Modeling Magic and Ritual: Analysing the Internal Validity of "The Golden Bough"

When Sir James Frazer published his seminal work 'The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion' in 1894, he marshalled two volumes of ethnographic and comparative religious field notes to explain the puzzling ritual of Arician Diana in Roman antiquity. But do these field notes and ritual interpretations support the conclusion that Frazer proposed? This dissertation investigates Frazer's claim by using script- and event-based knowledge representation in the tradition of Schank/Abelson and Davidson to reconstruct Frazer's ethnographic and comparative data set, then uses automated theorem proving techniques to determine whether Frazer's contentions are possible, plausible and the best solution.