51 quotes
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.
The Golden Bough (1890)
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.
The Golden Bough (1890)
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.
The Golden Bough (1890)
Small minds cannot grasp great ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their purblind vision, nothing seems really great and important but themselves. Such minds hardly rise into religion at all.
The Golden Bough (1890)
A Nootka wizard will make an image of a swimming fish and put it into the water in the direction from which the fish generally appear.
The Golden Bough (1890)
If their king is their god, he is or should be also their preserver; and if he will not preserve them, he must make room for another who will.
The Golden Bough (1890)
Ancient magic was the very foundation of religion.
The Golden Bough (1890)
It may be suspected that the custom of employing a divine man or animal as a public scapegoat is much more widely diffused than appears from the examples cited.
The Golden Bough (1890)
Even the recognition of an individual whom we see every day is only possible as the result of an abstract idea of him formed by generalization from his appearances in the past.
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.
The Golden Bough (1890)
It is probably not too much to say that the hope of progress--moral and intellectual as well as material--in the future is bound up with the fortunes of science, and that every obstacle placed in the way of scientific discovery is a wrong to humanity.
The Golden Bough (1890)
A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier.
The Golden Bough (1890)
When a tree comes to be viewed, no longer as the body of the tree spirit, but simply as its abode which it can quit at pleasure, an important advance has been made in religious thought.
The Golden Bough (1890)
The Athenians regularly maintained a number of degraded and useless beings at the public expense; and when any calamity, such as plague, drought, or famine, befell the city, they sacrificed two of these outcast scapegoats.
The Golden Bough (1890)
But once a fool always a fool, and the greater the power in his hands the more disastrous is likely to be the use he makes of it. The heaviest calamity in English history, the breach with America, might never have occurred if George the Third had not been an honest dullard.
The Golden Bough (1890)
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.
The Golden Bough (1890)
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.
The Golden Bough (1890)
If any of my readers set out with the notion that that all races of men think and act much in the same way as educated Englishmen, the evidence of superstitious belief and custom collected in this work should suffice to disabuse him of so erroneous a prepossession.
The Golden Bough (1890)
The natives of British Columbia live largely upon the fish which abound in their seas and rivers. If the fish do not come in due season, and the Indians are hungry, A Nootka wizard will make an image of a swimming fish and put it into the water in the direction from which the fish generally appear. This ceremony, accompanied by a prayer to the fish to come, will cause them to arrive at once.
The Golden Bough (1890)
It is not a new opinion that the Golden Bough was the mistletoe. True, Virgil does not identify but only compares it with the mistletoe. But this may be only a poetical device to cast a mystic glamour over the humble plant.
The Golden Bough (1890)