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Classics revisited: Death, immortality,

and Sir James Frazer
Douglas J. Davies

Durham University, UK
Version of record first published: 23 Jul 2008.

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Mortality, Vol. 13, No. 3, August 2008

Classics revisited: Death, immortality, and

Sir James Frazer
DOUGLAS J. DAVIES

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Durham University, UK

Sir James Frazer (18541941), prolific Victorian-Edwardian British anthropologist whose comparative mythology The Golden Bough is still in print, collected
much material on death. Here we consider his three volume, The belief in
immortality and the worship of the dead (1913, 1922, 1924/1968). Another
significant collection, The fear of the dead in primitive religion (1934, 1936), will
only be alluded to but would also repay closer study. Famed in his day for
advocating the new subject of anthropology, with a brief biography by Downie
(1940) and a splendidly full one by Ackerman (1987), his immense accumulation
and ordering of material on human attitudes to death and the practice of funerary
rites has tended to be ignored due to rapid changes of theoretical fashion in
anthropology throughout the twentieth century. Yet, his work remains as one
foundation upon which to approach the human engagement with death.
In exemplary prose, The belief in immortality and the worship of the dead described
and interpreted funeral rites, human beliefs in the continuity of souls after death,
and their transformation into powerful divine-like entities, perhaps even into the
idea of God. It embraced the ideological and material culture of death of
indigenous peoples in Australia, the Torres Straits, New Guinea and Melanesia
(Vol. I), Polynesia (Vol. II), and Micronesia (Vol. III). Much criticized as
intellectualist for stressing the supposed thought-forms of primitive peoples
(Evans-Pritchard, 1965, pp. 2730), this approach was superseded by Malinowskis functionalist approach (e.g., 1948) and the symbolic styles of
anthropology evident in Hertz (1907/1960) but much developed by later scholars
of death (e.g., Bloch & Parry, 1982; Metcalf & Huntington, 1991). Still, Frazer
prompts theoretical questions of the relationship between theory, description, and
interpretation as well as of ethical issues of personal judgment and cultural
relativism. Volume I consists of Aberdeens prestigious Gifford Lectures of 1911
1912 (1913); Volumes II (1922) and III (1924/1968) of lectures given,
respectively, at the Royal Institution and at Cambridge, where Frazer was a
Fellow of Trinity College and where he had become a friend of Robertson Smith
(18461894) who had been dismissed from Aberdeen for teaching theological
views pervaded by ideas of evolution (Black & Chrystal, 1912, pp. 235404).
Nearly two decades after Smiths early death, Frazer presented Aberdeen, once
more, with an evolutionary view: that the very idea of God had its origin in human
ISSN 1357-6275 (print) ISSN 1469-9885 (online) 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13576270802181681

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attitudes to the dead. These volumes expanded upon the very first paper on death
that Frazer had addressed to the Anthropological Institute in 1885.

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Theology and belief

Against the controversial Robertson Smith background, and because the Gifford
Lectures necessarily involve some aspect of religion, Frazer began with the notion
of natural theology, offering a history of religion that traced theological and
religious ideas to their sources (1913, p. 3) with the goal of gaining some sense of
their potential ethical value for the ongoing life of humanity. He refers to natural
religion as the frame for his topic, noting potential attitudes to it whether of
complacency as a noble testimony to the aspiring genius of man, who claims to
outlive the sun, or of pity as a melancholy monument of fruitless labour and
barren ingenuity over what fools profess as knowledge and wise men as
ignorance. He deems the existence of God an issue too difficult for himself and
can neither affirm or deny it, but only humbly confess his ignorance
(1913, p. 2). Still, he thinks that if we accept that our creeds have their origin in
some superstition of our rude forefathers, it might well shake our confidence
in our own articles of faith and be dangerous if it serves to loosen the cement
(the moral strength) and shake the foundation of religion (1913, p. 4). Despite
polite cautions that such dangers were not inevitable he sets out to discover the
origin of mans conception of God by means of the increasingly popular
comparative method (1913, p. 5; Cf. Adams, 1998, pp. 3738, 4345; Segal,
1995, pp. 343349). The numerous races, especially of preliterate groups
whose ways of life had recently become accessible, represented to Frazers
evolutionary perspective stages through which humanity had passed. By ordering
their complexity we could arrive at an historical record of the genetic
development of culture from a very early time to the present day (1913, p. 6).
Indeed, haste was vital before these groups all but disappeared. A chemistry of
the mind (1913, p. 7) indicated that we study simple features in savage religion
before approaching complex formulations in our own society. Defining his terms,
Frazer designates God as a powerful supernatural and on the whole beneficent
spirit, akin in nature to man. He discouraged using God for more abstract
conceptions lest we deceive ourselves as he thought some contemporaries did:
like putting up dummies to make an enemy imagine that a fort is still held after it
has been evacuated by the garrison. Central to human experience is the logic of
cause and effect evident in the association of ideas whether in primitive or
modern man, though primitive inference may be faulty due to restrictive access to
information (1913, p. 19). Additionally, Frazer thought that a dual form of human
experience underlay all knowledge, viz., an inward experience . . . of our own
minds and an outward experience of the . . . physical universe (1913, p. 14), a
scheme reflected in religious ideas manifest as either fervent temper in active
devotion, or as a calm and rational faith (1913, p. 23). Frazers map of deities
entertained three interconnected possibilities: (a) creator of the natural world
known through its beauty and order, (b) inspirer of ones inner experience,

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289

(c) the deified spirits of dead men (1913, p. 23). This last element of a worldwide belief in the survival of the human spirit after death provides the
substance of his Immortality volumes.

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Surviving spirits
Beliefs in a relationship between soul and body found amongst preliterate peoples,
as in his own society, are taken to be one of the finest fruits of philosophy and
religion, whilst also reminding us of how narrow may be the line that divides the
meditations of the savage and the sage (1913, p. 361). Through comparative
study Frazer sees that immortal might mean different things for different
peoples; just because souls are believed to survive death does not mean they will
continue to exist for ever. With a sociological perspective he shows how the status
of the deceased when alive influences their post-mortem period of influence over
the living: but souls may also fade in effective significance and, for practical
purposes, die (1922, p. 51). Despite polite caution against reducing ideas of
worship solely to the worship of dead persons, Frazer still thinks that route is often
followed, as with the Maori for whom, as time goes on our mortal nature (fades
or) brightens into the immortal and divine (1922, p. 70). This theory of the
ancient Greek Euhemerus (Euhemerism) Frazer now takes as the broad subject of
his Immortality lectures.
Frazers twofold route of knowledge, intuition of self and experiential
knowledge of others or of the external world, underlies the potential basis for
belief in immortal spirits. Speaking for himself he claims no intuition of his own
immortality, whilst allowing that others may find that sense within them,
reinforced perhaps by evidence from the external world. Key intuitional
evidence includes dreams of those who are dead (1913, p. 27), or of dreams in
which the soul is reckoned to leave the body while the person sleeps, as with the
Maori (1922, p. 12). Another kind of evidence comes from the likeness of
descendents to their dead ancestors, an observed fact interpreted as
metempsychosis.
Method and purpose
Frazer sees his work as the first systematically collected material on this topic
approached by drawing a distinction between the descriptive and the
comparative methods (1913, p. 29). While employing both he prefers the
descriptive method in this study as a means of advancing the history of religions.
This descriptive approach involves less conscious theorizing than the
comparative, is less exciting but holds its value precisely as a collection of
facts. Appropriately, he incorporates anthropology into this outlook distinguishing between descriptive anthropology and comparative anthropology:
the first should record observations without any admixture of theory while the
second needs to compare the observations made in all parts of the world, and
from the comparison to deduce theories, more or less provisional, of the origin

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and growth of beliefs and institutions . . . for the furtherance of their common aim,
the understanding of the nature and development of man (1913, pp. 230231).
Frazers comparative anthropology takes the idea that there is amongst the
lower races a religion based on a propitiation or worship of the human dead
into an account of the different statuses and sense of power accorded to the dead,
from common ghost up to the proud position of deity and reckons it to exist to
some degree among all races (1913, p. 31). Here his evolutionary assumptions
are as obvious as his pragmatic sense of the origin of ideas. Indeed, one reason why
he takes death as such a crucial aspect of his study of humanity is because it is
common to all people and not, as with some ideas, only of interest to a few
solitary thinkers. To the skeptic working by the cold light of reason the
different degrees of interest shown in the problems thrown up by the fact of death
might indicate that some societies, in what he sees as a fatal aberration,
speculate too much about an afterlife and ignore the certainties of this present life
(1913, p. 33): certainly, on counting heads, the overwhelming history of
humanity, a few dissenters even amongst savages apart, indicates belief in some
form of afterlife. Frazers way of establishing the point is to cite numerous
examples where people think that life is the natural human state and that any death
is caused by malevolence. For him such views constitute a mistaken theory of
death (1913, p. 53) but belong to a certain stage of social and intellectual
evolution in which people regard themselves as naturally immortal, only dying
through the malevolence of others. The search for the sorcerer or witch and their
subsequent punishment by death was, as Frazer saw it, one potent influence of
keeping down population levels, and an expression of the immense power for
evil of the worldwide faith in magic or sorcery. Following his underlying
commitment both to evolutionary progression and the power of reason he argues
that some people eventually appreciate that death is really due to such natural
causes as old age. However, he names groups that mark out ghosts as the cause of
illness and death and still evaluates them as marking a real step in intellectual and
moral progress and a great gain to society (1913, p. 57). This is because a
belief that there are powers greater than man both fosters a sense of humility
and reduces the number of vengeful retaliations: human security is improved.
Even in this advance, however, people try to bribe the higher powers through
prayer that is always cheap, and sacrifice, that may be very dear in the
destruction of property of life. As far as ghosts are concerned Frazer devotes the
great part of his The fear of the dead in primitive religion to very many aspects of their
relation to the living, including the ghosts of animals (1936, pp. 283311).
Frazers approach to the study of death is humane, liberal, and rational, arguing
that the numbers sacrificed to ghosts and gods have probably been far fewer that
the slaughter of witches and wizards. This brings Frazer to one expression of his
oft-rehearsed, yet often decontextualized, definition of what he calls natural
religion which, he says, might be defined roughly as a belief in superhuman
spiritual beings and an attempt to propitiate them (1913, p. 58). On the basis of
his many examples, and of his own added interpretation of peoples explanation
of causes of death, he now infers that an Age of Magic preceded an Age of

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Religion and sees this as a moral advance because an era of mercy replaced
the relentless severity of its predecessor (1913, p. 58).

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Myths of deaths origin

Frazer, in depicting myths explaining the nature of death, offers a fourfold
classification of such savage guesses at truth (1913, p. 60), viz., the Two
Messengers, the Waxing and Waning Moon, the Serpent and the Cast Skin, and
the Banana-Tree. The last is not as self-evident as the others and works on the
basis that the parent banana-tree dies once its progeny are separately established:
just so do parents die when replaced by their children. In these myths he sees the
products of a primitive philosophy (1913, p. 74), the very attitude that
prompted his being called an intellectualist within the history of anthropological
thought. Appropriately, one myth that personifies death as a personal being
Frazer regards as an intellectual advance because personification of an abstract
idea marks a development from very low intelligences (1913, p. 81). Ideas of
death thus offered Frazer one basis for constructing his scheme of human cultural
evolution and also influenced how he presented his data on material culture
including the housing of the living, grave sites, and houses built for departed
spirits as in the gigantic hospice built in Yap where wandering souls may come
to rest (e.g., 1924/1968, p. 166).
Frazer glosses his interpretation of changing human ideas of the relation of
death to life as the natural condition of humanity by citing contemporary
biological views that death is not a primary necessity and that certain primitive
life forms possess an unlimited duration. On this basis death emerged as a positive
adaptation in higher organisms. Here he cites Weissmans biological work: the
unlimited existence of individuals would be a luxury without any corresponding
advantage (1913, p. 85), reinforced with that of Alfred Russell Wallace. On death
as a necessity, he even compares primitives with such scientists: for primitives it is
a deplorable accident and for scientists it tends to the improvement and
therefore the happiness of the species.
Religious evolution
Frazer now shows how belief in immortality, with its emergent consequence of
the worship of the dead, comes to be a more or less important element
of . . . religion as such (1913, p. 87). Acknowledging the conjectural nature of his
work, since religion is in a sense a function of culture, he assumes that societies
that have passed through similar stages of cultural development are likely to have
engendered similar religious responses to life: this is all part of the embryology of
religion. Mirroring evolutionary biology he wants to begin with the simplest form
of social life and goes to the Australian Aborigines whom he regards as retarded
in their evolutionary development; indeed, he expects them soon to disappear
upon contact with European culture. They possess no religion in the strict sense
of the word, by which he meant a propitiation of real or imaginary powers

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regarded as personal beings superior to man (1913, p. 91). He notes a

widespread belief in the reincarnation of a dead person who lived on earth a
shorter or longer time ago, and that souls gather at special geographical places,
spiritual parks or reservations, waiting to reincarnate. This they do according
to clan rules and not through random association. There is no idea of a general
gathering place or heaven for the departed. Amidst the ethnographic accounts
available to him Frazer pinpoints Spencer and Gillens famous descriptions of the
Warramunga, who seem deeply in awe of a supernatural creature: they have a
firm belief in what Frazer calls a purely imaginary being who is visible to the
eye of faith alone, and they pray to him and propitiate him with solemn ritual
(1913, p. 106). He is interested in the notion of ancient ancestors and respect for
them for in that attitude he sees the possibility of the beginning of worship and
the presence of religion, the process of an ancestor becoming a god (1913, p.
113). He speaks of people standing on, if they have not already crossed, the
threshold of religion and is preoccupied by identifying parts of rites as
religious (typified by propitiation) and part as magical (typified by
constraint) whilst also noting the capacity of many peoples to behave in ways
that are not primarily logically consistent with each other (1913, pp. 108, 112).
He is ever ready to see in the rude creation of the Australian imagination . . . a
starting point for . . . some of the noblest works of sculpture and painting (1913,
p. 114). Still, some aspects of progressive development emerge as problematic,
not least the central Australian case of reincarnation which makes worship of a
distinct category of divine figures difficult since we are all returning spirits. For
Frazer a separate domain of supernatural beings open for worship constitutes a
distinction marking the first important step in religious evolution (1913,
p. 115).
Fear of the dead
Frazer, very aware that beliefs are notoriously difficult to ascertain, favours an
emphasis upon ritual practice as generally a safer indication of their actual creed
than the loudest profession of faith and now focuses on explicit descriptions of
funerary rites amongst Australian Aborigines (1913, p. 143). These express the
general belief in a potentially dangerous ghost, with rites including leaving water
or fire near graves to comfort the dead. He is quick to evaluate behaviour in terms
of moral evolution and, in respect of grave goods for example, notes that the
economic waste which the belief in the immortality of the soul has entailed upon
the world is incalculable (1913, p. 149). It is on the fear of the dead and the
evolution of graves into sepulchers that Frazer focuses his developing argument.
Fear is exemplified through ethnographic examples of decapitation, the bunging
up the apertures of a corpse, or of fires that prevent the soul exiting and following
the burial party home (1913, p. 152). He interprets mourners self-mutilation as
an expression of fear, proving to the deceased that due honour has been paid to
their memory, adding the idea that shed blood may also strengthen the departing
spirit for its next incarnation.

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Ritually speaking, Frazer criticizes those who too easily assume that each tribe
has one uniform way of disposing of all its dead, noting how status differences or
modes of death may affect the choice of burial or cremation rites and, for emphasis,
he adds examples from India, California, and classical Greece (1913, pp. 162163,
397). Later, he documents Maori tree-burial and secret secondary burial of
renowned persons as well as cremation during warfare or sickness (1922, pp. 21
23). One significant theoretical point for death studies relates to double burial
when he notes that in his Golden Bough (second edition, 1900) he pondered the link
between the decaying body and the changing status of the soul, suggesting that only
when total decay had been achieved was the soul free for its next phase of existence:
he now adds further examples to reinforce that earlier conjecture. Though this
phenomenon was treated much more fully by Robert Hertz (1907/1960), Frazer
never mentions him or, for that matter, Durkheim or any of their sociological circle.
However, he applauds A. C. Haddons work through the Cambridge funded
Torres Straits Expedition of 1898, and draws from it further potential evidence for
the worship of the dead. This is reinforced by clearer evidence from New Guinea
that brings Frazer, now more certainly, to a detection of elements of a regular
worship of the dead (1913, p. 214).
Mobile souls
Pursuing the souls destiny he describes New Guinea contexts where souls are
thought to pass into animals (1913, p. 245), or where a human may possess two
souls, one transmigrating to the land of the dead and the other into an animal, or
one that always remains in the body during life and another that may periodically
leave it (1913, p. 292). He notes how the souls of the recent dead may appear in
their village area, especially at night, or are believed to be able to leave the body
during sleep and enter others who may then have strange dreams (1913, p. 412).
In some societies the living may have the ritual competence to take a journey in
their own spirit to deadland (1913, p. 301).
When presenting alien lives to his domestic readers Frazer argues for the
rational basis of savage life even though it may be quite different from our own
(1913, p. 266). This expression of his intellectualism opposes opinions of
primitive emotionalism or superstition lodged in theories of the illogical or
prelogical savage advocated by some. When rehearsing Melanesian cases of
voluntary death, where people are buried alive at their own request as when
fearing incapacity, he sees the logic of their situation (1913, pp. 422423). His
mention of cases where the situation of old people seeking a voluntary death by
strangulation or burial alive passes into a degree of compulsion because of
interested motives of the living kin is not without parallel in todays debates
over voluntary euthanasia (1913, p. 425).
More theoretically, he speculates on the symbolic link between the initiation of
boys into manhood and ideas of death, rebirth, and resurrection (e.g., 1913, pp.
255, 302, 435). That he sometimes employs resurrection in these contexts may
be due to his underlying and often negative engagement with Christian belief.

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Issues of terminology and classification are interesting in Frazers work when

compared with the preferences of later generations. So, for example, his
description of the deathrebirth process of initiatory rites as a drama, albeit
one whose essential ideas he knew that he did not understand, foretells later
theoretical concerns as in Victor Turner (Frazer, 1913, p. 303; Turner, 1974, pp.
3359). His treatment of mediums who travel in their dreams never entertains
the notion of shamans (1913, p. 300), though this mirrors the large absence of that
category in earlier British anthropology. Sometimes he employs comparisons in a
positive fashion, as when linking Melanesian initiation rites involving encounters
with the ancestors at stone enclosures with stone circles at Carnac and Stonehenge
(1913, p. 438).
As we have seen, Frazer constantly searches for contexts where the departed are
increasingly and explicitly worshipped. Accordingly the Papuans of Geelvink Bay
afford a key opportunity in their domestic wooden images of their dead that
serve as a medium by which the deceased communicates with . . . surviving
relatives (1913, p. 308). One brief passage offers a condensed example. He
begins with sketching a wide variety of death rites including mummification,
decapitation of dead infants and the incorporation of their skulls into newly
fashioned heads of wooden bodies, bathing and feasting after funerary rites,
collecting the teeth of the old and wearing them after their death, wearing locks of
a dead persons hair, hair-cutting or tattooing of mourners, and the use of spirit
houses for the souls of the dead. In these acts Frazer depicts the fear of the dead
evident through behaviour serving to reduce that fear or any negative effect of the
dead upon the living. What is quite absent in Frazer is any treatment of grief
approached psychologically or with an emphasis upon the personal state of the
mourner as such. Though the bereaved are often described as mourners any sense
of individual loss or adaptation to it is largely absent. His intent remains ever with
tracing the evolutionary development of ideas concerning the dead rather than the
psychology of grief. Even the final chapter of the three volumes that accounts for
grief as the relational nature of the link between the living and the dead and
describes how the frantic demonstrations of grief were intended, above all, to
please and propitiate the powerful ghost by showing him how deeply he was
mourned, leaves grief undiscussed (1924/1968, p. 286).
Frazer is more interested in the afterlife realm of the spirits than in the grief of
survivors. For New Caledonia he tells of a post-mortal realm of the spirits, a very
rich and beautiful country situated at the bottom of the sea reached after
appropriate torments by a guardian entity, the fisherman of souls. Souls live
there in a spirit-world day but pass its night back at their memorial wooden sticks
on their earthly graves when it is now day on earth (1913, pp. 326327). Caves for
the bodies of the dead, these charnel houses and mortuary chapels, have also,
he thinks, fed the imagination of the natives with weird notions of life after
death: they are places of sacrifices (1913, p. 332). Here there exists a real
worship of the dead, and . . . this worship is indeed the principal element in their
religion (1913, p. 338). The elements Frazer takes as constituting this real
religion are that the spirits of the dead possess a happy post-mortem land and yet

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are near at hand to help the living and that the living pray to them and propitiate
them in seeking help and benefit in this world. Whilst there are magical
elements caught up in the various practices, Frazer sees this as an evolutionary
stage of transition from magic to religion in which the dead play a major role. In
his later account of Tonga he notes how Herbert Spencer (1904, p. 249)
advocated the theory that temples are commonly, if not universally, derived from
tombs (1922, p. 100).
The imagination and creativity of primitives in response to death is part of
Frazers intellectualist perspective. Citing Codringtons influential volume The
Melanesians of 1891 he accounts for the role of memory in sustaining the spirits of
the recent dead but goes on to talk of the second death when, in fact, the living
forget the dead who, as it were, now finally die (1913, p. 351). Here he adds a
not unimportant note on beliefs that link ones moral life on earth with
experiences in the afterlife, seeing these as marking a considerable ethical
advance (1913, pp. 354355). Similarly, for the Gilbert Islanders, there is a very
considerable moral advance evident in the role of the great judge who allocates
afterlife places to souls according to their good or bad conduct during life
(1924/1968, p. 53). In his evolutionary thinking all is relative since Frazer prefers
an ethic focused on this present life, as amongst the Hebrew prophets and the
Tongans, than one grounded in afterlife rewards and punishments (1922, p. 147).
Ultimately, Frazer sees belief in immortality as an expensive luxury (1913, p.
469), for in seeking to avenge the dead and their spirit-ghosts the living have
wreaked havoc upon each other, even the religious wars and persecutions, which
distracted and devastated Europe for ages were only the civilized equivalents of
the battles and murders which the fear of ghosts has instigated amongst almost all
races of savages (1913, p. 468). Having said that, however, Frazer regroups
himself to end his first volume, for example, by returning to his mission as a
comparativist describing customs yet also offering a double picture, one in which
humanitys destiny lies beyond this life and the other that sees it as its own end
within this life. The savage testimony to the survival of the soul after death
yields these two views that Frazer presents to his audience thus: I leave you to
draw your own conclusions (1913, p. 471).
The belief in immortality is continued and the worship of the dead. This
emphasizes Frazers overall purpose to deploy his extensive accumulation of detail
to depict a quality of relationship between the living and the dead, especially those
powerful during their life, that might be described as worship. Though he notes
beliefs in various gods who belonged to a different class and who had not once
been human, it is these links with ancestors or departed spirits that preoccupy him,
especially in the third volume (e.g., 1924/1968, pp. 120124). Whilst his style and
manner is to leave final judgment to his audience his view on how ideas of all
deities emerged is clear: In the history of religion few things appear to be
commoner than the deification of men whose humble origin has in time been
forgotten by their worshippers (1924/1968, p. 62). It is no accident that he ends
his volumes, on Micronesia as it happens, with the assertion: accordingly we are
justified in concluding that the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead

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were fundamental features of the ancient Micronesian religion (1924/1968, p.

286). What is unwritten is the obvious wish to extrapolate from Micronesia to the
macro-religious domain of humanity at large.

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