The Golden Bough

The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion is a wide-ranging, comparative study of mythology and religion , written by Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941). It first was published in two volumes in 1890; the third edition, published 1906–15, comprised twelve volumes. It was aimed at a broad literate audience raised on tales as told in such publications as Thomas Bulfinch's The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes (1855). It offered a modernist approach to discussing religion, treating it dispassionately  as a cultural phenomenon rather than from a theological perspective. The impact of The Golden Bough on contemporary European literature was substantial.

Ch. 4: Magic and Religion
Paragraphs:
 * 1) Magic, like science postulates the order and uniformity of nature; hence the attraction both of magic and of science.
 * 2) Tha fatal flaw of magic lies not in its general assumption of the uniformity of nature, but in its misapprehension of the particular laws which govern the sequence of natural events.
 * 3) Relation of magic to religion. Religion defined: It is a propitiation or conciliation of superhuman powers which are believed to control nature and man. Thus religion comprises two elements, a theoretical and a practical, or faith and works, and it does not exist without both. But religious practice need not consist in ritual; it may consist in ethical conduct, if that is believed to be well-pleasing to the deity.
 * 4) By assuming the order of nature to be elastic or variable religion is oposed in prionciple alike to magic and to science, both of which assume the order of nature to be rigid and invariable.
 * 5) Hostility of religion to magic in history.
 * 6) This hostility comparatively late: at an earlier time magic operated, and was partly confused, with religion.
 * 7) Same argument, India.
 * 8) Same argumetn, modern Europe.Mass of Holy Spirit, Mass of Saint Secaire.
 * 9) The early confusion of magic with religion was probably preceded by a still earlier phase of thought, when magic existed without religion.
 * 10) Among the Australian Aborigines magic in universal, but religion almost unkown.
 * 11) Magic is probably older than religion, and faith in it is still universal among the ignorant and superstitious.
 * 12) Latent superstition a danger to civilisation.
 * 13) The change from magic to religion may have been brought about by the discovery of the inefficacy of magic.
 * 14) Recognising their own inability to control nature, men came to that is was controled by supernatural beings.
 * 15) Tha change from magic to religion must have been gradual.
 * 16) The fallacy of magic is not easy to detect, because nature generally produces, sooner or later, the effects which the magician fancies he produces by his art.