Is this still worth reading, or is there another book/series

Bumping because I'm interested but clueless

I too shall bump

final bump

its good, read one of the abridged versions though (the new oxford one is good, its based on frazer's abridgement but it includes some controversial stuff about christ that he had originally cut).

i've drawn a lot of inspiration from the book.

>>9860886
Read the new abridged version, yeah, but don't take it too seriously. You can follow that up with Robert Graves' White Goddess if you enjoy this sort of fantasy-tier speculation.

And if you really want to go down the rabbit hole, check out Dupuy's Origin of All Cults, should be up on Archive.org or somewhere.

>>9863139

Yeah, fantasy-tier speculation is rather on point. Frazer, coupled with E.B. Tylor, is rightfully viewed with derision as an armchair theorist proposing a totalizing vision of human psychological development along a unilineal evolutionist track from animism to...what? 19th century Lutheranism? Frazer's prose is admirable, but the content is just completely outdated and really only of historical significance.

He's a persona non grata in contemporary academia, largely out of the post WWII academic fascism witch hunts. But really his book is consonant with something any post-ironic 1980's pomo kid like you or I would have thought up in the 4th grade.

>>9863166
Let's face it, juvenile speculation is doing an injustice to the deeper implications of Frazer's Dying God theory.

Consider the fact that it proposes an earthbound view of the solar phenomenon; the opposition between day and night; summer and winter, etc. This is backed up with reference to various religions and folk traditions.

Now consider the solar Apollonian spirituality of the Indo-European peoples, and you might begin to perceive an inkling of the absolutely fundamental set of oppositions therein.

See Bachofen, Evola, among others, for more on this. Frazer was onto something, but his lack of insight and promiscuous selectivity make his work something out of fantasy, not his psychologising approach.

>>9863197

I appreciate Frazer's phenomenological, volkisch orientation, but the categories and typologies he was working with have been thoroughly, empirically BTFO. The sort of Indo-European mythos both he and Graves were working off of has been severely problematized in the interim, and the totalizing meta-narratives that pervade this whole sort of modernist neo-Hegelian tradition (from Frazer through Steiner, theosophy, etc., to Evola, etc.) has proven itself totally bankrupt - metaphysically and existentially.

I don't say this from some Marxist pomo perspective - what I want is the continuation of similar lines of thought, but with more rigor and sophistication, as in Eliade and Corbin. I really appreciate the aesthetic appeal of Frazer, Evola.

Anyway, what is it you like about Frazer? I'm curious. I read his work years ago, but it's possible I didn't give him a fair shake.

I haven't said anywhere that I "liked" Frazer. What I am saying is that he misrepresents quite a few things, but in the process, unwittingly reveals some very interesting points on religions.

Namely, the opposition between solar religions (in the Apollonian sense) and crypto-lunar spiritualities masquerading as solar cults.

The geocentric view of the sun can be but telluric in nature, hence the so-called Dying God view of the sun.