The first year · Lesson 16
From Magician to King
Frazer’s story of how the public magician rose to power, and a look back over the first year
Julius Caesar turns up in today’s reading. That surprised me the first time. We have spent three lessons with village charms, nails in footprints and little clay figures. Now Frazer steps back and asks a bigger question. What happened to the people who did magic for a whole tribe? His answer is bold, and in places I think he is wrong. It is a short reading, the last of your first year. Let’s finish it together.
The reading
- Chapter III: Sympathetic Magic, paragraphs 69–73 The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (abridged edition), pp. 45–48 · about 1,737 words, 9 min Section 4, “The Magician’s Progress,” the last five paragraphs of Chapter III. Frazer turns from how magic was thought to work to who did it, and what that did to whole societies.
About 9 minutes in all. Each link opens the book at the first paragraph.
Before you read
- This is the end of Chapter III, only five paragraphs and about four pages. There are no more charms to collect. Instead Frazer tells a story about power. One magician serves the whole tribe, and over time that magician may become a chief or a king.
- Paragraph 71 is a single paragraph of almost 600 words. Take a breath halfway through. Look for the turn where Frazer moves from the tribe to its neighbors.
- A reminder from earlier lessons. Frazer wrote in 1922, and he uses the words of his day, like “savage.” Here he goes further. He praises one-man rule, conquest and empire, and he looks down on the peoples he writes about. These are his opinions, and most readers today find them wrong and harsh. Read them as a window on how a famous scholar of 1922 thought. The quiz asks what he says, not whether he is right.
- Frazer backs up his big claims with famous rulers and old empires. Notice which ones he picks and why. The quiz asks about them.
In a nutshell
Section 4: The Magician's Progress
Frazer says most of his examples so far were private magic, done to help or harm one person. But many peoples also had public magic, done for the good of the whole tribe. When a tribe believes its welfare hangs on these rites, the magician gains respect and power. He may become a chief or a king. Frazer then sorts magicians into two kinds. Some honestly believe in their powers. Others are clever cheats. He says every claim of magic is false. So when a charm fails, the cheat has an excuse ready, and the honest one may be punished. That means the cleverest men tend to rise to the top. Frazer says this was a good thing on the whole. Clever rulers often do good once they have power, and honest fools do more harm. He argues that rule by one strong man broke the hold of old custom. In his view, that led to wealth, conquest, art and science. He ends by weighing magic up. It did much evil, he says, but it also did much good.
Looking back over the first year (our words, not the book's)
You have now read three books that look at the same old ideas. The Kybalion looks from the inside. Its motto is “As above, so below.” The same patterns repeat on every level, and everything is in one great Mind. Agrippa also looks from the inside. He builds a map of the world from the four elements, the hidden virtues in things, and the seven planets. His rule is that each planet rules what is like it. Frazer looks from the outside. He is not trying to work magic. He wants to know why people believed in it. He finds two laws under it. Like produces like, and things once in touch stay linked. Now look back. Agrippa’s “like rules like” is Frazer’s first law. “As above, so below” is a grand version of the same idea. You can read these books as a believer of their day would, or as a scholar would. Now you can do both.
Highlights
public magic, that is, sorcery practised for the benefit of the whole community.
The new idea of this section. Up to now, magic was one person’s worry: a rival, a lover, a sickness. Public magic is for everyone, like rites for rain or a good harvest. That changes who the magician is.
the magician rises into a position of much influence and repute, and may readily acquire the rank and authority of a chief or king.
Frazer’s big claim in one line. If the tribe thinks its life depends on you, you have power. The rest of The Golden Bough follows this thread to its kings of the wood and gods who die.
every single profession and claim put forward by the magician as such is false
Frazer never hedges on this. He is a scholar of magic, not a believer. It is the opposite of how the Kybalion and Agrippa speak, and it is why he is such a useful third voice.
in another direction magic has paved the way for science
A hint of Frazer’s famous ladder. He thought people first trusted magic, then religion, and at last science. Later chapters of his book spell it out. Historians now doubt it, as you will see below.
if it is the child of error, it has yet been the mother of freedom and truth.
The last line of the chapter, and Frazer at his most quotable. Magic was wrong, he says, but good things grew from it. Whatever you think of his story, it is a generous way to end.
Words to know
- Public and private magic
- Frazer’s terms. Private magic is done for or against one person. Public magic is done for a whole community.
- Functionary
- Someone with an official job, here a magician who serves the whole tribe.
- Sorcerer, sorcery
- Frazer’s words for a magician and magic. He uses them for both kinds, honest and false.
- Knave, impostor, rogue
- Three old words for a cheat, someone who tricks people on purpose.
- Sagacious, sagacity
- Wise and shrewd, and the quality of being so.
- Oligarchy
- Rule by a small group. Frazer says many tribes were ruled by a group of old men.
- Despotism
- Rule by one person who holds all the power.
- Thraldom
- Slavery or bondage. Frazer says magic helped free people from the “thraldom of tradition.”
The real story
Our notes, not the book's.
In this section Frazer makes two large claims. One is that the public magician often became the chief or king. The other, spelled out later in the book, is that people climbed a ladder from magic to religion to science. Both made The Golden Bough famous, and both are now seen as a tidy story, not a law of history. Scholars who lived among the peoples Frazer read about found magic, religion and practical know-how side by side, in the same village and even the same person. Bronisław Malinowski, who admired Frazer, was one of the best known of them. Kings have risen in many ways, and magic is only one guess among many. Frazer’s praise of conquest and empire also belongs to his own time, not to the evidence. But his questions still matter. Why do people trust rites that fail? How do belief and power feed each other? Those questions are why we still read him.
Quiz
Answer from the notes or the reading, in any order; you can change an answer at any time. Each answer says why, with a link to the page.