December 12, 1918 
LAND &> WATER 
15 
Life and Letters 6v J. C Squire 
An Anthropologist 
SIR JAMES FRAZER'S Golden Bough has been, 
perhaps, the only anthropological work which is 
both a scientific and a literary classic ; his Folk-lore 
in the Old Testament (Macmillan, 3 vols., 37s. 6d. net) 
is a second. It has even the added charm of a 
miscellany of curiosities ; if a man be not interested in the 
theme, and care not at all as to how prevalent are stories of 
the Fall or the ceremonies of the Jewish priesthood, he can 
open it anywhere and find strange stories and odd facts 
about men in all climes and centuries. Open it at random, 
and you will strike sentences like "Among the pastoral Suk 
of British East Africa it is forbidden to partake of milk and 
meat on the same day," or "Mandrakes imported from the 
Orient are still in demand here among Orthodox Jews. They 
are rarely sold for less than four dollars, and one young 
man whose wife is barren recently paid ten dollars for a 
specimen. They are still thought to be male and female ; 
they are used remedially, a bit being scraped into water and 
taken internally ; they are valued talismans, and they 
ensure fertility to barren women"; or "The Waralis, a 
tribe who inhabit the jungles of Northern Konkan, in the 
Bombay Presidency, worship Waglua, the lord of tigers, in 
the form of a shapeless stone smeared with red lead and 
clarified butter. They give him chicken and goats, break 
coco-nuts on his head, and pour oil on him. In. return for 
these attentions he preserves them from tigers, gives them 
good crops, and keeps disease from thenj." Any fact like 
this, if one reads lightly, is amusing ; or, if one reads more 
seriously, is instructive; or, if one is imaginative, will do as 
the starting-point of a dream. Only the man with scaled 
eyes who lives in one place- and at one point in time can 
escape the fascination of such records. 
But Sir James Frazer is not collecting them for their 
value in isolation ; each one to him is a link in a chain. He 
takes in succession a large number of stories and customs 
recorded in the Old Testament, and groups together all the 
kindred facts that he can find in the works of ancient and 
modern writers who have studied the peoples of the world. 
No reviewer could survey so large a work ; one can give a 
single instance, however. He starts with the fact that the 
Jewish God "cherished a singular antipathy to the taking of 
a census which he appears to have regarded as a crime of 
even deeper dye than boiling milk or jumping on a thres- 
hold." He follows this with a list of all the other cases in 
which counting has been, or is, held to involve fatal results. 
The Bakongo refused to let the Congo State officials count 
them; among the Boloki "the native has a very strong 
superstition and prejudice against counting his children, for 
he believes that if he does so, or if he states the proper 
number, the evil spirits will hear it and some of his children 
will die ; hence when you ask him such a simple question as 
"How many children have you ?" you stir up his super- 
stitious fears, and he will answer: "I don't know." If you 
press him, he will tell you si.xty, or one hundred children, or 
any other number that jumps to his tongue." The Masai 
will not count themselves or their cattle. If you ask a 
Kikuyu mother how many children she has, she meets you 
with "Come and see." A missionary who once counted his 
Hottentot workmen paid for his rashness with his life. The 
Cherokees will not count their melons, lest they wither. 
In the Shetlands it is unlucky to count fish, and in Lincolnshire 
lambs ; in Denmark, eggs under a brooding hen. Tliis is 
Sir James's method. Thus, with immense paiis, he treats 
the stories of Moses in the Bulrushes, of Jacob's marriage, and 
dozens of others. 
So here we have this enormous mass of material collected 
by the most industrious and luminous of all anthropological 
writers. Sir James's laboriousness and his conscientious 
accuracy are amazing ; and not the least amazing thing 
about his researches is that all those which relate to out- 
landish tribes have been conducted in London and Cam- 
bridge, and that the Suks, the Wolofs, the Mafulus, and the 
thousand others have never seen his face. He has eaten his 
way through librai'ies as a caterpillar eats his way through 
cabbages. His eye has never missed the relevant and the 
significant fact ; he has sj'stematised a world of knowledge 
collected sporadically by generations cf travelling men. It is 
evident that he must work with a system of indexes so 
elaborate and comprehensive that scarcely any human 
custom or myth could be put before him as to which he 
could not quote parallels and resemblances, variatiors, and 
developments. A great scholar and a great organiser, he 
possesses, as so few scientific investigators do, a pellucid 
English style which is never burdened with technical jargon, 
which flows in an easy and even rhythm, and which (as in a 
fine meditative passage on Greek landscape in the first volume) , 
can rise into a sustained and qui^t beauty which betokens 
the man of letters, the lover and the editor of Addison and 
Cowper. But he has no argument ; or, if he has, it is con- 
cealed and to be guessed at. His work is the accumulation 
and arrangement of knowledge, the demonstraticn of the 
world-wide prevalence of certain legends ard rituals ; and 
he leaves it to others to make controversial use of the facts that 
he has ascertained. He has no axe to grind, save the axe 
of scientific truth. 
And I doubt if, at this stage, other people will make as 
much controversial use of his book as they would have done 
had it been published thirty years ago. The dogmas of the 
Christian religion may be accepted or they may be denied, 
but the assumption tliat their truth was finally exploded by 
the demonstration (or, rather, the not quite proved hypo- 
thesis) that man had evolved from the brute creation and that 
the story in the first chapters of Genesis was an allegory or 
a fiction, is no longer made. It was realised, after a great 
deal of passionate debate about apes, in which one party 
seemed to be as anxious (quite apart from the question of 
truth) to be related to the apes as the other party were 
shocked by the Darwinian pedigree, that it did not matter 
a straw to the Christian Church whether evolution was 
"true" or not. Since it had always been, very reasonably, 
held that God must move in a mysterious way, the dis- 
covery or suspicion of one more mysterious way made no 
difference ; it was seen to be no more remarkable that a 
man should be made out of an amcEba than that a woman 
should be made out of a rib. Anthropology and folk-lore 
make, and need make, no more impression. Mr. J. M. 
Robertson produced a book full of Pagan Christs ; and the 
answer is that (if Mr. Robertson's information be accurate) 
they were Pagan, but they were not Christs. So with Sir 
James Frazer's investigation of the Old Testament, which 
book a great many Christians regard with a very serene 
detachment. 
A great deal of his information has rather a historical than 
a religious reference ; it throws light on the social customs of 
that engaging race the Ancient Hebrews. In so far as stories 
like those of the Deluge are still taken literally, and regarded 
as important by believers, it might even be argued that his 
information confirms them. It has often been taken for 
granted that the Deluge could only be supposed to have 
happened if nobody but the Jews thought that it happened. 
But might it not be still more forcibly contended that whilst 
one nation's evidence was slender basis for the acceptance of 
such a fact, since everybody, from the Arctic Circle to the 
Congo, says that there was a deluge, there really may have 
been one ? It is surely ridiculous to credit a witness on the 
condition that nobody else confirms his storv. But this is 
not the place, and I have not the qualifications, to enter 
into theological or pseudo-theological argument ; I may 
merely be allowed to express the opinion that the time has 
passed in which religion had need to dread the investigations 
of conscientious scientists or scientists felt impelled, in self- 
protection, or out of premature swelled head, to treat every 
natural fact that they discovered to be a nail in the coffin of 
faith. The Golden Bough is in every intelligent clergyman's 
library, and this work will follow it. 
