2014年6月24日 星期二

JG Frazer's The Golden Bough.金枝


 
70年代末 我在英國買本Golden Bough 一直都沒讀 直到去年才寫一篇開頭的一段之簡介:JG Frazer's The Golden Bough.金枝

今天讀你轉貼的書山有路:許地山的藏書及其宗教研究---李焯然
寫些notes 給貴寶地:
Ken 這篇文章很有意思  不過有些地方說得不夠清楚 我在網路上找些資料
我印象最深刻的是許地山先生藏書有這本
Psyche’s Task: A Discourse Concerning the Influence of Superstition on the Growth of Institutions
此書十餘年前讀晚年的海耶克作品說: 恨不得大量全文引進此書來…..
臺灣大學圖書館有此書

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 Golden Bough In Virgil's Aeneid, book 6, Aeneas is told by the Cumaean Sibyl that he must find and pluck a ‘golden bough’ for Proserpine before he can enter the Underworld. This idea seems to be an invention of Virgil's own; Servius, the fourth-century commentator on Virgil, associated it with the cult of the goddess Diana at Aricia, where there was a sacred tree from which a branch had first to be broken off by the runaway slave who wished to kill the priest and take his place. This legend of ritual killing can be paralleled in other societies, and from this starting-point Sir James Frazer developed his great work on the evolution of religious beliefs and institutions, the Golden Bough (1890–1915).


今晚YouTube推薦我看BBC這片:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bhuDH25_Po
Caligula with Mary Beard HD
Published on Aug 2, 2013
Two thousand years ago one of history's most notorious individuals was born. Professor Mary Beard embarks on an investigative journey to explore the life and times of Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus - better known to us as Caligula.
Caligula has now become known as Rome's most capricious tyrant, and the stories told about him are some of the most extraordinary told about any Roman emperor. He was said to have made his horse a consul, proclaimed himself a living God, and indulged in scandalous orgies - even with his own three sisters - and that's before you mention building vast bridges across land and sea, prostituting senators' wives and killing half the Roman elite seemingly on a whim. All that in just four short years in power before a violent and speedy assassination in a back alley of his own palace at just 29-years-old.

令我大開眼界的倒是:所謂Diana之鏡的勝地/聖地.....



 (1930 年代) Golden Bough 12部中一部有漢譯:
交感巫術的心理學》弗蘭柔原著、李安宅譯述、許地山校訂,中華民國二十年五月初版。首頁「交感巫術底兩個原理:相似律與接觸律」以後版本(19342) 可能改為《交感巫術1988年上海文藝出版社有影印本
周作人所有的只是一卷的節本,他自己也說這十二冊的大書我卻終於沒有《金枝上的葉子》1935

下文比較有出處說明
http://forum.book.sina.com.cn/thread-1898708-1-1.html
在中國現代學人中最早提起植物繁衍與人間性關係之間聯繫的的人乃是周作人,他先前在《狗抓地毯》一文中率先引用著名人類學家茀來則博士之名著《金枝》的觀點說:野蠻人覺得植物的生育的手續,與人類的相同,所以相信用了性行為的儀式,可以促進 稻麥果實的繁衍(《語絲》第3期,1924121,後收入《雨天的書》)。周作人十分欣賞《金枝》一書,稍後又介紹說:這部比較宗教的大著在 1890年出版,當初只有兩本,二十年後增廣至八卷二十冊,其影響之大確如《泰晤士報》所說,當超過十九世紀的任何書,只有達爾文斯賓塞二人可以除外(《夜讀抄;金枝上的葉子;》)。
到晚年周作人還說:於我最有影響的還是那《金枝》的有名的著者茀來則博士 J·G·Frazer)。社會人類學是專研究禮教習俗這一類的學問,據他說研究有兩方面,其一是野蠻人的風俗思想,其二是文明國的民俗,蓋現代文明國的 民俗大都即是古代蠻風之遺留,也即是現今野蠻風俗的變相……有些我們平常不可解的神聖或猥褻的事項,經那麼一說明,神秘的面幕倏爾落下,我們懂得了時候不 禁微笑……”(《知堂回想錄·拾遺》)。








The Golden Bough 金枝 有不甚可觀的譯本


 Golden Bough In Virgil's Aeneid, book 6, Aeneas is told by the Cumaean Sibyl that he must find and pluck a ‘golden bough’ for Proserpine before he can enter the Underworld. This idea seems to be an invention of Virgil's own; Servius, the fourth-century commentator on Virgil, associated it with the cult of the goddess Diana at Aricia, where there was a sacred tree from which a branch had first to be broken off by the runaway slave who wished to kill the priest and take his place. This legend of ritual killing can be paralleled in other societies, and from this starting-point Sir James Frazer developed his great work on the evolution of religious beliefs and institutions, the Golden Bough (1890–1915).

 12部中一部有漢譯

交感巫術的心理學》弗蘭柔原著、李安宅譯述、許地山校訂,中華民國二十年五月初版。首頁「交感巫術底兩個原理:相似律與接觸律」以後版本(如1934第2版) 可能改為交感巫術》1988年上海文藝出版社有影印本

Modern myths

From TS Eliot to Apocalypse Now, 20th-century culture is in thrall to JG Frazer's The Golden Bough. But that book might not have existed without Turner's inspiration, says Jonathan Jones
    Turner's The Golden Bough
    Inspiring view ... Turner's mythological landscape of 1834, The Golden Bough. Reproduction courtesy of Tate Britain
    A uniform hangs in the shadows inside the ruined temple, the name printed on it KURTZ. Water drips from somewhere, a voice recites TS Eliot, books lie in bronze light and you notice that this jungle library includes The Golden Bough. Of course it does. It's a book to read at the end of the river.
    First published in 1890 by the Scottish anthropologist JG Frazer, The Golden Bough has had a more powerful influence on modern literature and cinema than Freud or Marx. A vast essay on comparative religion, it traced the roots of Christianity in folklore, of science in magic, and did so with the vulgarity of a bestseller. To know that Kurtz, in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, is a reader of The Golden Bough is to see him as a priest-king whom Martin Sheen's assassin must ritually slaughter, himself to become the new King of the Wood.
    The chief literary source for Apocalypse Now is Eliot, whose 1925 poem "The Hollow Men" Marlon Brando recites for Dennis Hopper:
    "We are the hollow men
    We are the stuffed men
    Leaning together
    Headpiece stuffed with straw. Alas!"
    Three years earlier, Eliot had acknowledged his debt to Frazer in "The Waste Land", writing of a "work of anthropology ... which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough". Eliot's generation - the modernists - were all victims, survivors or fortunately distant witnesses of the mass sacrificial slaughter of European youth of the first world war. And there is a startling image in The Golden Bough that casts new light on the war's resonance for this generation.
    In his central discussion of the ancient near-eastern deity Tammuz, worshipped by the Greeks as Adonis, a corn god ritually mourned on his descent into death each year just as the corn "dies" and is reborn annually, and whose blood stains the ground, Frazer mentions the eerie appearance of the landscape after a terrible European conflict: "In the summer after the battle of Landen, the most sanguinary battle of the 17th century in Europe, the earth, saturated with the blood of 20,000 slain, broke forth into millions of poppies, and the traveller who passed that vast sheet of scarlet might well fancy that the earth had indeed given up her dead."
    Frazer makes you see in the poppies of Remembrance Sunday an image of nature bleeding. Over his book hangs a deep pessimism about history. "If mankind had always been logical and wise," he comments, "history would not be a long chronicle of folly and crime." That sentence is key. Frazer sees human thought as capable of leading itself, through the false logic of magic and religion, to devastating cruelties.
    Frazer begins his anthropological study looking at a single work of art. "Who does not know Turner's picture of the Golden Bough?" he asks in the first chapter. "The scene, suffused with the golden glow of imagination in which the divine mind of Turner steeped and transfigured even the fairest natural landscape, is a dream-like vision of the little woodland grove of Nemi - 'Diana's Mirror', as it was called by the ancients ... "
    In fact, Turner's 1834 painting The Golden Bough, owned by Tate Britain, depicts Lake Avernus in Campania, with the Cumaean Sibyl, but no matter. Turner did also depict Lake Nemi, beside which in ancient times stood a sanctuary of the goddess Diana Nemorensis, Diana of the Wood; votive offerings left there can be seen today in the British Museum. The shrine, explains Frazer, was next to a sacred grove. And it's what took place inside the grove that concerns him.
    Why does he invoke Turner? To answer this question is to discover the true nature of Frazer's book, The Golden Bough's golden bough.
    Frazer started his book in the 1880s; Turner had died in 1851. Over the course of the book's successive editions (published in two volumes in 1890, it was expanded to 12 volumes by 1915, and condensed to a mere 714 pages in the author's own abridged version of 1922), the very identity of Turner as an artist changed. In his lifetime Turner had been controversial; people were constantly disparaging his "mustard" yellows and "harsh" light. He was famous as a painter of myth and history: a perspective on Turner of which we've almost lost sight. In 1905, the Tate Gallery exhibited a selection of some of the works left by Turner to the nation that had previously been considered unfinished; in the light of Monet it suddenly looked as if Turner had secretly invented impressionism, yet been unable to make this public in the culture of Victorian England.
    Frazer was a Victorian and his view of Turner predates the modern preference for form over content. For him, Turner is a painter of stories set in landscapes: a grandiose mythologist. Visit the Clore galleries at Tate Britain and you see Frazer's Turner in paintings whose very titles, such as Apollo and Python, or The Goddess of Discord Choosing the Apple of Contention in the Garden of the Hesperides, are relics of a classical culture we've almost lost.
    Gods and monsters populate Turner's art, and for his first audience, his great achievement was to visualise, in a modern, disturbing way, the ancient myths. In the greatest of all his mythological paintings, Ulysses deriding Polyphemus - Homer's Odyssey (1829) in the National Gallery, the ship representing intelligent, rational human aspiration sails away from the towering, formless mountains where the vague, shapeless giant Polyphemus rages in the clouds. Yet the sea is an unhealthy, fiery colour - the location of this adventure was said to be the Sicilian coast below volcanic Mount Etna - and the sea itself might be about to erupt in fire, anticipating the vicissitudes, the deaths, yet to come.
    Turner is a doom-laden Romantic - he wrote an epic poem he called "The Fallacies of Hope" - and his vision of Greek myth is darkling. In his painting of Jason, the tiny hero faces a dragon too immense to be depicted, that lurks in a dreadful, ruinous mountain cleft. In his painting of Apollo and Python, the hideous broken body of the snake is more impressive than the god who is associated with reason and order.
    In citing Turner at the very beginning of his book, Frazer might simply be announcing the kind of book it is. For Turner already had a history of inspiring baggy books. The biggest and most bonkers of all Victorian non-fiction tomes, John Ruskin's Modern Painters, takes Turner as a departing point for a rollicking journey through art history, aesthetics and even geology, much as The Golden Bough spins off a Turner painting into diffuse realms of folklore. Nor was Ruskin's the only big book inspired by Turner's big art. As if the sublime scale of his imagination were infectious, he fascinated Herman Melville. One of his paintings of whaling ships inspired the mysterious image that hangs on the wall at the Spouter Inn in Moby-Dick.
    Just as Ruskin and Melville had found something they needed in Turner, so did Frazer. In late-Victorian Britain, the avant garde in art was "symbolism", the movement across Europe that looked beneath appearances, to the inward self. Classical mythology was seen in a new way by symbolist artists. In France, the painter Gustave Moreau imagined the world of Greek myth as a melting, pustulating psychic domain of febrile desire. If this shocking modernity is visible in Moreau it is still more explicit in Gustav Klimt's Pallas Athene (1898), a castrating goddess painted in Sigmund Freud's Vienna.
    British artists not only participated in this movement - they got there first. As early as 1874, Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted Jane Morris, with those mythic lips, as Proserpine, the girl sentenced to spend part of the year in the Underworld and claimed by Frazer as yet another manifestation of the annually dying nature god. And just as Rossetti feasted on the twilight of myth, so does Frazer.
    Frazer begins with art because he is an artist. The Golden Bough may be disguised as a sombre work of science but in reality it is a vast prose poem, whose images were to shape 20th-century culture. Frazer's images - of trees, fire, mannequins and slaughtered gods - hang above his pages. He begins with Turner in order to paint a landscape of his own: in deliberate contrast to the golden glowing Italian scene he remembers in Turner's painting The Golden Bough, he paints a grove of darkness:
    "In antiquity this sylvan landscape was the scene of a strange and recurring tragedy ... In this sacred grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day, and probably far into the night, a grim figure might be seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he kept peering warily about him as if at any instant expected to be set upon by an enemy. He was a priest and a murderer ... "
    Frazer is an astonishing figure who connects our own culture with that of late-Victorian England. Transcribing his words I can hear the Doors' deceptively gentle guitar in the soundtrack to Apocalypse Now. The lesson of his debt to Turner is a fundamental one about the "soft" sciences, as physicists and biologists dismiss the human sciences - anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis - invented in the late-19th century. The lesson, and this is what gives Frazer's book its enduring value, is that they really are soft. Frazer doesn't pretend to be a scientist delivering data; he makes it explicit from his first sentence that he is a human being who lives inside, not outside, culture. This is why, before leading us into the forest where culture begins, he reminds us that somehow humanity's path leads to the divine Turner.

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