Abstract

In this chapter I trace a number of thematic connections between Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Notebooks on the one hand, and his ‘Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough’ on the other. Pointing to this continuity will, I hope, bring out how the dimension of significance, central to the ‘Remarks on Frazer’, plays a role in the progress of the Tractatus, as well as elucidate how metaphysics is an expression and a distortion of the spiritual, similar to the one we find in magic and mythology. It would explain, as Wittgenstein puts it, “metaphysics as a kind of magic”.