various pieces of evidence suggesting that the festival involved a human sacrifice.
The fourth section discusses the Babylonian festival of the Sacaea, during which a condemned prisoner was given the title of Zoganes and allowed to play the despot, exploit the king’s harem and enjoy a debauched lifestyle for a period of time before being put to death on the cross or the gallows. This festival has been identified with the festival of the New Year, Zakmuk, which coincided with the Spring Equinox and renewed the king’s authority. Frazer suggests that the Zoganes was sacrificed as a substitute for the real monarch.
Frazer traces the origins of the Jewish festival of Purim to the Babylonian Sacaea. The origins of the Purim festival are described in the Book of Esther. The vizier Haman had erected a gallows to hang his enemy, Mordecai, while he himself expected to be awarded the honor of wearing the king’s crown and riding his horse. In the event, the fates of the two rivals were reversed: Mordecai became a temporary king and Haman was executed.
Frazer reflects on the significance of the temporary king being granted access to the real king’s harem. Drawing on the connections between the Sacaea ritual and the worship of Anaitis, he points out that this latter goddess “had practically merged in the sensual worship of the Babylonian Ishtar or Astarte” (648) and of the legendary Semiramis, meaning that the sacrificial victim, in accessing the king’s harem, temporarily played the divine king to the divine queen embodied by the sex workers. Semiramis was a queen who took in a series of lovers but always killed them instead of committing to formal marriage.
Mimicry is important in these rituals. By re-enacting key events in the lives of the gods, those involved hoped to perform the “divine function” (651) associated with it. Various divine dramas and masked dances from around the world illustrate this point. For example, parallels between Semiramis and her lovers, Aphrodite and Adonis, Cybele and Attis, and Isis and Osiris.
Effigies of Haman being ceremonially destroyed at Purim to suggest lingering traces of human sacrifice. The different fates of the two would-be temporary kings in the Purim story reflect the resurrection narrative in the parallel stories of Adonis and Attis. Haman is the old, dying god, while Mordecai is the new, emerging divinity.
Book 3, Chapter 5 Summary: “The Crucifixion of Christ”
This chapter notes the resemblance between the treatment of Christ by the Roman soldiers at Jerusalem and the treatment of the mock king during the Saturnalia of the Sacaea. Considering the links between the Sacaea and Purim, Frazer conjectures that Christ may have been ritually crucified in the character of Haman.
He anticipates the objection that Christ was crucified during Passover, not Purim, by suggesting that Haman, like the annual Saturn, might have been allowed a month’s license before being put to death. The soldiers who mocked Christ are described as Herod’s, not Pilate’s, so they may have been Jewish. If Christ played the part of Haman, Frazer suggests that Barabbas, the criminal chosen by the crowd to be spared, played the role of Mordecai. He argues that the rapid spread of Christianity may have been facilitated by the fact that Christ died as the representative of a god whose counterparts were well known all over Western Asia.
Book 3, Chapters 1-5 Analysis
Book 3 encompasses the text’s argument on the origin of the scapegoat and methodically leads to Frazer’s explanation for the mythological precedent for Christ’s crucifixion. This highlights the theme of Christianity and Its Prehistory and is perhaps the most contested aspect of The Golden Bough’s argument.
In the practice of scapegoating, a person or animal is symbolically burdened with the community’s sins and then banished or killed to purify the group. This ritual serves a similar function to the sacrificial death of the king or god, as it aims to rid the community of negative influences and restore harmony and prosperity. The scapegoat, like the sacrificial king, becomes a vessel through which the community’s renewal is enacted. The term “scapegoat” comes from Judaism, and it means “the escaped goat,” an animal that the community lets loose into the wild or pushes off a cliff after ritually imbuing it with their collective sins. Frazer retroactively applies this term to ancient practices of banishing evil in Rome, India, South America, Germany, and other areas of the world. In these cases, priests either ritually kill the old gods or human sacrifices are made in their stead. Such ceremonies upend the regular social order and create a period of carnival, in which deities are mocked and lowly individuals are made temporary kings before the sacrifice is made and order is restored.
In these chapters, Frazer explains the apparently mysterious combination of reverence and hatred that often characterizes sacrificial ceremonies by theorizing that the sacrificial man-god also served as a scapegoat, carrying away the sins and sorrows of the populace. Thus, the god simultaneously represented divine power and the repulsive sins that the community wanted to expunge. The killing—real or symbolic—thus elicited sorrow for the slain king but joy that the community had been cleansed. These psychological and emotional contradictions contribute the chaotic atmosphere of the carnival, during which the natural social order is suspended and the community temporarily exists without its leader.
Grafting this series of events onto the passion and death of Christ crossed both cultural and theological lines in the Western world. The comparison implies that the story of Jesus Christ was not unique but rather one of many similar myths, undermining the uniqueness and divine nature of the Christian narrative. Frazer’s theories on the crucifixion of Christ were perhaps the most offensive and controversial aspect of his work at the time of publication. Because Frazer lacked theological training, being a classicist rather than a divinity scholar, the text was seen as oversimplifying and misinterpreting the complex nuances of Christ’s narrative. The Golden Bough was part of a greater trend of rationalism and empiricism that emerged during the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the emergence of the Industrial Revolution. This was seen as threatening traditional religious beliefs and undermining the view of the Bible as divine inspiration.
These ideas created such a backlash that they were expunged from Lily Frazer’s 1922 abridgement. These sections were only added back into the text by the Oxford World’s Classics edition of 1998.
