The Golden Bough Immediately

In this landmark study Frazer digs up the oldest of Christianity's roots--the worship of a god who dies only to be resurrected--and follows it to its elemental source: the cyclical death and rebirth of plant life. It's that simple. The turning of the seasons. Drawing upon examples from hundreds of cultures and peoples as divergent as African huntsmen and German peasants, Native Americans and Welsh farmers, Frazer proves conclusively that Christianity and a host of other religions all reflect the death of the Earth in fall and winter and its rebirth in spring and summer.
Ron Hogan, whoever he is, criticizes Frazer for the so-called "social Darwinism" that "finds its most explicit form in Frazer's rhetorical question: `If in the most backward state of human society now known to us we find magic thus conspicuously present and religion conspicuously absent, may we not reasonably conjecture that the civilised races of the world have also at some period of their history passed through a similar intellectual phase?'" Substitute the word "primitive" for "backward" and the statement is now politically correct; it is already correct on every other level. Hogan goes on to complain: "Frazer was much too genteel to state plainly that `primitive' races believe in magic because they are too stupid and backwards to know any better; instead he remarks that `a savage hardly conceives the distinction commonly drawn by more advanced peoples between the natural and the supernatural.' The stupidity here belongs to Hogan; scholars from Carl Jung to Claude Levi-Strauss argue quite conclusively over many pages precisely this point: primitive--or let us say primal as Jamake Highwater suggests to intimate "first"--primal cultures do NOT separate the natural and supernatural. Remove "by more advanced cultures" and Frazer become politically correct--and that is the only correctness Hogan is arguing. Frazer wasn't being "genteel" by not calling such cultures "stupid"; stupid has nothing to do with Frazer's argument. That's Hogan's area of expertise.
The Golden Bough is absolutely brilliant in its insights and breathtaking in scope. And we should be ashamed that for decades Frazer's chapter on the Crucifixion was dropped from all the abridged versions of his classic study--and let's face it; no one outside of a handful of scholars is going to read the 12-volume unabridged third edition. This is what's truly primitive--pretending that if we hide Frazer's analysis of the Crucifixion the analysis and its implications don't exist.
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