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myths thus eventually comes to make rather large claims on the essential forms of the whole culture.”28 Yet there was never a dearth of critics to challenge any of the theories discussed so far. From Müller to Gaster, the premises, methods, and conclusions of the myth and ritual school were frequently probed and disparaged. Frazer’s legacy in this area came to be judged particularly harshly, even though its general popularity was not significantly dampened until the early 1960s. By that time, an impressive number of powerful critical analyses had accumulated.29

In a particularly important critique, Clyde Kluckhohn pointed out that although some myths are clearly related to ritual, it is silly to claim that all are. Not only is such a claim impossible to prove but also there is substantial evidence for a variety of relationships between myths and rites, including their complete independence from each other. “The whole question of the primacy of ceremony or mythology,” Kluckhohn wrote, “is as meaningless as all questions of ‘the hen or the egg’ form.” Based on his evidence, “neither myth nor ritual can be postulated as ‘primary’.”30 In order to improve on the methods used by the myth and ritual school, Kluckhohn called for the testing of their generalities against real data and detailed studies of the actual relationships found between myth and ritual.31 Joseph Fontenrose’s critique, written nearly thirty years later, was more devastating than Kluckhohn’s. While calling attention to all the inconsistencies and mistakes in the myth and ritual literature, particularly in the work of Frazer, Fontenrose effectively demonstrated that there are no historical or ethnographic data that can serve as evidence for the reconstructed pattern of the sacrifice in Near Eastern kingship. His critique, which was the culmination of the challenges raised by Kluckhohn and the others, effectively undermined the universalistic tendencies of this earlier generation of scholarship and their concern with origins.32

Despite the repudiation of Frazer’s legacy, however, ritual has remained important in the study of religion and of society. For example, a focus on ritual has been central to the emergence of social functionalism in anthropology and to those approaches that have pursued the other side of the myth and ritual equation, namely, the historical and cultural primacy of myth. In this latter line of thinking, loosely known as the phenomenological approach, certain Frazerian ideas remain quite influential. Robert Segal, for one, also argues that the enduring value of the myth and ritual school’s theoretical work on ritual is significant, even though many of their theories are wrong since they opened up questions concerning the relationship of practice and belief, and religion and science, that have been central to the study of religion in the 20th century.33

The Phenomenology of Religions

While the myth and ritual school was primarily rooted in a British intellectual tradition, another line of thinking developed on the continent that became known in German as Religionswissenschaft, or the “science of religion,” a term first used by Müller to designate a nontheological and nonphilosophical approach to religion, even though he was not sure its time had yet come.34 This term has also been translated as “phenomenology of religion,” which I will use here; “comparative religions”;

or, most officially, “history of religions.”35 While this line of thinking has been too informal and divergent to be considered a school as such, it can be identified on the basis of a few central premises and enduring emphases.36 First, phenomenology of religions aligned itself with Müller’s emphases on myth, as opposed to the later championing of ritual by the Cambridge ritualists, and on systematic comparison in understanding religion.

Second, this line of thinking tended to react negatively to what it saw as the reductionism of Tylor, Robertson Smith, and some later sociological or anthropological approaches to religion. For example, phenomenologists rejected Tylor’s rationalistic approach to religion as a form of primitive explanation. They developed his notion that myths are a form of understanding, while rejecting his conclusion that such religious explanations, although interesting, are nothing more than subjective delusions and mistaken logical inferences.37 The early phenomenologist Rudolf Otto (1869–1937), in his The Idea of the Holy (1917), explicitly approached religious experience as a real and irreducible phenomenon and urged scholars to explore the components of such experiences of “the holy” as something “wholly other.”38 Otto made several critical assumptions in characterizing this antireductionist phenomenology, such as the a priori existence of the holy (called “the sacred” by others), the universal nature of all religious experience, and its accessibility to a form of study that looked to structural similarities.

In the later development of a third emphasis, phenomenologists repudiated most attempts to determine the historical origins of religion and generally backed off from using an evolutionary framework to explain the differences among religions. Unless one recognized the transhistorical sacred, they argued, a purely historical approach is reductionism: “For the historian of religions the fact that a myth or a ritual is always historically conditioned does not explain away the very existence of such a myth or ritual. In other words, the historicity of a religious experience does not tell us what a religious experience ultimately is.”39 The phenomenologist’s stress on the ahistorical aspects of religion accompanied the attempt to develop a sophisticated method of comparison by mapping religious phenomena in terms of essentially morphological categories, that is, in terms of what were assumed to be underlying patterns or structures.

Gerardus van der Leeuw (1890–1950) and Raffaele Pettazzoni (1883–1959), each in his own way, attempted to make this approach more systematic by identifying two formal components of religion: the phenomenological dimension, by which they meant the common structural elements underlying all religious experience; and the historical dimension, namely, the actual particular forms that these structures have in reality.40 Comparative research among the various forms religion has taken in history—that is, the historical dimension—would disclose, they suggested, the phenomenological dimension of religion, namely, the structural commonalities underlying the multiple historical forms of religious experience.41 At times, van der Leeuw seemed to assume that these common phenomenological structures had some sort of ontological status, that as pure universal forms they actually existed somewhere above and beyond their particular historical forms and, as such, were tantamount to “the sacred” itself. Elsewhere, he and others tended to identify these pure phenomenological forms as cognitive structures of the human mind, that which makes a

10 Theories: The History of Interpretation

human being homo religiosus. According to this latter view, therefore, “the ‘sacred’ is an element in the structure of consciousness,” not a transcendent divine reality or a stage in the history of human consciousness.42 While the ritualists of the myth and ritual schools were talking about a single evolutionary-historical pattern that diffused to become the underlying basis for all ritual, myth, and other cultural developments, the phenomenologists were trying to identify a more complex set of ahistorical universals (either the sacred out there somewhere or within the human consciousness) that manifest themselves in multiple historical forms. This search for ahistorical universals enabled the phenomenological argument to abandon the worst excesses of evolutionism but often at the cost of a truly historical framework.

A major effect of the phenomenological approach was to minimize the importance of ritual, although certainly not to dismiss it. Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), by far the most famous spokesperson for the phenomenological study of religion, gave a distinct primacy to religious myths and symbols. While Eliade argued this position on methodological grounds—that myths and symbols provide a clearer and more spontaneous view of the various forms in which humans experience and express the sacred than is afforded by ritual—he was also apt to attribute a greater primordiality to myths and symbols. Ritual is treated as a somewhat secondary reworking of mythic symbols: “A symbol and a rite . . . are on such different levels that the rite can never reveal what the symbol reveals.”43 Thus, in contrast to the myth and ritual school, which saw ritual as relatively stable and myth as more likely to change, phenomenologists have tended to hold the opposite view, seeing far more stability, even eternality, in the structures underlying myth.44

Eliade’s position on myth embraced Tylor’s idea that such primitive forms of reasoning should not be dismissed out of hand but analyzed for what they reveal about human perception and cognition. Eliade also enlarged upon the etiologic dimensions of myth formulated by the myth and ritual school, namely, how myth (often accompanying ritual) tells a sacred story about the actions of the gods and thereby explains how things came to be the way they are.45 For Eliade,

Myth narrates a sacred history; it relates an event that took place in primordial Time, the fabled time of the “beginnings.” In other words, myth tells how, through the deeds of Supernatural Beings, a reality came into existence, be it the whole of reality, the Cosmos, or only a fragment of reality—an island, a species of plant, a particular kind of human behavior, an institution. Myth, then, is always an account of a “creation”; it related how something was produced, began to be. . . . Because myth relates the gesta of Supernatural Beings and the manifestations of their sacred powers, it becomes the exemplary model for all significant human activities.”46

In this way, Eliade rejected Tylor’s conclusion that myth is a misguided explanation and argued instead that myth explains only by reference to cosmic creation and symbols that express the awe and tremendum, as Otto would say, of an encounter with the sacred.

For Eliade, the identification of human acts with the divine models preserved in myth enables people to experience the ontologically real and meaningful, to regenerate cyclical notions of time, and to renew the prosperity and fecundity of the

community. Ritual sets up the beginnings of this identification. Rites, he argued, are reenactments of the deeds performed by the gods in the primordial past and preserved in mythological accounts. By performing these deeds again in ritual, the participants identify the historical here and now with the sacred primodial period of the gods before time began. Through the ritual enactment of primordial events, according to Eliade, human beings come to consider themselves truly human, sanctify the world, and render meaningful the activities of their lives.47 For example, when he looked at Frazer’s data on agricultural rites, Eliade emphasized quite different points than

Frazer had. For Eliade, the meaning of sacrificial offerings and practices that associate sexuality and fertility (e.g., nude women sowing seeds at night and carnivalesque festivals) lay not in primitive beliefs that the forces of the sacred must be seasonally regenerated but in the fact that these acts specifically repeat the mythical activities that created the cosmos: “A regeneration sacrifice is a ritual ‘repetition’ of the Creation. . . . The ritual makes creation over again.” Through the recitation of the creation myth, the animal being sacrificed is identified with “the body of the primeval being . . . which gave life to the grain by being itself divided ritually.”48 Nonetheless, just like Frazer, Eliade’s focus on the relationship of ritual to the cosmogonic myth heavily evoked themes of death and rebirth, degenerative chaos and regenerative order.49

In sum, for Eliade, ritual is a reenactment of a cosmogonic event or story recounted in myth. The myth plays a critical role in establishing the system in which any activity has its meaning by ritually identifying the activities of the here and now with those of the gods in the period of creation. Thus, we might conclude that ritual is dependent on the myth, since it is the story that assures people that what they are doing in the ritual is what was done in that primordial age when the gods, heroes, or ancestors ordered the cosmos, created the world, and established divine models for all subsequent meaningful activity: “Thus the gods did; thus men do.”50 Yet Eliade acknowledges that in traditional societies the myth is never separated from the rite: telling the sacred story requires ritual, and intrinsic to the ritual reenactment of the events in the story is the recitation of the myth itself. Hence, in the final analysis, it would seem that Eliade did not think it possible to separate “living” myth from ritual; when such separation exists, myth is no longer myth; it becomes literature or art. At the same time, Eliade’s approach also tends to place ritual on a secondary level, reserving a primary place for myth by virtue of its closer relationship to the underlying structures of all religious experience. Perhaps myth, as a matter of beliefs, symbols, and ideas, is deemed a manifestation of the sacred that is inherently closer to the cognitive patterns that define homo religiosus, while ritual, as action, is considered a secondary expression of these very beliefs, symbols, and ideas.51

The traditional emphases of the phenomenological approach have been simultaneously affirmed and significantly modified in the work of Jonathan Z. Smith (b. 1938). Smith is best known for his critical rereadings of classic studies of religious ritual and practice, where his close examination of historical detail puts the reputed structural (and universal) meaning of the ritual in a new light. Less concerned with how universal patterns underlie specific historical forms of religion, Smith has pointed instead to how historically specific rituals attempt to create broad patterns of order and meaning. This includes an emphasis on the situational as much as the substan-