Surviving Frazerisms: twenty-first century Witchcraft and the eternal return

James Frazer's The Golden Bough has been an enduring presence for contemporary magical-religious witches and Wiccans in Britain and across the world. Its influence on the intellectual and artistic landscape of the early twentieth century that inspired new witchcraft traditions was substantial, and seemed to provide evidence of ancestral continuity with prehistoric European fertility cults. Now considered outdated as a scholarly text, Frazer rarely makes an explicit appearance in Wiccan texts and rituals. However, surviving Frazerisms remain vivid, as a compendium of folkloric sources, and as a poetic history offering experiential insights through ritual and magicality. It offers a valuable illustration of how the past is navigated according to agendas in the present, measured against shifting criteria for what counts as “witchcraft” as well as “history.”