The Mythology in Our Language

Front matter

Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough

Translated by Stephan Palmié, with a Preface by Giovanni da Col

Edited by Giovanni da Col and Stephan Palmié

CHAPTER 9 Remarks on Wittgensteins Remarks on Frazers Golden Bough

Ritual in the Practice of Life Michael Lambek

CHAPTER IO Explanation as a Kind of Magic Michael Taussig

CHAPTER II On an Anthropological Tone in Philosophy Sandra Laugier, translated by Daniela Ginsburg

APPENDIX Remarks on Wittgenstein and Ritual Rodney Needham

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein 1889-1951

Sir James George Frazer 1854-1941 viii THE MYTHOLOGY IN OUR LANGUAGE

CONTRIBUTORS

Stephan Palmié is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition (2002) and The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion (2013) as well as the editor of several volumes on Caribbean and Afro- Atlantic anthropology and history.

Giovanni da Col is Research Associate at SOAS, University of London and Founder and Editor of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory as well several volumes and collections on the anthropology of hospitality; luck and fortune; the anthropology of future; the history of anthropology; animism; and the spirit world in Tibet and Southwest China.

Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University and author of Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty and Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary.

Wendy James recently retired as Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford and is author of War and Survival in Sudan’s Frontierlands: Voices from the Blue Nile, The Ceremonial Animal: A New Portrait of Anthropology and The Listening Ebony: Moral Knowledge, Religion and Power among the Uduk of Sudan.

Heonik Kwon is professorial Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, and an AP] associate. The author of The Other Cold War, he co-authored North Korea: Beyond Charismatic Politics and is completing a book on intimate histories of the Korean War.

Michael Lambek is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. The author of The Ethical Condition: Essays on Action, Person, and Value, and The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar, he co-authored Four Lectures on Ethics: Anthropological Perspectives.

Sandra Laugier is Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris 1 Panthéon- Sorbonne and author of Etica e politica dell'ordinario, Recommencer la philosophie, and Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy.

THE MYTHOLOGY IN OUR LANGUAGE ix

Knut Christian Myhre is a researcher at the Department of Ethnography, Numismatics, Classical Archaeology and University History, University of Oslo. He is the author of Returning Life: Language, Life Force and History in Kilimanjaro and editor of Cutting and Connecting: Afrinesian’ Perspectives on Networks, Relationality, and Exchange.

Professor Rodney Needham (1923-2006) held the chair of social anthropology at Oxford University from 1976 to 1990 and was author of Mamboru, history and structure in a domain of Northwestern Sumba, Counterpoints, and Exemplars.

Michael Puett is the Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology at Harvard University. He is the author of The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China and To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China.

Michael Taussig is Professor of Anthropology at The European Graduate School and author of What Color is the Sacred?, Walter Benjamins Grave, and My

Cocaine Museum.

Carlo Severi is Directeur d’études at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He is author of L’Objet-Personne: Une anthropologie de la croyance visuelle, The Chimera Principle: An Anthropology of Memory and Imagination, and co-author of Naven, ou le donner a voir.

Chapter I

Translation is Not Explanation Remarks on the Intellectual History and Context of Wittgensteins Remarks on Frazer

STEPHAN PALMIE

The origins of Ludwig Wittgensteins “Bemerkungen über Frazer’s The Golden Bough” are as complex and unclear as its checkered editorial and translational history (see Orzechowski and Pichler’s [1995], Rothhaupt’s [2016], and Westergaard’s [2015] systematic assessments and critiques). The way Wittgenstein’s literary executor, Rush Rhees (in Wittgenstein 1967: 233) presents the matter, one year after Wittgenstein’s return to Cambridge in 1929, he expressed to his student Maurice O’Connor Drury an interest in reading James Frazer. As Rhees reports, Drury appears to have procured the first volume of the 1906-15 third edition (The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings I) and proceeded to read to his mentor from it for the course of one academic term, before the two abandoned their conversations. Despite Drury’s mention of the third (12 volume) edition, there is some agreement that Wittgenstein based his occasional lecture remarks during 1930-31 concerning Frazer as well as his notes on The Golden Bough on the 1922 abridged edition, which, perhaps not insignificantly, had been purged of most of its reference to Christianity that had caused such public furor upon publication of the second edition in 1900. Again, according to Rhees’s version, Wittgenstein commenced writing on Frazer for a few weeks in June 1931, eventually dictating the results as part of what became known as “Ihe Early Big Typescript,” but rearranging the materials repeatedly, and eventually dropping practically all of them in what eventually became the so-called “Big Typescript.”

As Rhees tells us, there was a second set of notes on The Golden Bough, jotted down on “odd bits of paper,” not “earlier than 1936 [when Wittgenstein acquired a personal copy of the 1922 abridged edition] and probably after 1948.” Elizabeth Anscombe discovered these after Wittgenstein’s death. Rhees eventually united the various sets of notes for the 1967 publication in the German journal Synthese, though he never gave a clear rationale for his editorial interventions, or for why significant segments of the resulting text were omitted from the eventual translation published in 1979. Based on Rhees’s original selection and arrangement for the 1967 Synthese publication, the following text is a complete English retranslation of Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazers Golden Bough.'

The following translator’s notes need to be prefaced by the disclaimer that I am neither a philosopher nor an intellectual historian, but an anthropologist. Hence the title of this contribution, which aims to gesture toward a set of problems peculiar to my discipline since at least the last decades of the twentieth century. Putting matters in Wittgensteinian terms, the question is this: Is it even possible to translate the language games constitutive of other forms of life into those we find ourselves immersed in? At what cost do we attempt to override their incommensurabilities? And what, for that matter, are the entailments of such attempts at translation? What are its politics, and what are its consequences for both the language of origin and target (Gal 2015)? Like me, Wittgenstein was a native German speaker working in an Anglophone environment. But even though English and German are closely related languages, he chose to think and write in the latter idiom. This fact may seem of trivial consequence at first glance. Surely, all of his work has long been available to Anglophone audiences, and has spawned a vast secondary literature in English. But taking Wittgenstein by his own word, to entertain such a view is to trivialize the

1. The numbering of Wittgenstein’s Notes in this new translation has been undertaken solely for ease of reference, and should decidedly 707 be seen as Wittgenstein’s own choice. Rhees’s Synthese publication features them in unnumbered succession, but does not make clear whether the order in which they are presented originated with Wittgenstein, or from Rhees himself. For an editorial procedure comparable to the one presented here, see G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright’s “Editor's Preface” in Wittgenstein (1981).

difference between the forms of life constitutive of—and recursively constituted by—specific language games, the mutual interintelligibility of which cannot be a foregone conclusion.

In his Remarks on Frazer, Wittgenstein opposed a now bygone tendency in my discipline to rationalize—according to metropolitan European standards of reason—what used to be called “ostensibly irrational beliefs” and practices in the non-Western world, or Europe’s own peasant periphery. What he opposed was the moment of “explanation” that aimed to reduce other forms of life and their associated language games to—perhaps historically explicable, but nonetheless erroneous—category mistakes. But, of course, Wittgenstein did so intuitively, neither being acquainted with the history of the discipline Frazer stood for, nor understanding the transformations it was undergoing all the while that he penned his Remarks.

While I hope that my new translation will be of use to practitioners of other disciplines, my brief in the following is thus to contextualize Wittgenstein’s foray—and his Remarks really are that just that: disjointed notes, never meant for publication—into a disciplinary domain that Frazer significantly helped to establish (not the least by giving Edward Tylor’s chair at Cambridge a new lease on life): Social Anthropology. Of course, by the time Wittgenstein read the abridged edition of Sir James’s crowning achievement, Frazer’s influence on anthropology (though not the British intelligentsia in a more general sense) was on the wane. It had been eclipsed by what Bronistaw Malinowski once self-aggrandizingly called “the events of 1910” (i.e., his own arrival in England) and I. C. Jarvie (1964) famously bemoaned as “the revolution in anthropology.”

As has often been noted, Frazer’s biographer Robert Ackerman began his— by no means unsympathetic—study of Frazer’s life and work with the following remarks:

Frazer is an embarrassment. The man who has had more readers and who was arguably a better writer than any anthropologist writing in English does not appear in any of the professional lineages that anthropologists acknowledge today. The reason for this is plain enough: he wrote vast, assured tomes about primitive religion and mythology without ever leaving the library. He based his comprehensive theories on the often crude and ethnocentric reports of explorers, missionaries, and traders. He lacked the idea of culture as the matrix, both conscious and unconscious, that gives meaning to social behavior and belief, and thus had no qualms about comparing terms of culture from the most disparate times and places. He was a hard-line rationalist who used ethnographic facts to try and knock the last nail in the coffin of religion in the name of objective science. If from time to time he achieved a kind of prophetic power, it is because he was the spokesman for an imperialist confidence that has now been swept away. It is no wonder that no one wants him for a professional ancestor. (Ackerman 1987: 1)

Parts of this assessment could be debated (Frazer certainly provided considerable inspiration to artists critical of “modernity” and may well be regarded as one of the unsung heroes of early twentieth-century modernist “primitivism,” cf. Lienhardt 1993). Yet the fact remains that Frazer has been summarily dismissed by practically all of his successors. Different from Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871), which retained its status as a foundational (though otherwise increasingly irrelevant) text for Anglophone anthropology, Frazers Golden Bough is now, at best, regarded as a footnote to a phase of the development of the discipline—and an unfortunate one at that. This phase came to an end with the emergence of genuinely fieldwork-based anthropological theorizing under W. H. R. Rivers, Alfred Cort Haddon, Arthur M. Hocart, Malinowski, and others in Great Britain, and with the vigorous attacks launched in the United States by Franz Boas against pseudo-evolutionary speculation from 1896 onward.

If Frazer had been the priest king of the “science of man” that Tylor inaugurated in the Victorian period, soon after Prince Edward assumed the throne, Frazer’s eventual successors had begun to prowl the sacred grove at Cambridge, swords in hands.” Though Malinowski (himself once a protégé of Frazer) paid tribute to him (Malinowski 1948) toward the end of both of their lives (Frazer predeceased Malinowski by a year in 1941), there was no question that the so-called “comparative method” against which Boas (1896) had begun to rail more than a generation earlier, and which formed the cornerstone of Frazer’s

2. Intriguingly, both Frazer and Wittgenstein were Fellows of Trinity College, and technically overlapped there for considerable amounts of time. However, Brian Clack (1999: 177n5) is surely right in arguing that the likelihood that they would ever have interacted is small. Josef Rothhaupt (2016: 76) notes the curious coincidence that Frazer presented his inaugural William Wyse lectures on “The Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religion” during the Michaelmas Term of 1932 and May Term of 1933 on the exact days and at the exact time of day that Wittgenstein was himself lecturing. The one exception was Frazer’s lecture on May 8, 1933, which Wittgenstein could have attended (and even though G. E. Moore’s lecture notes show that Wittgenstein had mentioned Frazer earlier, he did make reference to him in his own lecture on May 9, 1933).

enterprise, was no longer a subject of debate. By the 1930s, at the latest, it had become irrelevant to the ways in which Anglophone anthropology, on both sides ofthe Atlantic, conceived of its own tasks and future.

Frazer’s grand scheme of deriving universally valid developmental sequences from indiscriminate raids on uncontextualized ethnographica from across the globe now was perceived as the last—however grandiose—instantiation of a “method” that had driven comparative philology as it emerged from the eighteenth century onward, exerted its influence upon Charles Darwin and Lewis Henry Morgan, and received perverse reinforcement from Herbert Spencer’s misapplications of evolutionary theory to the social realm. It was the method that Adam Smith’s disciple Dugald Stewart had christened “conjectural history,” and in the face of a new definition of the discipline’s tasks it had not so much run into a dead end than become outright degoutant: as British anthropologists turned to structural functionalism and their American counterparts embarked on similarly synchronic forms of holistic analyses—thus transforming their predecessors’ searches for laws of social development into searches for laws of social organization and cultural coherence—Frazer’s (and Tylor’s) program for anthropology had been given a 90-degree shift.’

‘There is no shortage of autopsies of Frazer’s project (e.g., Evans-Pritchard [1933] 1973; 1965: 27-29; Leach 1961, 1966; Smith 1973; Beard 1992; Lienhardt 1993; Stocking 1995: 126-51). And even though Jarvie’s (1964) strictures against ethnographic particularism and cultural relativism reverberated through the “rationality debate” (conveniently summed up by Lukes [1982], if in a somewhat partisan spirit), with the significant exception of Mary Douglas (1978), it was not until the aftermath of the Writing Culture moment of the mid-1980s that scholars such as Marilyn Strathern (1987) or James Boon (1992) began to appreciate how Frazer’s emplotment of humanity’s differential “rise to civilization” recurred to narrative forms different in degree, but not so much kind, that were flourishing in the discipline of their day and age. Putting the matter bluntly, what had been the “persuasive fictions” (Strathern 1987) of anthropology in, say 1900, had stopped being persuasive by the 1930s. What is more, they had become unpalatable to the discipline as the kind of “just-so

3. As E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1962: 47) put it, “The functionalist critics of both evolutionists and diffusionists should have challenged them, not for writing history, but for writing bad history. As it was, they dropped the history and kept the pursuit of laws, which was often precisely what had made the history bad.”

stories” that had once seemed to underwrite the discipline’s social function in an age of (however anxious) Victorian liberal progressivism. By the 1980s, however, the affinities between Frazerian styles of exposition, and, say, the no less poetically driven self-referential accounts of the authors of Argonauts of the Western Pacific (Malinowski 1922), or Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande (Evans-Pritchard 1937) were rife for exploration and comparison. This, we should note, was not because a resurgence of idiographic inscriptivism—however “thick,” in Clifford Geertz’s (1973) sense—might have gotten the better of residual nomothetic impulses still lingering in anthropology. On the contrary, perhaps, it was because its last great attempt at positivistic universalism—Claude Lévi-Strauss’s positing of elementary structures of the human mind—had given way to a poststructuralist hermeneutics of suspicion to end all hermeneutics of suspicion.

Despite the overwhelming importance of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, this was a moment inspired, at least in some quarters (Needham [1972] being an anticipatory case in point), by Wittgenstein’s own thought—though inspired must surely be the key word here. However much Wittgenstein polemicized against scientism in his later years, and however much he may have been partisan to Oswald Spengler’s gloomy ruminations about Occidental Modernity as a civilization in decline: the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein 1922) can only be assimilated to “postmodern” epistemic sensibilities (in our discipline or elsewhere) by a considerable stretch of the imagination.* To be sure, Wittgenstein appears to go to considerable length in reprovincializing (Bauman and Briggs 2003) the universalistic pretensions of Frazer’s scholarship—such as when he charges that all that Frazer’s explanations achieve is to make exotic practices “plausible to people who think like him” in presenting “all these practices, in the end, so to speak, as foolishness” (#1) or based on “false physics, or as the case may be, false medicine, technology, etc.” (#15). Or when he accuses Frazer of a “narrowness of spiritual life” that precludes him from “grasping a life different from the English one of his time” and of imagining “a priest who is not basically an English parson of our times, with all his stupidity and shallowness” (#12). Or again, when he calls Frazer “far more savage than most of his savages, for these savages will not be as far removed from an understanding of spiritual matters as an Englishman of the twentieth century” (#19). But these vituperative attacks on Frazer’s often smug

4. See the contributions to Beale and Kidd (2017), in particular Coliva (2017).

ethnocentrism, or Wittgensteins disparagement of Frazer’s rationalization of magic and religion as bastard science as simply arising from “the stupid superstition of our time” (#13) hardly amount to a coherent argument.

Nor does Wittgenstein’s alighting on Frazer’s “tone”—we might say, poetics of exposition—present a sustained critique, such as when he writes that “Frazer begins by telling us the story of the King of the Woods at Nemi” so as to show “that something strange and terrible is happening here” (#2). Wittgenstein eventually does pursue this latter line of inquiry regarding the affective tenor of Frazer’s writing in the sections on the Beltane Fire Festival (a much later addition to the text). But, as we shall see, what Wittgenstein has in mind is not at all the kind of vicarious frisson Frazer’s reveling in bizarre exotica may well have produced among his contemporary late Victorian and Edwardian lay audiences (cf. Beard 1992; Lienhardt 1993).

A different matter is Wittgenstein’s dismissal of Frazer’s historicizing “exg 8

planations” of ostensibly obscure ritual practices “in the form of a hypothesis

concerning temporal development” (#20) as inadequate to what Wittgenstein va variously calls the “inner nature,” “spirit,” “depth,” or even “mystery” of such practices—and it gets us closer not only to Wittgensteins apparent concerns in the Remarks but also to a set of controversies within anthropology to which they have been often thought to speak. I refer here to the longstanding debate between proponents of what E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1965, 1973) called “intellectualist” approaches toward ritual, and those often labeled “symbolist.” The particulars of the theoretical divide marked by these terms—which found its most poignant expression in the “rationality debate” of the 1960s and 1970s (Wilson 1970; Hollis and Lukes 1982) in which a Wittgensteinian (Peter Winch) played a considerable role—are well known, and need not be rehearsed here at any length. Standing in the tradition of Tylor and Frazer, intellectualist approaches found their culmination with Robin Horton (e.g., 1967, 1982) contributions to a view of “African traditional thought” as a system of “explanation, prediction and control,” and John Skorupski’s (1976) summary defense of the broadly “theoretical” nature of the beliefs underlying ritual action, and their origin “out of a need to understand and control the natural environment” (Skorupski 1976: 9). It is this type of approach to ritual that appears to bear the brunt of Wittgenstein’s critique:

One could begin a book on anthropology in this way: when one observes the life and behavior of humans all over the earth, one sees that apart from the kinds of behavior, one could call animal, the intake of food, etcetera, etcetera, humans also carry out actions that bear a peculiar character, and might be called ritual actions. But then again it is nonsense to go on and say that the characteristic feature of these actions is that they spring from erroneous notions about the physics of things. (#15)

But surely, the “symbolist” alternative, harking back to William Robertson- Smith and Emile Durkheim and largely prevailing in twentieth-century British Social Anthropology, appears alien to Wittgenstein’s thinking as well. Characteristic of the tenor of the work of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Edmund Leach, Mary Douglas, John Beattie and others, one of the earlier statements of this position occurs in the Introduction to Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s collection African Political Systems:

Members of an African society feel their unity and perceive their common interest in symbols, and it is their attachment to these symbols which more than anything else gives their society cohesion and persistence. . . . To explain these symbols sociologically, they have to be translated into terms of social function and the social structure they serve to maintain. Africans have no objective knowledge of the forces determining their social organization and actuating their social behavior. Yet they would be unable to carry on their collective life if they could not think and feel about the interests which actuate them, the institutions by means of which they organize collective action, and the structure of the groups into which they are organized. (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940: 17-18)

Hence the importance of “sacred symbols, which reflect the social system, endow it with mystical values which evoke acceptance of the social order that goes far beyond the obedience exacted by the secular sanction of force” (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940: 17-18). This is so because the “African does not see beyond the symbols; it might well be held that if he understood their objective meaning, they would lose the power they have over him” (1940: 18). Ritual enacts these symbols, puts them into social circulation, so to say, and feeds them back into the collective order they serve to maintain, endowing it with experiential consistency. There is thus nothing right or wrong, truthful or mistaken, about ritual action (or the sets of beliefs associated with it), as long as we subscribe to the Durkheimian move to see “society” as both subject and object of religious behavior, and are willing to accept indigenous justification for such practices as secondary elaborations of systemic—and systemically necessary—forms of méconnaissance (a point Karl Marx would have appreciated).° But this clearly is not what Wittgenstein has in mind, either—unless one wanted to expand his elaborations on “language games” in the Philosophical Investigations and elsewhere, beyond the rather unclear sociological implications they or the notion of “forms of life” seem to carry. Is religion a language game among others? Is science? And are their “grammars” compatible, as the intellectualist tradition has held? Given how vague Wittgenstein remained on such matters, the exegetical pendulum has swung both ways.’ Still, even on Wittgensteins own view, a rigged game, once its rules are revealed to the disadvantaged player, simply turns into a different game, but remains a game nonetheless—and does not reveal the “real state of matters” (i.e., no game at all, whatever that might be taken to mean).’ “False physics” and “false social theory” may thus merely be two sides of the same coin, and though Wittgenstein never really seems to have bothered about the kind of anthropology bodying forth from Oxford during his lifetime, it is sufficiently clear that he might not have had much sympathy with it.*To be sure, there appears

5. Regarding Frazer’s assertion that “at a certain stage of early society the king or priest is often thought to be endowed with supernatural powers,” Wittgenstein notes (#33): “It is of course not the case that the people believe that the ruler has these powers while the ruler himself very well knows that he does not have them, or does not know so only if he is an idiot or fool. Rather, the notion of his powers is of course arranged in a way such that it corresponds with experience—his own and that of the people.”

6. Peter Winch (1958) certainly took that stance—two different, incompatible games—in helping to kick off the debate about whether bodies of scholarship concerned with the human condition could align themselves with the epistemic standards of the physical sciences. To put it in a nutshell, for Winch, “the idea of a social science” was deeply paradoxical.

7. Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics II, #77. Here Knut Christian Myhre (2006) provides an astute critique of the perennial anthropological temptation to “explain” ostensibly unverifiable truth claims on the part of our ethnographic interlocutors by translating the terms of statements about, for example, witchcraft or sorcery into the putatively “real” world of reference that we claim for ourselves (such as expressions of social tension that, while projected into the unverifiable mystical spheres, feed back into observable social realities—in the form of witchcraft accusations). Cf. Needham (2014: 549-54).

8. But see Philippe de Lara (2000), who makes a convincing case for Wittgenstein’s affinity with Evans-Pritchard’s (1937, 1970) struggles to ethnographically address to be some overlap between Wittgenstein’s thinking and the distinction between “instrumental” and “expressive” action, as it came to be elaborated in British Social Anthropology from Malinowski onward, and a good deal of Wittgenstein scholarship has focused on it (e.g., Cook 1983; de Zengotita 1989, but see also the critiques by Clack 1999 and de Lara 2000, 2003). But while Wittgenstein might have agreed with John Beattie (1964)—for example, that the distinction between these two modalities of ritual behavior had long been artificially overdrawn—he would nevertheless have insisted that an explanation of the persistence of magical practices regarded as goal-directed by the actors themselves should zor be sought in the “latent” functions (in Robert Merton’s sense) of such rituals:

The same savage who, apparently in order to kill his enemy, pierces an image of him, really builds his hut out of wood, and carves his arrows skillfully and not in effigy. (#10)

‘Thus, instrumental orientations in magical behavior are not to be confused with inadequate knowledge of natural phenomena:

Frazer says it is very hard to discover the error in magic—and this is why it persists for so long—because, for example, a conjuration intended to bring rain will sooner or later appear as effective. But then it is strange that, after all, the people would not hit upon the fact that it will rain sooner or later anyway. (#2, cf. #31)

Although A. J. Ayer (1986) dealt a blow to this argument by suggesting that if rain ceremonies were to be performed faithfully before the start of each and every rainy season, no one could be presumed to know the difference, Wittgenstein wants to take the argument in a different direction:

Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of a loved one. This is obviously not based on a belief that it will have a definite effect on the object which the picture represents. It aims at some satisfaction, and does achieve it, too. Or rather, it does not aim at anything, we act in this way and then feel satisfied. (#9)

what de Lara calls Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s problem; that is, “how to make sense of mystical thought, once we refuse both intellectualist reduction and dualism” (de Lara 2000: 124-25). By “dualism,” de Lara means a strict separation between “mystical and empirical” idioms of thought (empirically illusory, as it is).

More sharply:

How misleading Frazer’s explanations are becomes clear, I think, from the fact that one could very well invent primitive practices oneself, and it would only be by chance if they were not actually to be found elsewhere. That is, the principle according to which these practices are ordered is a much more general one than [it appears] in Frazer’s explanation, and it exists in our own soul, so that we could think up all the possibilities ourselves. (#13)

And so he does throughout much of the Remarks, confronting Frazer’s casuistry with rites that one might just as well “make up” oneself—and then might find confirmed in the ethnographic literature on some or the other corner of the world (or not— which, in fact, would not matter as long as such practices could be imagined; and imagined as persisting because they “correspond to a general inclination among the people” [#45] who would continue to enact them):

We can thus readily imagine that, for instance, the king of a tribe becomes visible for no one, but also that every member of the tribe is obliged to see him. The latter will then certainly not occur in a manner more or less left to chance; instead, he will be shown to the people. Perhaps no one will be allowed to touch him, or perhaps they will be compelled to touch him. Think how after Schubert's death his brother cut Schubert’s scores into small pieces and gave to his favorite pupils these pieces of a few bars. As a gesture of piety, this action is just as comprehensible as that of preserving the scores untouched and accessible to no one. And if Schubert’s brother had burned the scores, this could still be understood as a gesture of piety. The ceremonial (hot or cold) as opposed to the haphazard

(lukewarm) is what characterizes piety. (#13)

In all of this, Wittgenstein refuses “explanation,” and not just of the historicizing kind that he finds so objectionable in Frazer’s work on the rex nemorenis:

If one sets the phrase “majesty of death” next to the story of the priest king of Nemi, one sees that they are one and the same. The life of the priest king represents what is meant by that phrase. Whoever is gripped by the [idea of] majesty of death can express this through just such a life. —Of course, this is also not an explanation, it just puts one symbol for another. Or one ceremony for another. (#5)