ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Ludwig Wittgenstein's Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, which were written around 1931. Between 1890 and 1915, the British anthropologist Sir James George Frazer wrote The Golden Bough, a monumental study of magic and religion centred on the myth of the king priest. According to Frazer, the myth of the king priest is at the basis of many magic rituals, far apart from one another in time and space, characteristic of rural cultures related to land and passage of the seasons. The first theme of Wittgenstein's criticism of Frazer's views focuses on the relationship between magical and religious rituals on the one hand and beliefs about the workings of nature on the other. The concept of mythology is often present in crucial passages of the philosophical production of the later Wittgenstein. There is a tendency to consider Wittgenstein either a simple precursor of the ideas of the logical positivism, or as a mere philosopher of ordinary language.
