>The trick in reading the Bough is to look beyond the exotica and high
>strangeness to ask, "real people did this for real, logical reasons. What
>were those reasons?"
In all fairness to Frazer, he does ask those questions. It's just that his answers are a bit too crass and cynical for Glorantha. He boils everything down to power politics - religious and magical authorities are seen as con men who don't really believe any of the myths they use to control the common populace. Again, to be fair, he's not entirely eurocentric either: there are hints that he views christianity in the same way.
As for why the belivers did what they did, he has some answers there too. Mainly, he tries to condense them down to a few general principles of magic, explaining all cultures the same way. Kind of a precursor to the monomyth. :-)
(Naturally, I'm simplifying things here. If the book is read with a principle of charity in mind, one can find many examples of more nuanced reasoning.)
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