Volume 31, Number 20 · December 20, 1984
Betwixt, Bothered & Bewildered
By Mary Douglas
Structuralist Interpretations of Biblical Myth
by Edmund Leach, by D. Alan Aycock
Cambridge University Press, 132 pp., $9.95 (paper)
Edmund Leach—president of the Royal Anthropological Institute, fellow of the British Academy, receipient of many scholarly awards, former provost of King's College, Cambridge—has long been the doyen of British anthropology. For more than twenty years, he has been developing his own method of analyzing myths, which he is careful to distinguish from the methods of such 'world mythologists' as James Frazer and Mircea Eliade. Frazer's Golden Bough (1890–1915) imposed on the myths of the world a uniform pattern in which divine kings were killed so as to give energy to the biological cycle of birth and death. Frazer implied that Jesus Christ was only one among a long series of mythological divinities slain to renew the world.
Review, 3466 words
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