Social Question
What are you reading these days? (Part ?)
The question is self explanatory, you don’t have to read below to answer it. But I would like you to expound a bit on what you’re reading; your interest in the subject or author, your opinion of the work. whether or not it has had any discernable effect on your day…
I ask this same question every once in awhile. It gives me ideas for my own reading and I’m curious what other people read. It sometimes gives clues to their interests, how they see things, and why they see things the way they do. Sometimes, not always.
As for me, I’ve been reading about ancient Mayans, the culture, the theogony, cosmogony, what we’ve been able to surmise about their society and daily lives, from what they left behind.
In the study of the house I’m staying in, I recently noticed a large, old hardback, “The Golden Bough,” by social anthropologist James George Frazer. It’s a huge compendium of mythologies and comparative religion going back to Sumeria. Back about 1900, it was a groundbreaking work and found on the shelves of the intelligentsia from the late Victorian era through the inter-war years, next to other innovators like Freud and Einstein.
Many writers of the time such as T. S. Elliott, William Carlos Williams, Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, Aleister Crowley, Ezra Pound, William Gaddis, Mary Renault, Joseph Campbell, Roger Zelazny, Naomi Mitchison (in her The Corn King and the Spring Queen), and Camille Paglia, are some of the authors whose work shows the deep influence of The Golden Bough.
Frazer isn’t as important as he once was, but he was first to cover all the various gods, creation myths, and their relationship to the predominant Judeo-Christian myth, and made our own mythology seem quite vanilla in comparison. This Scottish Cambridge don showed us a different way of examining our past through more modern realism. Bloody pornographic at times.
His gods didn’t leave their game at home. Frazer informed us that they were just like us in our jealousies, sexual experiences and experimentation, and lust and loves. Many were literally messin’ with the man.
Frazer took a lot of shit for treating Christianity with the dispassion of a scientist and had to remove the parts on Genesis and the Crucifixion in later editions. Sadly, this is the 1922 abridged edition, with all the Christian stuff relegated to sparse notes in an appendix in the back.
Feel free to expound on your current reading as well. The question is in social, so let it fly.
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