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tive aspects of ritual.52 Most simply, for Smith, ritual portrays the idealized way that things in this world should be organized, although participants are very aware that real life keeps threatening to collapse into chaos and meaninglessness. Ritual, he suggests, is an opportunity to reflect on the disjuncture between what is and what ought to be; it is a “focusing lens” through which people can attempt to see, or argue for, what is significant in real life.53

Through Smith’s influence, phenomenology has come to see religion as central to the cognitive need to understand, explain, order, and adapt. This is an intellectualist approach that is very much in keeping with the orientation of most theorists who have pondered myth and ritual, with the possible exception of the social bent represented by Robertson Smith and the emotional bent represented by Otto. Whether it is a matter of so-called primitive peoples or so-called civilized ones, from this perspective, religion is essentially a human project to formulate stable and meaningful dimensions behind the accidental, chaotic, and shifting realities of human existence. Phenomenologists have described this project differently and chosen to locate “the sacred” in very different ways—in mystical confusion, in transhistorical commonalities, in cognitive structures, or in human interpretive endeavors. Yet the results are similar: myths and rituals are seen as attempting to present, model, and instill a coherent and systematic unity within all human experience. From the historical perspective of the myth-and-ritualists, the ritual pattern of seasonal dying and rising revealed a unity of human experience that hearkened back to the earliest stratum of civilization. From the cognitive or intellectualist perspective of the phenomenologists, myth and ritual are the means by which people keep forging some sense of this unity of human experience. For this reason, phenomenologists have stressed that such religious phenomena must be understood “in their own place of reference”; they cannot be reduced to “infantile trauma, glandular accident, or economic, social, or political situations.”54 Ultimately, phenomenologists conclude that the same principle of unification that lies behind the practice of religion must also underlie the study of religion: “the meaning of religious symbolism as an integrated, coherent unity and the interpretive work [of the historian of religions] as an integration of the various religious phenomena form a single and consistent correlation.”55

Psychoanalytic Approaches to Ritual

Robertson Smith’s researches into the social primacy of ritual suggested the presence of unconscious forces in shaping social behavior. Although he saw the primordial sacrifice and communal sharing of a totemic animal by the whole tribe to be the foremost means for cementing the social bonds of the group, the participants themselves would never have been conscious of this as the main purpose of the rite. Thus, underlying the more immediately obvious and rational reasons for performing a communal meal, Robertson Smith pointed to causes for social behavior about which the group itself knew nothing: “The ‘real’ purpose and significance of ritual were different at times even from what the actors themselves believed.”56 This insight was soon independently echoed in the work of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), who developed theories of repression, the unconscious, and psychoanalysis as an interpretive

approach to buried levels of meaning.57 Yet it was Frazer’s portrayal of totemism

(Totemism and Exogamy, 1910) that influenced Freud most directly. Frazer—and

Tylor before him—had advanced a theory of religion that relied heavily on psychological rather than social elements by suggesting that “primitive” peoples developed religion to explain and rationalize perplexing psychological experiences having to do with dreams, nature, and the effectiveness of magic.58

In a 1907 essay that predated his close reading of Frazer, Freud drew a provocative comparison between the obsessive activities of neurotics and those “religious observances by means of which the faithful give expression to their piety,” such as prayers and invocations.59 For Freud, the neurotic’s innumerable round of little ceremonies, all of which must be done just so, as well as the anxiety and guilt that accompany these acts, imply a similarity between the causes of religion and the causes of obsessional neuroses. He suggested that both are rooted in the same psychological mechanisms of repression and displacement—specifically, the repression of sexual impulses in the case of neurosis and egotistical or antisocial impulses in the case of religion.60 The parallelism led him to the conclusion that one might describe neurosis as individual religiosity and religion as a universal neurosis.61 With this article, Freud took a step that proved to be fundamental to his subsequent studies of religion and ritual; that is, he moved smoothly from analysis of so-called individual neuroses

(obsessive behavior) to analysis of so-called universal social neuroses (such as religion). Assuming a basic identity between individual psychic processes and social processes—“What is now the heritage of the individual was once, long ago, a newly acquired possession, handed on from one generation to another”—Freud began to reconstruct the psychological development of the human race on the basis of his clinical reconstructions of the psychic history of specific patients.62

After beginning to read Frazer, Robertson Smith, and other anthropological studies, Freud eagerly attempted to apply his earlier ideas to an analysis of totemism and its taboo against harming the totem animal.63 In his 1913 study, Totem and Taboo,

Freud first argued that the similarities between the repression that gives rise to obsessive neuroses and the repression that gives rise to religion are ultimately identical; in both phenomena, the repressed content was incestuous sexual desires. The evidence of this basis for religion could be seen with particular clarity in the ritual activities of primitive religion. Freud then focused on totemism’s association with the practice of exogamy, whereby the members of one totem group could not marry or have sexual relations with each other, even though they were not blood relatives. He interpreted this totemic marriage rule as revealing “an unusually high grade of incest dread or incest sensitiveness.” Drawing heavily on Frazer’s less than reliable data, he also argued that it is one of the two oldest and most important taboos in primitive society,

“namely not to kill the totem animal, and to avoid sexual intercourse with totem companions of the other sex.” Things so strictly forbidden, Freud suggested with great simplicity, must have been greatly desired. Moreover, after noting how totems are frequently identified as father or ancestor, he concluded that both totemic prohibitions and their basis in underlying desires “agree in content with the crimes of Oedipus,” that is, the killing of his father and sexual intercourse with his mother. Having elsewhere identified the “Oedipal complex” as a stage in adolescent psychological development when a young boy must overcome desire for his mother and murder-

14 Theories: The History of Interpretation

ous envy and fear of his father, Freud went on to argue that the totemic system itself results from the same conditions that give rise to the Oedipus complex.64

In the conclusion of his study, Freud combined Robertson Smith’s depiction of a primal sacrificial meal, in which the totemic animal was slaughtered and eaten by its own clan, with Charles Darwin’s notion of the primal horde, in which “there is only a violent, jealous father who keeps all the females for himself and drives away the growing sons.”65 Using these ideas, Freud developed a compelling scenario of the early history of the human race: “One day the expelled brothers joined forces, slew and ate the father, and thus put an end to the father horde. . . . The totemic feast, which is perhaps mankind’s first celebration, would be the repetition and commemoration of this memorable, criminal act with which so many things began, social organization, moral restrictions and religion.”66

Freud theorized that the brothers, consumed by guilt, then attempted to undo their crime by renouncing the women for whom they had killed the father and prohibiting the killing of the totem, which was considered a father substitute. Hence, this primordial patricide resulted in the totemic cult with its taboos against killing the sacralized totem and against incest, though the latter taboo is extended to all sexual relations with nonkin women from the same totemic group. Although the totemic cult hides the reality of its own origins in desire and murder, it still promotes the repressed longings, ambivalence, and guilt of the original crime throughout its subsequent development into increasingly more complex forms of religion, forms that include the deification of the murdered father and a sacrificial rite of communion with him.

It became clear to Freud, therefore, that taboos are inseparable from ritual practices since ritual is the acting out of the obsessional neurotic’s mechanism of repression. In other words, the taboo necessitates the ritual: “We cannot get away from the impression that patients are making, in an asocial manner, the same attempts at a solution of their conflicts and an appeasement of their urgent desires which, when carried out in a manner acceptable to a large number of persons, are called poetry, religion and philosophy.”67 This last statement summarizes the Freudian interpretation of ritual: it is an obsessive mechanism that attempts to appease repressed and tabooed desires by trying to solve the internal psychic conflicts that these desires cause.

While Freud used religious ritual to help complete his psychological theory of

“the whole mental content of human life,” Theodor Reik (1888–1969) more narrowly applied Freud’s early psychoanalytic principles to various forms of ritual. In a revealing discussion, Reik suggested the appropriateness for psychoanalysis of a primary focus on the action of ritual, instead of myth, in the same way that Robertson Smith accorded primacy to ritual over myth. Reik was aware of the significance of the information that could be gleaned from people’s activities quite apart from their own verbal (mythic) account of why they do those activities. Yet he did not assume, as Robertson Smith did before him, that ritual is actually older than myth. On the contrary, he appears to have believed that myth predates ritual and remains basic to any understanding of the first psychological conflicts in primitive societies. Indeed, myth,

“in its original state, preserves in a far less disguised form the memory of those events which led to the institution of religion.”68 Yet for Reik and the psychoanalytic approach, analysis of religious rituals paves the way for understanding myth, dogma,

and cult, “just as an intensive study of the ceremonials of obsessional patients invariably leads us to the larger structures of their dreams, obsessional ideas, conscientious scruples and compulsive acts.”69 Methodologically, psychoanalytic ethnographers might begin with the ritual, but they must work backward, even past the etiologic myth, to uncover what is thought to be the “real” story of desire and repression, fear, and projection that is at the root. Unconscious motives are the profoundest and most explanative; the unconscious myth is the true one.70 Explanation to uncover the true myth will uncover the meaning of the ritual in what Freud called the “return of the repressed.”71

A few theorists have tried to pull a more positive interpretation of ritual from Freud’s writings. Building on Freud’s allusions to the therapeutic value of ritual, they tend to emphasize how ritual and religion are the means for a healthy accommodation of the repression of desire demanded by all culture and civilization, rather than the means used to create and then police this repression. Bruno Bettelheim (19031990), for example, argued that initiation rituals are an effective means to integrate asocial instinctual tendencies and adjust to prescribed social roles. He broke with Freud’s view that Oedipal conflict and castration anxiety are the source and underlying logic of male initiation rituals, that such rites “result from the fathers’ jealousy of his sons, and their purpose is to create sexual (castration) anxiety and to make secure the incest taboo.” Bettelheim argued, instead, that these rites attempt to resolve, not instill, the ambivalence described in another Freudian psychoanalytic insight, envy of the sexual organs and functions of the other sex, especially male awe of female reproductive power: “I hope to show how likely it is that certain initiation rites originate in the adolescent’s attempts to master his envy of the other sex, or to adjust to the social role prescribed for his sex and give up pregenital, childish pleasures.”72 Similarly, Volney Gay has also argued that Freud’s theory of religious ritual can be interpreted in such a way that “ritual behavior is a product of the non pathological, often beneficial, mechanism of suppression”—not repression. As such, “rituals might, to the degree that they aid the ego’s attempt to suppress disruptive or dangerous id impulses, further the cause of adaptation” or healthy maturation.73

Psychoanalysis and myth and ritual theory greatly influenced each other. While

Harrison’s argument in Themis was essentially an expansion of Frazer’s work, it also enlisted the new psychological terminology concerning emotion and desire.74 As a psychoanalyst, Rank’s The Myth of the Birth of the Hero reduced various hero myths to several key episodes in which the hero enacts an Oedipal scenario. In Raglan’s study The Hero (1936), the ritual pattern of the dying and reviving god is linked to an ancient regicide that echoes the murder of the father in Freud’s Totem and Taboo.75

Interpreters of religion from Geza Roheim to Georg Bataille have developed the use of psychoanalytic readings of themes drawn from the myth and ritual school, while the grand ambitions of Robertson Smith, Frazer, and Freud to determine the ultimate origins and universal meaning of religion and human culture itself still echo in the work of such recent mavericks as René Girard.76

René Girard (b. 1923) echoes these three early theoreticians in a series of studies depicting ritual, religion, society, and culture as all emerging from a foundation in primal violence.77 He describes a process in which desire, channeled through the ritual of an original murder, is ultimately enshrined in every social institution, in-

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cluding language.78 His notion of primal desire is not strictly Freudian, since he characterizes it as an asexual, “mimetic” desire to imitate an “other” and thereby create simultaneously both a model and a rival, which leads to indiscriminate violence that threatens all members of society—not desire for a mother or father that threatens to tear apart the family. To curb the destructiveness of asexual desire, Girard argues, and even repress consciousness of both the violence and desire, a human victim is seized as a scapegoat and ritually sacrificed. This ritual sacrifice is the means by which the community deflects or transfers its own desire and violence on to another, someone who has been made into an outsider, an “other.”

For Girard, this act of scapegoating lies not only at the beginning of human history but also at the beginning of a sociocultural process that continually repeats and renews both the violence and the repression that renders the violence deceptively invisible: “Violence, in every cultural order, is always the true subject of every ritual or institutional structure.”79 As the sacrifice of a scapegoat, ritual lies at the heart of all social activity. As for Freud, this ritual process is the invention of society. In an interesting permutation of the traditional totemism argument, Girard argues that the group becomes conscious of itself as a group in relationship to the sacrificed totem victim not by means of identification with it but by contrast to it as “other.” The danger that looms when an “other” has been identified and characterized with projected desire and violence gives rise to the ritualized killing of sacrifice. The solidarity of the group is ultimately the result of this ritualization, understood in Freudian terms as the repression of original impulses of desire and violence. In addition to Freud, there are

Frazerian echoes of the dying and reviving god in Girard’s description of the killing of the victim and its eventual deification when resurrected as a god, and even Eliadean themes of the ritual repetition of primal myths are pulled into Girard’s larger theory.

The writings of Joseph Campbell (1904–1987), which became quite popular in the 1960s and again in the late 1980s, have offered another curious amalgamation of the myth and ritual school (especially Raglan), psychoanalysis (via the work of Carl

Jung), and comparative mythological studies (primarily Eliade). Campbell’s synthetic approach is obvious in the four functions he outlined for both myth and ritual: a metaphysical or mystical function that induces a sense of awe and reverence in human beings; a cosmological function that provides a coherent image of the cosmos; a sociological function that integrates and maintains individuals within a social community; and a psychological function that guides the individual’s internal development.80 Campbell is also known for his theory of a universal “monomyth,” a type of

Ur-myth underlying all myths and many other cultural developments, which is composed of basic stages like separation from the world, penetration to a source of great power, and then a life-enhancing return. This monomyth, he argued, is most readily perceived in the myth of the hero, which echoes the theme of the dying and rising god. Campbell’s claims for the universality and modern relevance of the monomyth— that it is found everywhere and is the key to unlocking everything—captures something of the vision of ritual elaborated by both the early phenomenologists and the myth and ritual schools.81 In the guise of Campbell’s best known works—Primitive Mythology, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Myths to Live By, The Mythic Image, and The Power of Myth—the theories of these schools continue not only to influence people’s interpretations of the world of religion but also to shape that world.82