17 Facts About James Frazer

Sir James George Frazer was a Scottish social anthropologist and folklorist influential in the early stages of the modern studies of mythology and comparative religion.

James Frazer was born on 1 January 1854 in Glasgow, Scotland, the son of Katherine Brown and Daniel F Frazer, a chemist.

James Frazer studied at the University of Glasgow and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated with honours in classics and remained a Classics Fellow all his life.

James Frazer was knighted in 1914, and a public lectureship in social anthropology at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Glasgow and Liverpool was established in his honour in 1921.

James Frazer was, if not blind, then severely visually impaired from 1930 on.

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James Frazer is commonly interpreted as an atheist in light of his criticism of Christianity and especially Roman Catholicism in The Golden Bough.

In 1896 James Frazer married Elizabeth "Lilly" Grove, a writer whose family was from Alsace.

James Frazer was the first scholar to describe in detail the relations between myths and rituals.

James Frazer published a single-volume abridged version, largely compiled by his wife Lady Frazer, in 1922, with some controversial material on Christianity excluded from the text.

James Frazer believed that, over time, culture passed through three stages, moving from magic, to religion, to science.

James Frazer defined magic separately from belief in the supernatural and superstition, presenting an ultimately ambivalent view of its place in culture.

James Frazer believed that magic and science were similar because both shared an emphasis on experimentation and practicality; his emphasis on this relationship is so broad that almost any disproven scientific hypothesis technically constitutes magic under his system.

In contrast to both magic and science, James Frazer defined religion in terms of belief in personal, supernatural forces and attempts to appease them.

James Frazer noted that magic sometimes returned so as to become science, such as when alchemy underwent a revival in Early Modern Europe and became chemistry.

James Frazer collected stories from throughout the British Empire and devised four general classifications into which many of them could be grouped:.

Larsen criticizes James Frazer for applying western European Christian ideas, theology, and terminology to non-Christian cultures.

James Frazer routinely described non-Christian religious figures by equating them with Christian ones.