traveller Pausanias' description of Greece in the mid-2nd century AD. Since his time, archaeological excavations have added enormously to the knowledge of ancient Greece, but scholars still find much of value in his detailed historical and topographical discussions of different sites, and his eyewitness accounts of Greece at the end of the 19th century. Theories of religion and cultural evolution Among the most influential elements of the third edition of The Golden Bough is Frazer's theory of cultural evolution and the place Frazer assigns religion and magic in that theory. Frazer's theory of cultural evolution was not absolute and could reverse, but sought to broadly describe three (or possibly, four) spheres through which cultures were thought to pass over time. Frazer believed that, over time, culture passed through three stages, moving from magic, to religion, to science. Frazer's classification notably diverged from earlier anthropological descriptions of cultural evolution, including that of Auguste Comte, because he thought magic was both initially separate from religion and invariably preceded religion. He also defined magic separately from belief in the supernatural and superstition, presenting an ultimately ambivalent view of its place in culture. Frazer believed that magic and science were similar because both shared an emphasis on experimentation and practicality; his emphasis on this relationship is so broad that almost any disproven scientific hypothesis technically constitutes magic under his system. In contrast to both magic and science, Frazer defined religion in terms of belief in personal, supernatural forces and attempts to appease them. As historian of religion Jason Josephson-Storm describes Frazer's views, Frazer saw religion as "a momentary aberration in the grand trajectory of human thought." He thus ultimately proposed – and attempted to further – a narrative of secularization and one of the first social-scientific expressions of a disenchantment narrative. At the same time, Frazer was aware that both magic and religion could persist or return. He noted that magic sometimes returned so as to become science, such as when alchemy underwent a revival in Early Modern Europe and became chemistry. On the other hand, Frazer displayed a deep anxiety about the potential of widespread belief in magic to empower the masses, indicating fears of and biases against lower-class people in his thought. Origin-of-death stories Frazer collected stories from throughout the British Empire and devised four general classifications into which many of them could be grouped: The Story of the Two Messengers This