James George Frazer

James George Frazer was a Cambridge classicist who spent his life in the library and never met a savage, and whose Golden Bough, two volumes in 1890 and twelve by 1915, gathered the myths, rites and customs of the world to explain why the priest of Diana at Nemi had to kill his predecessor. Magic gives way to religion and religion to science, and the dying god who is killed and reborn is everywhere. Anthropologists abandoned the method; Eliot took The Waste Land from it, and Freud, Yeats, Joyce and Wittgenstein all read it. The Great Books set added the abridgement in 1990.