Early Theories and Theorists

4Theories: The History of Interpretation

was subsequently “misunderstood” by later generations of the cultural groups they conquered.

This view was soon challenged by many, notably the folklorist Andrew Lang (1844–1912) and the anthropologist Edward B. Tylor (1832–1917).2 Tylor argued that myth should not be interpreted as a misunderstanding, but as a deliberate philosophical attempt to explain and understand the world. Although Tylor admitted that the results of mythological attempts at explanation were patently wrong, still myth cannot be dismissed “as mere error and folly.” Rather, it should be studied “as an interesting product of the human mind” for insight into what Tylor and others saw as “primitive” ways of reasoning.3 Tylor invoked an evolutionary view of human social development from childlike “savages” to “civilized man,” in the course of which some primitive explanations lingered on as “survivals” in certain modern religious customs.4 This approach to myth was linked to what Tylor saw as its role in the origin of religion. Religion, he suggested, originated in the experience of seeing the dead in dreams. “Primitive” people explained these experiences through a theory of souls and spirits, in effect, postulating that part of the deceased continued to live in some way after the corruption of the body. They also came to believe that similar spiritual or animistic forces inhabited nonhuman things like animals and plants. Tylor used the word animism, from the Greek anima (soul), to designate this earliest form of religion.

William Robertson Smith (1846–1894), a gifted linguist and Old Testament scholar, followed Tylor’s evolutionary framework but argued for the primacy of ritual, over a notion of souls, in the origins of religion and society. Religion, he believed, did not arise in the explanations of animism but in activities that cemented the bonds of community. In other words, Robertson Smith saw religion as rooted not in speculative myths about the nature of things but in rituals that essentially worshiped divine representations of the social order itself: “religion was made up of a series of acts and observances . . . [it] did not exist for the sake of saving souls but for the preservation and welfare of society.”5

Robertson Smith’s most famous work reconstructed the early Semitic ritual practice of sacrificing and consuming a “totem” animal, an animal held to be a divine ancestor by a particular exogamic lineage group. The term itself comes from the expression “ototeman” in Ojibwa, the language of the Algonquins of Canada, and means “he is a relative of mine.”6 While Tylor’s theory of ritual sacrifice implies a type of “gift” model, according to which human beings make offerings to ancestors and spirits in return for blessings, Robertson Smith boldly interpreted the Semitic sacrificial rite as a festive “communion” between humans and gods that has the effect of sacralizing the social unity and solidarity of the group. Hence, for Robertson

Smith, ritual is the primary component of religion, and it fundamentally serves the basic social function of creating and maintaining community. He relegated myth to a secondary place, somewhat akin to its place in Müller’s theory, by arguing that myth evolved as an explanation of what the rite was about when the original meaning was forgotten or confounded. In almost every case, he argued, “the myth was derived from the ritual, and not the ritual from the myth; for the ritual was fixed and the myth was variable, the ritual was obligatory and faith in the myth was at the discretion of the worshipper.”7

Robertson Smith’s investigations into ritual laid the groundwork for the basic tenets of three powerful schools of interpretation of religion.8 The first was the “myth and ritual” school associated with Sir James Frazer’s famous work, which argued that in order to understand a myth one must first determine the ritual that it accompanied. The second was the sociological approach to religion associated with Émile

Durkheim, for whom religion was a social creation that exists, as Robertson Smith had noted, “not for the saving of souls but for the preservation and welfare of society.”9 A third interpretive approach, the psychoanalytical school founded by Sigmund

Freud, adopted Robertson Smith’s notions of totemism, primal sacrifice, and the social origins of religious authority, guilt, and morality. For the psychoanalysts, Robertson

Smith’s unequivocal emphasis on the importance of ritual pointed to modes of analysis and interpretation that look beyond what people themselves think about what they do or believe. In this way, Robertson Smith pioneered what has been called an “antiintellectualist” understanding of human behavior, that is, behavior rooted in irrational impulses and not simply reasoning according to a primitive form of logic.

A student of Robertson Smith, Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941), was also concerned with the experiences and activities in which religion originated. While he was perhaps most interested in underlying beliefs, Frazer’s research into ritual customs earned him the accolade of “the most illustrious ancestor in the pedigree of ritual.”10 Frazer began by appropriating Tylor’s theory of myth as explanation but gradually came to see myth as a secondary remnant or survival of ritual activity. Hence, for Frazer, ritual is the original source of most of the expressive forms of cultural life.11 Successive editions of Frazer’s famous work, The Golden Bough, developed Robertson Smith’s notion of the ritual sacrifice of the divine totem into a complex new theory, namely, that the universally diffused pattern underlying all ritual is an enactment of the death and resurrection of a god or divine king who symbolized and secured the fertility of the land and the well-being of the people. For Frazer and his followers, the theme of the ritually dying and reviving god became the basis of all myth and folklore, and Frazer indiscriminately cataloged customs of the “primitives” of his day (from the French peasantry to the more remote Pacific Islanders) that he thought evoked this theme. As a result, the third edition of The Golden Bough (1911– 15) consisted of twelve volumes. Like Tylor and others before him, Frazer wanted to document the whole “evolution of human thought from savagery to civilisation,” as well as the survivals of primitive magic and superstition within the “high religions” of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.12

The Myth and Ritual Schools

Robertson Smith and Frazer were the two inspirational poles for what has been called the “myth and ritual school,” an approach to the historical and cultural primacy of ritual that emerged in two interdependent branches: a group of biblical and ancient Near Eastern specialists on the one hand, and a group of Cambridge University classicists on the other.13 Among the first group, the Old Testament scholar Samuel Henry Hooke (1874–1968) argued the thesis that myth and ritual—the thing said and the thing done—were inseparable in early civilizations. The religions of ancient Egypt,

6Theories: The History of Interpretation

Babylon, and Canaan were primarily ritual religions, centered on the dramatization of the death and resurrection of the king as a god in whom the well-being of the community rested. Essential to the ritual action was the recited story, which was deemed to have had equal “potency.” Over the course of time, however, the actions and the story separated and gave rise to distinct religious and dramatic genres.14

Assembling the evidence to support this theory led the myth and ritual school to a number of ambitious analyses of the myths and rites of the Near Eastern cultures of the Nile, Euphrates, and Indus River valleys, including the new year activities of the king in ancient Israel. Hooke and his colleagues reconstructed a set of rites synchronized to the seasonal cycle of planting and harvesting in which the king was first humiliated and then symbolically killed, after which he descended into the underworld. He subsequently arose to reestablish order on earth through formal combat with the forces of chaos. Upon his victory over chaos, the king reclaimed the throne, celebrated a sacred marriage, and pronounced the laws of the land. According to

Hooke, the symbolic enactments of these events were accompanied by the recitation of the story as an extended narrative account of creation itself. Although critics challenged the historical accuracy and scope of this interpretive reconstruction, it became a powerful model of sacred kingship that scholars attempted to use in other cultural areas as well.

The Cambridge school of classicists systematically developed this theory by arguing that folklore and literature derive from the ritual activities of ancient sacred kings, not from actual history or the folk imagination, as people had long believed. In particular, Gilbert Murray, Francis M. Cornford, and Arthur B. Cook tried to show how the model of the dying and rising Near Eastern god-king, also seen in the

Dionysian fertility rites of ancient Greece, provides the structural models for Greek drama.15 One of the most influential scholars among the Cambridge classicists was Jane Ellen Harrison, whose major studies, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903) and Themis (1912), attempted to root the origins of Greek myth, dramatic theater, and even the Olympic games (in a chapter of Themis contributed by

Cornford) in the ancient rites described by Frazer.16 Put most simply, Harrison saw ritual as the source of myth; myths arose as spoken and somewhat secondary correlates to the activities performed in the rite. Harrison’s evolutionary framework also suggested that the original ritual activities tended to die out, while the accompanying myths continued independently in various forms. She argued that once the myth lost its original relationship to a ritual, it might try to account for its own existence and enhance its intellectual coherence. For example, even though a myth might have arisen to accompany a ritual, if and when the rite died out, the story could attach itself to specific historical figures and events, or it could even be adopted as a pseudoscientific explanation of particular phenomena.

This argument, presented in Harrison’s Themis, crystallized the basic ideas of the Cambridge school; thereafter, many scholars began to apply them even more broadly. For example, Cornford’s From Religion to Philosophy (1912) traced several philosophical ideas back to their supposed origins in ritual, Murray’s Euripides and His Age (1913) applied the notion of ritual origins to the work of that great Greek dramatist, and Cook’s Zeus (1914) analyzed Greek mythic heroes as “ritual concretizations.”17

The work of the Cambridge school influenced scholars outside classical studies as well. Harrison’s theory reappears, for example, in Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920), which argued that the romance of the Arthurian Grail legend is nothing other than a “misinterpretation” of the fertility rite of the dying and rising god-king.18 Weston’s book had great influence, in turn, on the poetry of T. S. Eliot, especially The Wasteland (1922), as well as the literary studies of Northrop Frye.19

Other scholars went on to scrutinize fairy tales, nursery rhymes, children’s games, folk drama, law, language, and even experimental physics, seeking echoes of an original ritual pattern preserved in them.20 A. M. Hocart’s 1927 study, Kingship, found a basic royal initiatory ordeal to be at the root of a variety of historical survivals.21 In 1937, F. R. R. S. Raglan published a study entitled The Hero, in which he argued that most myths and folktales, if they did not specifically originate in ritual, are at least associated with ritual activities and reflected ritual structures and patterns.22 Raglan’s work was one of the most ambitious studies of the myth and ritual school to that date and would be the focus of much later criticism. As with Otto Rank’s earlier study, “The Myth of the Birth of the Hero” (1908), the model of the ritually dying and rising god-king was taken as a direct historical influence on the characteristic pattern of the hero in folklore, religion, and literature.23 Raglan itemized some twentytwo elements that recur with great regularity in portrayals of heroes, arguing that they generally echo the ancient ritual activities of a king who is killed and then returns to life.24 Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, further research continued to fuel the myth and ritual school’s argument for the historical and cultural primacy of this ritual.

Theodore Gaster’s (1906–1992) study Thespis (1950) converted the dying and reviving god motif into the more embracing thesis of a “seasonal pattern” in all ritual by which it regularly renews and revitalizes the total world order.25 This seasonal pattern involves “emptying” (kenosis) rites of mortification and purgation and the “filling” (plerosis) rites of invigoration and jubilation—in other words, rites of death and resurrection. Ancient institutions of kingship in which the king personified the total world order epitomized the sequence and purpose of this ritual pattern. In

Gaster’s analysis, however, the place of myth shifts significantly. Myth is neither a mere outgrowth of ritual nor simply the spoken correlate of what is being done. Rather, myth is the “expression of a parallel aspect” that in effect translates the very real and specific ritual situation into an idealized and timeless model.26 Yet like Hooke, Gaster also believed that this mythic aspect of the ritual eventually separates from the specific ritual acts to assume the form of literature, passing through stages of drama, poetry, and liturgical hymns. Although he argued that rite and myth should not be viewed as developing in a historical sequence, Gaster ultimately maintained that the survival of the seasonal pattern within the very structure of different works of literature constitutes nothing less than an argument both for the logical primacy of ritual and for the intrinsic ritual logic underlying all culture.

To substantiate these universal claims for the structure of ritual and culture itself, scholars continued to look everywhere for ritual patterns—in the music of

American blues and in the work of Shakespeare, Thomas Mann, D. H. Lawrence, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.27 As Stanley Hyman argued in 1955, with more admiration than caution, what had begun “as a modest genetic theory for the origin of a few