The theory here assumed grossly defies the elementary laws of logic, for every act of ritual must essentially have been preceded by a thought: Act is the outcome and offspring of Thought: Idea was never the idiot-child of Act. The assumption that the first idea of God evolved from the personation of the Sun God in a mystery play or harvest dance is not really or fundamentally a mental tracking of that God right home, but rather an inane confession that the idea of God cannot be traced further backward than the ritual of ancient festivals.
Speaking of that extremely remote epoch when the twilight and mists of morning shed dim-looming shapes and flickering half lights about the path of our scarcely awakened race, _The Athenæum_ a year or two ago remarked: "No wonder that to such purblind eyes men appear as trees, and trees as men--Balder the Beautiful as the mystic oak, and the oak as Balder". This passage forms part of a congratulation that the work of Sir James Frazer is now complete, and that _The Golden Bough_ "has at length carried us forward into broad daylight".
I have studied the works of Sir James Frazer in the hope of finding therein some insight as to the origin and why of custom, but I have failed to perceive the broad daylight of _The Athenæum's_ satisfaction.
One might lay down _The Golden Bough_ without a suspicion that our purblind ancestors ever had a poetic thought or a high and beautiful ideal, and it is probable that scholarship will eventually arraign Sir James Frazer for this _suggestio falsi_. In the meanwhile it should hardly be necessary to enter a _caveat_ against the popular idea that we are now "in broad daylight". The value of _The Golden Bough_ lies largely in the evidence therein adduced of what may be termed universal ritual. But all ritual must have originated from ideas, and these original ideas do not seem to have entered the horizon of Sir James Frazer's speculations. What reason does he suppose lurked necessarily behind, say, the sacred fire being kindled from _three_ nests in _three_ trees, or by _nine_ men from _nine_ different kinds of wood? And why do the unpleasant Ainos scrupulously kill their sacred bear by _nine_ men pressing its head against a pole?