FRAZER, JAMES G. (1854–1941), was a British anthropologist and historian of religion. James George Frazer, the eldest of four children, was born in preindustrial Glasgow, the son of a successful pharmacist. His parents were devout members of the Free Church of Scotland, a conservative sect that in the 1840s had broken away from the (Established) Church of Scotland on matters of church governance. Accordingly Frazer was raised in an atmosphere of deep piety, which, be it noted, he later said that he did not find oppressive.

Frazer early showed academic promise and entered the University of Glasgow at the then not unusually early age of fifteen. There, he writes in a genial memoir composed at the end of his life, three important things occurred: He conceived his lifelong love of the classics, he came to see that the world is governed by a system of...