Always Winter And Never Christmas

So … to be Seamus Heaney about it, we continue to be snowed in or under, whichever you prefer. I, like you I’m sure, have been struggling against its annoying aspects and enjoying others. Such as a good excuse to go out and about in a woolly hat clicking away with a digital camera. This one was taken not long after sunrise. It does not really capture the crystal brilliance of the moment. The woodland was like a fairy tale which put me in mind of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I wondered what those pagan Anglo-Saxon folk thought about a sun so full of light and yet lacking warmth. Did they, as some undoubtedly think, seek to rekindle it, with some kind of fire ceremony. And was the sun reborn or reinvigorated with life as a result? It is easy to view this sun as both corpse-like and radiant.

I have read much of that T.S. Eliot favourite, The Golden Bough, by James Frazer, which I know is now considered hopelessly out of date, in comparative anthropological circles, and even, I have read, imperialistic and seeking to impose some kind of patronising European ‘mindset’ on the world. Frazer, certainly, was a product of his times. Exactly as contemporary anthropologists are. Imperialist or not The Golden Bough is still a source of fascinating speculation. Much of the voluminous ‘evidence’ is anecdotal and it is difficult in many instances to see how it applies to the hypotheses advanced. The simple formula: Magic-Religion-Science as an evolutionary concept is certainly flawed. Many anthropologists now consider the central ‘sacral king’ thesis very iffy, particularly with regard to the origin of diverse myths. This does not mean that sacred kings did not exist but that the entire history of religion and magic is highly unlikely to boil down quite so conveniently. Indeed I think it has been shown that the priest of the golden bough at the temple of Diana was very unlikely to have been such a king. One can hardly blame Frazer. Despite being supposedly more advanced in our approach, scholars still have a natural propensity for pouring a quart into a pint pot of their own making.

It is quite apparent that religion contains a great deal of magical thinking and that science is clearly capable of operating as a means of explaining phenomena or solving problems that are conceived as being ultimately divine in origin. Such simplistic linearity is patently false. Whilst it is often repeated as some kind of chattering mantra that science has steadily replaced religion, a quick glance around the globe shows that science has really replaced magic or aspects of religion which seek to affect in some way personal outcomes and can therefore be seen as kinds of magic, rather than religion itself. Science seeks to understand the physical world and uses an evidence based method in order to accomplish this. The rather neurotic need to apply this method to the whole of human experience is not science but scientism.

Frazer himself drew a comparison between science and magic which still seems reasonable to me but then followed it through untenably. As magic was replaced by religion so religion would be supplanted by science, presumably the advanced form of magic based on real evidence rather than some kind of supernatural knowledge. Which of course it is. This ignores the obvious fact that science also has been with us from the beginning even if it was indistinguishable from magic by its practitioners. Chemistry had its magical aspects right up until Newton. The great scientist was an enthusiastic alchemist and not above mixing up his approach with magic. However, this ‘civilised’ development appeared obvious to a person of Frazer’s time. In the same way man moved from superstitious savage to sophisticated scientist. It is interesting that while Frazer’s idea of primitive savage to civilised European is today rather embarrassing the comparison he drew and thinly veiled between Christian ritual and earlier more ‘savage’ rites is still happily employed by those essentially antipathetic to Christianity for the very same reasons. Not that such comparisons are necessarily invalid but that the meanings allied to them are almost always prejudicial in some way.

Iced rose hips. Looking at these red berries among the branches puts one immediately in mind of embers in Mother Nature’s fire or of drops of blood around the crown of thorns or perhaps less hysterically but more boringly, of lovely spots of colour on a muslin cloth. To me they are beautiful but to a pagan Anglo-Saxon or a Gerard Manley Hopkins or even somebody with a connection to a quasi-religious ‘deep ecology’ they are profound. To appreciate this profundity, to try and touch it, is to draw closer I think to the characters of The Rune of Ing. We come back to The Golden Bough. What is certainly profound is the irony that while Frazer’s theories have been more or less discredited as science, as a largely anecdotal encylopedia of  folklore, magic and early custom TGB is staggering. It seems to inspire a religious outlook on the world rather than undermine one. Especially of the Robert Graves neo-pagan variety. As a work of literature masquerading as a scientific thesis it is indubitably one of the most influential works of the Victorian mind. Rave on Sir James. Rave on.

Frazer’s work might just be the closest a scientific treatise has come to Tristram Shandy in terms of its endless digressions and parentheses. And I have only read the huge ‘abridged’ version. The full twelve volumes? I do have a life you know.

Shortly by a combination of science and magic, not to mention a great deal of praying, The Rune of Ing shall appear.

Happy New Year!