(IMG) Golden bough image
       
       The Golden Bough by Sir James George Frazer
       
       Book notes from January, 2009.
       
       Reading this was like drinking from a fire hose.  It cast new light
       some fantasy books that I have read before.  It was interesting to
       read that taboos came to exist not because something was holy or
       unclean, but because it was considered dangerous or in danger. 
       Making it taboo secluded the spiritual danger and prevented it from
       spreading.
       
       The theme of a sacred tree guardian defeated in combat by the new
       guardian reminds me of The One Tree by Stephen R Donaldson.  The
       similarities are too clear to ignore.
       
           "Brinn, Covenant's Haruchai bodyguard, sacrifices himself in a
       duel with the Tree's Guardian ak-Haru Kenaustin Ardenol. He is
       regenerated as the new Guardian and leads the party to the Tree
       itself."
       
 (TXT) The One Tree
       
       The book also discusses the idea of superstition being replaced by
       religion, and religion replaced by science.  Many times it contrast
       savages against modern Europeans.
       
           "No human being is so hide-bound by custom and tradition as you
       democratic savage; in no state of society consequently is progress 
       slow and difficult."
       
           "Thus the theory which recognises in the European Corn-mother,
       Corn-maiden, and so forth, the embodiment in vegetable form of the
       animating spirit of the crops is amply confirmed by the evidence of
       peoples in other parts of the world, who, _because they have lagged
       behind the European races in mental development_, retain for that v
       reason a keener sense of the original motives for observing those
       rustic rites which among ourselves have sunk to the level of
       meaningless survivals."
       
           "The heathen origin of Christmas is plainly hinted at, if not
       tacitly admitted, by Augustine when he exhorts his Christian brethr
       not to celebrate that solemn day like the heathen on account of the
       sun, but on account of him who made the sun."
       
       Several passages in the book describe natural beauty.
       
           "For at the dawn of history Europe was covered with immense
       primaeval forests, in which the scattered clearings must have appea
       like islets in an ocean of green."
       
           "Nowhere apparently are the alternations of the seasons more
       sudden and the contrasts between them more striking than in the
       deserts of Central Australia, where at the end of a long period of
       drought the sandy and stony wilderness, over which the silence and
       desolation of death appear to brood, is suddenly, after a few days 
       torrential rain, transformed into a landscape smiling with verdure
       and peopled with teeming multitudes of insects and lizards, of frog
       and birds. The marvellous change which passes over the face of natu
       at such times has been compared even by European observers to the
       effect of magic; no wonder, then, that the savage should regard it 
       such in very deed."
       
           "For at Aphaca there was a famous grove and sanctuary of Astart
        ... The site of the temple has been discovered by modern traveller
       near the miserable village which still bears the name of Afka at th
       head of the wild, romantic, wooded gorge of the Adonis. ... A littl
       way off the river rushes from a cavern at the foot of a mighty
       amphitheatre of towering cliffs to plunge in a series of cascades i
       the awful depths of the glen.  The deeper it descends, the ranker a
       denser grows the vegetation, which, sprouting from the crannies and
       fissures of the rocks, spreads a green veil over the roaring or
       murmuring stream in the tremendous chasm below.  There is something
       delicious, almost intoxicating, in the freshness of these  tumbling
       waters, in the sweetness and purity of the mountain air, in the viv
       green of the vegetation. ... Across the foam and roar of the
       waterfalls you look up to the cavern and away to the top of the
       sublime precipices above.  So lofty is the cliff that the goats whi
       creep along its ledges to browse on the bushes appear like ants to
       the spectator hundreds of feet below.  Seaward the view is especial
       impressive when the sun floods the profound gorge with golden light
       revealing all the fantastic buttresses and rounded towers of its
       mountain rampart, and falling softly on the varied green of the woo
       which clothe its depths."
       
        title: The Golden Bough
        author: Frazer, James George, Sir, 1854-1941
        LOC: BL310 .F7
 (HTM)  source: Gutenberg etext 3623
 (TXT)  detail: The Golden Bough
       
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