The Golden Bough

What Hacker News says

1. AmezarakJun 2023
   Most classical histories include some ethnographic descriptions of foreign rituals. Check out Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, etc.

   For a modern and extensive compilation, Frazer famously wrote a huge multi-volume work that documents sacrificial myths from all over the world in The Golden Bough. He selects and uses them to make his own argument, but you’re not likely to find a more comprehensive compilation.

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2. pangolinjaJun 2023
   you definitely shouldn't read James Frazer's The Golden Bough. Absolutely no documented history of European aristocracy sacrificing and eating humans up to this century. Definitely no evidence that all the Egyptian mummies were EATEN by Victorian era Europeans. And then there's today's Rich...
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3. techloadMay 2023
   "The Golden Bough" - a study in comparative religion, by James George Frazer

   https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1159648W/The_golden_bough?ed...

   LETTER TO A BRAZILIAN MASON - Marcelo Ramos Motta

   https://parareligion.ch/dplanet/motta/moma2.htm

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4. WriterGuy2021Oct 2021
   "The Genealogy of Morals" by Nietzsche with the reminder that I am using "violence" in the way he uses "power." Power is just the civilized word for violence.

   And this is what I consider to be a cipher from his "Thus Spoke Zarathustra:"

   “But it is the same with man as with the tree. The more he seeks to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthword, downword, into the dark, the deep - into evil.”

   Also "The Golden Bough" by Frazer if you can read between the lines.

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5. carapaceJan 2020
   Cheers!

   > But can we codify it in a mathematical language that can be a visual map?

   Short answer is yes (but not in the same way as physics.) But there's no "one true" map (somewhat like how there's no "one true" programming language.)

   > I chose Vedic astrology because to a certain extent the astronomy and math part of it is pretty well documented and authored.

   Yes, but it's all made up. And all in association with a world that's long gone (or at least changed massively since then.) It's no better or worse than e.g. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Astrology isn't about the actual planets.

   Have you looked at Sacred Geometry? (It's just geometry, but studied with a sacred mindset.) https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Sacred+Geometry&t=ffab&atb=v60-1&i...

   It sounds to me like you might be wanting to "mind map" psychological archetypes onto a sort of Sacred Geometry? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map )

   > How to extract the predictive pattern recognition aspects of it so the ‘intuition’ part of it can be understood?

   There's aren't any "predictive pattern recognition aspects" in the thing itself. As scientists point out, rightly, divination is logically barren. The intuition is something the operator does, the system of astrology (or whatever) is just the markings on the dial.

   You can't understand intuition (if you could it would just be "thinking") only experience it. Understanding and intuition are like sight and hearing: two different but complimentary ways to sense/model the Universe.

   Does this help?

   Really, if you just want to study astrology like an anthropologist would then just read the books you have. If you want to use astrology to model the world you should instead use physics. If you want to use astrology to model the inner world then read e.g. "Golden Bough" and Jung's archetype work and his Liber Novus (aka The Red Book), and maybe "The Varieties of Religious Experience" and "The Perennial Philosophy". And then just make up your own system. It will work just as well for prediction.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Bough

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Book_%28Jung%29

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Varieties_of_Religious_Exp...

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Perennial_Philosophy

   (It's a shame this got flagged, eh?)

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6. playing_coloursJul 2018
   Hero With A Thousand Faces is truly amazing. It made me think about archtypes, meaning of live. The next stop for me after that book was famous and mystical The Golden Bough by James Frazer. I highly recommend it. I bought a great edition from Folio [0]

   [0] http://www.foliosociety.com/book/GNB/golden-bough

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