Oddcast episode

November 12, 2025

Jason Ānanda Josephson-Storm on James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, and Western Esotericism

While James George Frazer (1854-1941), author of The Golden Bough, is widely credited as one of the great voices in the modern debunking of ‘magic’ and of magic’s distinction from ‘religion’ and ‘science’ as autonomous categories, the truth is actually quite different and much, much more interesting. In a discussion with with Jason Josephson-Storm we explore the evolutions in Frazer’s thought over the course of his long writing career (in which The Golden Bough evolved, over three editions, through a number of mutually-unrecognisable mutations), the huge influence his work had on culture in general and on modern western esotericism in particular, and we ask the question whether Frazer can be read in some sense not merely as an influence on modern Occultism, but as a proponent of an occultist worldview in his own right.

Interview Bio:

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is a historian and philosopher of the Human Sciences. He is currently Professor of Religion and Chair of Science & Technology Studies at Williams College. Storm received his Ph.D. from Stanford University, his MA from Harvard University, and has held visiting positions at Princeton University, École Française d’Extrême-Orient, and Universität Leipzig in Germany. He is the author of award-winning The Invention of Religion in Japan (2012), The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity and the Birth of the Human Sciences (2017), as well as Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (2021), all published by University of Chicago Press. A fourth monograph, The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, & the Coils of Critical History is forthcoming from Chicago in April 2026.

Works Cited in this Episode:

The Golden Bough:

Frazer, James George (1890). The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion. 1st ed. 2 vols. New York, NY/London: Macmillan & Co.

— (1900). The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. 2nd ed. 3 vols. New York, NY/London: Macmillan & Co.

— (1906–1915). The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. 3rd ed. 12 vols. New York, NY/London: Macmillan & Co.

Other Citations

Aster, Ari, dir. (2019). Midsommar.

Budin, Stephanie Lynn and Caroline J. Tully, eds. (2024). A Century of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough: Shaking the Tree, Breaking the Bough. London: Routledge.

Crowley, Aleister (1903). The God-Eater: a Tragedy of Satire. London: Watts & Co.

— (1976). Magick in Theory and Practice. New York, NY: Dover.

The Doors song referenced is Not to Touch the Earth, off Waiting for the Sun (Elektra, 1968). Wikipedia tells the Frazerian story of the track.  Cf. e.g. God of the Grain by Amebix off the album Sonic Mass (Easy Action / Amebix Records, 2011), and probably a million other songs.

Downie, R. Angus (1940). James George Frazer: The Portrait of a Scholar. London: Watts & Co.

Frazer, James George:

•  ed. and trans. (1898). Pausanias’ Description of Greece. 6 vols. London: Macmillan & Co.
• (1926). The Worship of Nature. London: Macmillan & Co.
• for Frazer’s essay ‘The Devil’s Advocate: A Plea for Superstition’, see Frazer (1913) Psyche’s Task. 2nd. London: Macmillan & Co.

Freud, Sigmund (1919). Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics … Trans. by James Strachey. London: Routledge.

Graves, Robert (1948). The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. Faber & Faber.

Jevons, Frank Byron (1896). An Introduction to the History of Religion. London: Methuen.

Josephson-Storm, Jason A. (2017). The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Klein, T. E. D. (1984). The Ceremonies. Bantam.

H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu, first published Weird Tales, Feb. 1928. The passage in question: ‘The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of press cuttings, in Professor Angell’s most recent hand; and made no pretence to literary style. What seemed to be the main document was headed “CTHULHU CULT” in characters painstakingly printed to avoid the erroneous reading of a word so unheard-of. The manuscript was divided into two sections, the first of which was headed “1925—Dream and Dream Work of H. A. Wilcox, 7 Thomas St., Providence, R.I.”, and the second, “Narrative of Inspector John R. Legrasse, 121 Bienville St., New Orleans, La., at 1908 A. A. S. Mtg.—Notes on Same, & Prof. Webb’s Acct.” The other manuscript papers were all brief notes, some of them accounts of the queer dreams of different persons, some of them citations from theosophical books and magazines (notably W. Scott-Elliot’s Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria), and the rest comments on long-surviving secret societies and hidden cults, with references to passages in such mythological and anthropological source-books as Frazer’s Golden Bough and Miss Murray’s Witch-Cult in Western Europe. The cuttings largely alluded to outré mental illnesses and outbreaks of group folly or mania in the spring of 1925.’

Mannhardt, Wilhelm (1875–1877). Wald- und Feldcult. Antike Wald- und Feldkulte aus nordeuropäischer Überlieferung erläutert. Berlin: Gebrüder Bornträger.

Spengler, Oswald (1918). Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Gestalt und Werklichkeit. München: C.H. Beck.

Strauss, David Friedrich (1835). Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet. Tübingen: C. V. Oslander [English translation idem. (1846). The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. Trans. by George Eliot. London: Swann Sonnenschein].

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (2018). The Mythology in Our Language: Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough. Ed. by Giovanni da Col and Stephan Palmié. Trans. by Stephan Palmié. Chicago, IL: Hau Books.

Themes

Aleister Crowley, Fairies, Friedrich Schiller, James George Frazer, James Joyce, Magic, Max Müller, Max Weber, Modernism, Natural Magic, Neo-Paganism, Occultism, Sigmund Freud, T.S. Eliot, Wicca