Yes, that’s something I can certainly see in my own early writing – particularly some of my early “shamanic” pieces. Now that I think of it, you could say that Frazer had a big hand in the “pick ‘n’ mix” approach to mining “magical traditions” which is nowadays primarily associated with Chaos Magic. I’ve kind of softened on my earlier antipathy to cross-cultural analyses of late, as I’ve shifted away from a “hardcore” social constructivist perspective, and I’ll be returning to the wider question of comparativism in due course. What I did find interesting is that although a lot of people who draw on, or seem to uncritically accept that kind of “join-the-dots-to-arrive-at-the-truth” approach are less open to partiality than Frazer himself was. it brings to mind the “Liber 777″ approach to correspondences (and other things). I should have mentioned, I suppose, that Frazer was a major influence on the Perennialist school of thought, which of course had a huge influence on contemporary occulture. Possibly one for another time.

I’ve never drawn on Frazer much. The abridged copy of The Golden Bough has always sat on my shelves almost as a totemic item for a pagan-oriented writer. But I’ve definitely been drawn to similar works, and shared that attitude in research.

One take I have on the cultural moment that Frazer occupied is that (among other things) it often looks to me like the winding down of the period when a highly intelligent and industrious person could get a reasonable grasp on the entirety of their culture’s learning. I guess the period when one person could actually read all the books in their culture ended much earlier, before the Renaissance maybe. But we’re all aware of these stupendous late 19th century works that try to do a “global synthesis”. Of course, it was Imperial confidence as much as a broad scholarly knowledge that allowed such sweeping views—and as we know now, the entirety of that culture’s learning had vast gaps and distortions. But I think this is one element of the appeal of Frazer. It’s not just “don’t confused me with new ideas”, it’s also: “I know there’s some problems with this, but ah for the days when you could hope to comprehend ‘the world’…”

I also think, looking at how my own learning has unfolded, that the “Frazerian” approach of taking a bit from here, and bit from there, and forming a “theory” or bolstering an “identity”, is a valid phase. Like many people I received next to zero context for spirituality or religion in my upbringing (not even the negative context of considered atheism). When you break from your upbringing and are confronted with this crazy mass of information about spirituality through the ages—often via the lens of troubling spontaneous experiences—it’s a healthy thing to have a bash at making your own sense of it all. Of course, the image you construct fragments over time as you learn more complexities to reality—but that synthesis is a good “initiation”, to find your feet. (Though of course, you need to come out the other side of any initiation, and leave it behind.) I guess the images that anthropology constructed as colonialism decayed had a similar initiatory role for our culture, as we grappled with the fact that “savages” are like us—and before we realized that they’re different, too, from us and each other.

Patrick Harpur is probably the most interesting exponent of the “synthesizing” approach today. When I interviewed him, I asked about this issue. I found it interesting that he feels it’s important to find the common structures across different traditions, even though he’s a confirmed supporter of “soul” as opposed to “spirit”. In James Hillman’s Neoplatonic terms, this means an interest in the multiplicity and mess of things as opposed to transcendent unifying viewpoints. You travel in the valleys as opposed to ascending the peaks. But there’s a strong element of “ascending the peaks” in the Frazer school of thought, taking a transcendent overview of human spiritual culture. Patrick admitted the contradiction, saying he thinks it’s also important to look for our “common humanity”. I guess this is a post-Frazer position, not saying “all savages are the same”, but “there are things that tie us all together”.

I’m suspicious of any kind of easy, insipid take on this, of course. But there seem to be two edges to the transcendent view. On the one hand, it can serve the aggressive globalizing ambitions of Empire, or the desire to avoid the complexities that Empire has created; on the other, as in some schools of Sufism, there’s a genuine and important impulse to find common spiritual ground across the species. I guess we need to watch out for the latter impulse getting tangled with the former.