sententia

In this series

1. Breaking the Golden Bough
2. The Myth of Elune
3. The Rituals of Elune
4. The Nature of Elune

Let it never be said that one can’t have any fun when studying religion.

I was going through my files this afternoon, and found a paper I wrote for a course I took on methodology in the study of religion. In this paper, I pretended that I was Sir James George Frazer, author of The Golden Bough, analyzing the religion of the Night Elves of from Blizzard’s World of Warcraft. It was a lot of fun… if only because it’s something that I could totally see Frazer doing.

The Golden Bough

Frazer’s The Golden Bough is one of those books that everyone seems to love for it’s fascinating discussion of the relationship between religion and magic — that is, it’s one of those books that everyone except religious studies scholars seems to love. Why aren’t religious studies scholars fans? Well, for one thing, it’s old, and scholarship has changed a lot in the past 100 years. There a lot of things that were believed at the beginning of last century that are no longer believed now.

But even more than that, Frazer’s book represents bad scholarship. He often made evidence say what he wanted it to say, rather than letting it speak for itself. And his sources were questionable — he often took fictional material and used it to prove his point, as if it represented fact.

When I say that I wrote a chapter on Night Elf religion as if I were Frazer, I mean it. Frazer used things that were just as fictional to support his theories on religion — and he was dead serious about treating them as if they were fact! He was also quite demeaning toward religion (which is probably why he remains so popular), and was really quite over-confident in “modern” man, especially when compared to the “primitive savage” of times past.

So I wouldn’t exactly recommend that one read The Golden Bough if they wanted something that has scholarly credentials. But it is kinda fun.

The “Real” Elune?

And it was also fun to analyse Night Elf religion as if it were real. Given the closely intertwined relationship between religion and magic in the Warcraft universe, it seemed appropriate that someone like Frazer would show interest in the myths and legends developed by Blizzard for their games, novels and comics.

The paper I wrote consists of a “lost chapter” from The Golden Bough, in which Frazer discusses the Night-Elf goddess Elune. In writing it, I tried to stay true to the style and voice of Frazer, as seen in his early 20th century works — his 1922 abridgement of The Golden Bough, and especially the unabridged Adonis, Attis and Osiris from his 3rd edition of The Golden Bough. The language is a bit stilted and antiquated, but hopefully, good for a laugh if nothing else.

Wherein I Become Frazer

So, have I piqued your interest yet? The next posts in this series will be my pseudo-Frazarian analysis of the Night Elf (Kaldorei) religion. Here are some things to watch for…

In terms of content, my “lost chapter” of the Golden Bough closely follows Frazer’s analysis in Adonis, Attis and Osiris of the nature of divine figures as both tree- and corn-spirits. The structure of the “lost chapter” mirrors that of the chapter on Osiris, in which Frazer devotes nearly the same amount of time to detailing the myths and rituals of Osiris as he does to a discussion of their importance. For Frazer, understanding the myths and rituals was key to understanding the true nature of Osiris.

Frazer’s interest in distinguishing between official and popular (or folk) religion is drawn upon in the section discussing rituals.  It’s important to remember that one of Frazer’s key assumptions was that, in antiquity, “Homoeopathic magic [ie., ancient religious beliefs] commits the mistake of assuming that things which resemble each other are the same: contagious magic commits the mistake of assuming that things which have once been in contact with each other are always in contact”. In other words, Frazer bases his writing on an assumption that myths are believed literally, ritual re-enactments depict history, and that religion never changes how it understands the connections between things.

If you want to do a bit of pre-reading, here’s a free (online) version of The Golden Bough. It’s interesting stuff, if not necessarily all that accepted in scholarly communities any more.

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