ULRIKE BRUNOTTE
In its narrowest sense, the myth-ritual debate happened around 1900. Together with the advent of comparative anthropology in England, it marked a turning point in the analysis of classical European religions: the epistemological focus moved from a text-centric approach to the recognition of social practices and performances, and to visual cultures and material artifacts as mediators of religion. Yet still at the beginning of the 1970s, two eminent religious scholars publicly offered two completely contrary approaches to the myth-and-ritual question.1 In 1971, Geoffrey Stephen Kirk stated in Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures: “Therefore it will be wise to reject from the outset the idea that myth and religion are twin aspects of the same subject, or parallel manifestations of the same psychic condition just as firmly as we rejected the idea that all myths are associated with rituals.”2 Around the same time, in 1979, the Swiss Hellenist Walter Burkert developed a totally different position in his Sather Lectures, Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual.3 Burkert claimed: “And it was in this way that the complex of myth and ritual, though not indissoluble, became a major force in forming ancient cultures, and as it were, dug those deep vales of human tradition in which even today the streams of our experience will tend to flow.”4
How and in which context did the notion of a close connection between myths (beliefs, creeds, and symbols) and rituals (action, cult) start to emerge? For a long time, myths were understood as autonomous, sometimes even as a literary edifice of narratives about gods, heroes, and chthonic demons. The interest in rituals developed in Germany, France, and Great Britain roughly at the same time. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, Wilhelm Mannhardt5 began to conduct empirical surveys “in search of traces of belief in vegetation, grain, and wood spirits and related manners and customs.” About the same time Edward Burnett Tylor6 managed to interest the Anglo-Saxon public in “the peculiar features of primitive cultures outside Europe.”7 Comparative anthropologists created some temporal distance from the “primitives” through their stage model of evolutionism, yet the concepts of survivals or revivals imply a rather vague concomitancy.
It is no coincidence that the myth-ritual debate unfolded around 1900 in the intellectual center of the largest contemporary European colonial empire. If we follow David Chidester,8 comparative religious studies in general were not only a product of the Enlightenment, but first and foremost a result of the shock of religious and cultural pluralism experienced in the colonial contact zone.9 However, comparative religious studies, stimulated by the “Other” within colonial contact, also discussed issues of the hierarchy of thought (reason, meaning) and action (social practice) in the myth-ritual debate. In Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (1992), Catherine Bell argued that traditional theories of ritual reproduce a hierarchal dichotomy between thought and action, mind and body. She also emphasized the role of power structures in this discourse, especially the action-thought dichotomy in ritual theories.10
If one wanted to develop a rough outline of research positions concerning the changing relationship between myth and ritual, one could determine that mythology research was the predominant paradigm in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and was influenced by the Christian, often Protestant coding of the contemporary discourse. This position was captured by one single sentence: “A ritual is an enactment of a myth.”11 However, until the end of the nineteenth century, myths were the central object of research in religious historiography, often disassociated from both their associated rituals and social context. Myths were seen as a mainly prescientific explanation of nature;12 at the same time, they were perceived as an important source for the study of “primitive mentality.” Edward Burnett Tylor, the founder of the English anthropology, proposed an equally evolutionist and rationalist schema in which myths represented a primitive stage of human thought, detached from rituals: “Myth is the ancient counterpart to modern science.… It is an explanation of the physical world, not of ritual. It operates independently of ritual. It amounts to creed, merely expressed in the form of a story.”13 Ritual and therefore action were subordinate to mythos, belief, and ethos, and hence to thought: the ritual follows a nonmaterial content, which it enacts.14 This notion changed radically with the beginning of myth-ritualist theory around 1900.15
However, a new anthropological concept of ritual only became possible through a transdisciplinary development in European societies around the turn of the century. This trajectory replaced theories of religion based on the individual and its consciousness with approaches that perceived religion as mainly a social, public, and collective matter.
The first religious scholar who gave the ritual priority over the mythos was the biblical scholar, Semitist, and anthropologist William Robertson Smith.16 During his analysis of the archaic layers of Semitic religions in his book Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1889/1894), Robertson Smith concluded that rituals are more fundamental than myths (dogma). To him, ritual and practice appeared to be the oldest component of religion. In this context, myths and religious belief are secondary; they are primarily derived from the cult or have an etiological meaning: “So far as myths consist of explanations of ritual, their value is altogether secondary, and it may be affirmed with confidence that in almost every case the myth was derived from 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 creation of the worshipper.”17
Robertson Smith’s search for the oldest layers of religion, which he also tried to find in “survivals” as an ethnographer in the “field,” culminated in his then-revolutionary theory of sacrifice. In his opinion, sacrifice is not a gift to the gods but is a “communal performance, in which the participants constitute themselves as a moral community through the consumption of the sacred totem animal.”18 The medium for the cheerful communion and “joyous confidence”19 between the god and its worshipers is the flesh and blood of the sacrificial animal: “The leading idea in the animal sacrifices of the Semites, as we shall see by and by, was not that of a gift made over to the god, but of an act of communion, in which the god and his worshippers unite by partaking together of the flesh and blood of a sacred victim.”20 If all who share the meal are brothers, then the meal results in the recognition of the obligations of friendship and of fraternal relationships in all actions. According to Robertson Smith, all institutions of morality and duty take this ritual as their starting point.
Using the account of an author called Nilus from the fourth century BCE, Robertson Smith believed that he could reconstruct a “survival” of the “reportedly much older public ritual of a camel sacrifice in which all members of the tribe took part in.”21 Even if the historical pillars of his theoretical edifice are somewhat dubious and obsolete today,22 Robertson Smith’s theory of religion had significant ramifications. Its central notion is the creation of social cohesion—the highly emotional process of binding and bonding—through the collective ritual of sacrifice. The theory inextricably welds individuals’ bodily and emotional perception, collective ritual practice, and society (collective conceptions and institutions): “His interest in ‘Ritual institutions’ as social instruments influenced Durkheim, Freud,”23 and Marcel Mauss.
In his work The Elementary Forms of Religious Life,24 Émile Durkheim initially distinguished between “beliefs” and “rites”: “Between these two classes of facts, there is all the difference which separates thought from action.”25 However, he then established the collective ritual celebration as the social space in which the individual perception and collective action/affect are integrated and collective representations/conceptions are created. In contrast to Robertson Smith’s ideas, Durkheim believed that the “substance” or the “consubstantiality” in which the participants of the totemic sacrificial meal and orgy take part is not merely connected to consuming the “flesh/matter” of the “sacrifice”; “instead it is the corporeal conceived community itself, an apotheosis of the body of the Roman law.”26 For Durkheim, the sphere of the sacred (Sacré) coincided here with society and paved the way for scientific research into secular or civil rituals.
Following Wilhelm Mannhardt’s theory of vegetation cults and Robertson Smith’s theory of sacrifice, James George Frazer developed a significant and influential version of myth ritualism, especially in the first edition of The Golden Bough.27 Frazer focused on the vegetation cycle and the seasonal changes marked by New Year’s rituals and the mythical narratives about the dying and resurrection of the vegetation god or holy king. Myths and rituals are closely connected in his account.28 Still, Frazer’s concept of the relationship between ritual and myth is not congruent in his work: “One can find, strewn through the many volumes and editions of The Golden Bough, statements by Frazer supporting at least three different and incompatible theories concerning myth: euhemerism, intellectualism and ritualism.”29 He either preferred a rationalizing method of myth interpretation that means, like the Greek mythographer Euhemerus, that myth is a “supernatural” explanation of a historical event, or he interpreted ancient man as an intellectual who tried to understand and influence “natural law.” Admittedly, in Frazer’s evolutionary scheme of magic, religion, and science, something like “myth-ritualism [can] be found” only in the transitional stage from magic to religion: “The ritual operates on the basis of the magical law of similarity, according to which the imitation of an action causes it to happen. The ritual directly manipulated the God of vegetation.”30
In the same year as Robertson Smith, Jane Ellen Harrison,31 an expert on classical antiquity and the initiator of the Cambridge Ritualists, came to believe that rituals precede myths during her studies of ancient Greek religion. She began to revolutionize the study of antiquity, which had previously focused primarily on texts, literature, and “high culture,” by building on archeology, especially on Sir Arthur Evans’s32 discovery of the early Greek Mycenaean-Minoan culture on Crete and some studies of material artifacts and vase images that she interpreted in the light of and as ritual scenes. In Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens, published in 1890, she developed her first myth and ritual theory: “I have tried everywhere to get at, where possible, the cult as the explanation of the legend. Some of the loveliest stories the Greeks have left us will be seen to have taken their rise, not in poetic imagination, but in primitive, often savage, and I think, always practical ritual.”33
Together with her colleagues Gilbert Murray and Francis Macdonald Cornford, Harrison established the circle of the Cambridge Ritualists, which was later joined by Arthur Bernhard Cook.34 Robert Segal explained that “for them, myth-ritualism is likely the earliest stage of religion.”35 Harrison developed her second, much more complex myth-ritual theory in her book Themis: A Study of the Social Origin of Greek Religion.36 She theorized that myths, even collective beliefs, stem from the process of ritual dance; they are no mythical idea, but rather “a projection of group unity,”37 or an embodiment of collective effects. As she illustrated with regard to an initiation ritual found in the Kouretes hymn, the fact that “the god invoked … depends on the ritual that invokes him” does not mean that the ritual takes priority over the myth, the action, the song, or speech: “They probably arose together. Ritual is the utterance of an emotion, a thing felt in action, myth in words or thoughts. They arise pari passu.”38 In another part of the book, she wrote: “Myth is the spoken correlative of the acted rite, the thing done; it is to legomenon as contrasted with or rather as related to to drômenon.”39 Because Harrison linked her model of myth directly to the enactment of the cult, to song and dance, her second myth-ritual theory approximated the performative theory of the speech act. The most prominent contemporary religious scholar to take up Harrison’s myth ritualism is Walter Burkert.40 However, in theater studies, Jane Harrison is currently being rediscovered as a pioneer of a performative theory of drama.41
The anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski also engaged with myth ritualism and gave it a functional edge. For him, myths work as a charter for customs, rights, rituals, and institutions: “Society depends on myth to spur adherence to rituals.”42 In a similar vein, Clyde Kluckhohn argued in 1942 that there is “an intricate interdependence of myth … with ritual and many other forms of behaviour.”43 Edmund Leach came close to Harrison’s second myth-ritual theory when he wrote: “Myth implies ritual, ritual implies myth; they are one and the same.… As I see, myth regarded as a statement in words ‘says’ the same thing as ritual regarded as a statement in ‘action.’ ”44
In 1933, the Old Testament scholar Samuel Henry Hooke published his programmatic essay “The Myth and Ritual Pattern of the Ancient East.” It was a part of his edited volume Myth and Ritual: Essays on the Myth and Ritual of the Hebrews in Relation to the Culture Pattern of the Ancient East.45 Following the title of the anthology, the ensuing academic school was termed the Myth and Ritual School. It assumed that a unified cult pattern existed in the entire Orient, in which kingship played a central role. Hooke focused on the analysis of the Babylonian New Year’s festival, which ritually dramatized the appointment of the king with Marduk’s mythic fight against the chaos-water snake Tiamat and made it present through the recitation of the myth in the Babylonian creation song Enuma Elish. With almost no reference to Frazer or the Cambridge Ritualists, Hooke developed an incoherent myth-ritual theory, which finally placed the myth as the representation of godly deeds “in illo tempore”46 above the ritual: “It is the story which the ritual enacts. This is the sense in which the term ‘myth’ is used in our discussion. The original Myth, inseparable in the first instance from its ritual, embodies in more or less symbolic fashion, the original situation which is seasonally reenacted in the ritual.”47 A number of biblical scholars and orientalists, especially British and Scandinavian scientists, were inspired by Hooke’s approach.48
Even if one leaves the field of the classical myth and ritual debate, the epistemological tension between thought (myth, symbol) and action (ritual) remains prevalent in newer ritual theories. As Talal Assad49 and then especially Catherine Bell have argued, the role of ritual is sometimes seen as mediating the dichotomy of thought and action. Nevertheless, in many theories of ritual, the starting point of theorizing ritual is still the tension between action and thought.
For example, Roy A. Rappaport, who took up the work of Durkheim, Austin/Searle, and Levi-Strauss, saw formalism as the commonality between performative speech acts and rituals. Rituals provide a basic structure for social existence. They are repetitive acts, “not entirely encoded by the performers,50 which refer to a ‘higher [being].’ ” In contrast to Durkheim, Rappaport’s “transcendental” did not coincide with “society”: “Religion’s major conceptual and experiential constituents, the sacred, the numinous, the occult, and the divine, and their integration into the Holy, are creations of ritual.”51
However, his theory of ritual was ambivalent. On the one hand, he tried to focus on the power of ritual actions: as “meta-performative actions,” rituals do not perform mythical scripts but they cause something themselves. In their performance, they generate and confirm the cultural codes, conventions, and social rules of society: “I will argue that social contract, morality and the establishment of convention are intrinsic to ritual’s form.”52 On the other hand, he conceptualized rituals as “prior” encoded symbolic actions. In ritual acts, those participating submit themselves to “something ‘higher,’ they are taken up by something higher.”53 Sometimes, Rappaport even compared “intentionless” ritual action with genetically coded animal behavior, which dictates particular gestures.
At times, the dichotomy between act and thought can escalate into the question of the meaning or meaninglessness of rituals. Especially where the construction and analysis of meaning in religious and cultural systems is concerned, as in Clifford Geertz’s work, rituals play the role of intermediaries. Combining Durkheimian and Weberian approaches, Geertz first distinguished between “ethos” and “worldview”; “ethos” denotes dispositions like “mood” and “motivations,” while “worldview” captures the more cognitive aspects of the “real,” such as “ideas” and “notions.” In his analysis of the symbolic systems, the ritual space functions as the medium for synthesis: “In ritual, the world as lived and the world as imagined, fused under the agency of a single set of symbolic forms, turns out to be the same world.”54
If ritual theories define the ritual as action and then separate it from the conceptual-symbolic aspects of culture such as belief, myths, and meaning, then these dichotomist differences can be taken to extremes, according to Catherine Bell: “Ritual is then described as particularly thoughtless action—routinized, habitual, obsessive, or mimetic—and therefore the purely formal, secondary, and mere physical expression of logically prior ideas.”55
In 1979, Frits Staal published his famous article with the programmatic title “The Meaninglessness of Ritual.”56 On the basis of his research on the Vedic ritual of the fire epiphany, Staal reached a radical conclusion: formalist ritual theories focus on the technique and a ritual’s exact repetitive sequence of action. According to Staal, a ritual does not refer to something “prior” that was coded symbolically: “It is characteristic of a ritual performance, however, that it is self-contained and self-absorbed. The performers are totally immersed in the proper execution of their complex task. Isolated in their sacred enclosure, they concentrate on correctness of act, recitation and chant. Their primary concern, if not obsession, is with rules. There are no symbolic meanings going through their minds when they are engaged in performing ritual.”57
For Staal, the ritual is “pure activity.”58 In this sense, his understanding approximates the concept of a ceremony, which is first and foremost about the correct observance of rules. But “if ritual is useless this does not imply it may not have useful side-effects. It is obvious, for example, that ritual creates a bond between the participants, reinforces solidarity, preserves morale and constitutes a link to the ancestors.”59 Staal denoted prelinguistic rituals as early forms of pure activity and compared them to bird songs, which, as a succession of sounds or movements, cannot be allocated a direct function.
Following Staal, Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw also detached rituals from symbolic or functional meaning in their much-discussed book The Archetypal Actions of Ritual, published in 1994. In their study of the Jain Puja, they differentiated between ritual action and everyday action through the Jainists’ own reversal of intentionality, as “they learn how to perform ritual acts and have them inscribed in their bodies separately from prototypical ideas they may come to have of them.”60 If rituals function at all as a means to convey messages, then they do so through embodied emotional states that are expressed in dance, gestures, or music.
Even within the most recent theories of ritualization, a certain tension remains between opposed concepts: ritual action is seen as, on the one hand, a meaningless and thoughtless repetitive behavior and, on the other hand, the result of a similar focus on unconscious incorporated mechanisms that defines rituals as “making sense” on both levels, physical and cognitive. In these latter theories, rituals represent a creative, performative practice. According to Klaus-Peter Köpping, the tension between the two approaches might be resolved by dint of “the habitus-concept as the core concept of praxis. If we assume with Bourdieu that people in daily practice demonstrate the unconscious mastering of their system, then ritual performance can be understood as ‘regulated improvisation,’ which makes possible the ‘intentionless’ emergence of the unexpected so that the unexpected and involuntary almost appears as a result of the regulatedness of ritual redundancy and formality.”61
In the production of a “ritual sense” within processes of ritualization, Catherine Bell also saw a kind of embodied or incorporated knowledge that enables us to perform rituals and reproduce dispositions but also to create and shape future transformations. The approach to ritual as ritualization and often-unconscious habitus can perhaps overcome the theoretically constructed gap between thought and action, ritual and myth, and body and mind.
NOTES
1. Henrik S. Versnel, Transition and Reversal in Myth and Ritual (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 19.
2. Geoffrey Stephen Kirk, Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 31.
3. Walter Burkert, Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).
4. Ibid., 58.
5. Wilhelm Mannhardt, Roggenwolf und Roggenhund: Beitrag zur Germanischen Sittenkunde (Danzig: Constantin Ziemssen, 1865–66); Wilhelm Mannhardt, Die Korndämonen (Berlin: Borntraeger, 1868); Wilhelm Mannhardt, Antike Wald- und Feldkulte (Berlin: Borntraeger, 1875–77).
6. Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture (London: J. Murray, 1871).
7. Versnel, Transition, 20.
8. David Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996).
9. Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 33–40.
10. Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 6.
11. Clyde Kluckhohn, “Myths and Rituals: A General Theory,” Harvard Theological Review 35 (1942): 49.
12. Cf. Robert A. Segal, Myth: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
13. Robert A. Segal, “Myth and Ritual,” in Theorizing Rituals: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts, ed. Jens Kreinath, Jan Snoek, and Michael Stausberg (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 103.
14. Cf. the instructive study by Talal Asad on the change of the concept of ritual from text to attitude around 1900. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 55–79.
15. Segal, “Myth and Ritual,” 101.
16. Hans G. Kippenberg, “William Robertson Smith (1846–1894),” in Klassiker der Religionswissenschaft: Von Friedrich Schleiermacher bis Mircea Eliade, ed. Axel Michaels (Darmstadt: Beck, 1997), 67.
17. William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (London: Transaction, 2002), 18.
18. Hans G. Kippenberg, “Emile Durkheim,” in Michals, Klassiker der Religionswissenschaft, 108.
19. William Robertson Smith, “Lecture VII,” in Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, 255.
20. William Robertson Smith, “Lecture VI,” in Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, 227.
21. Kippenberg, “Robertson Smith,” 71.
22. Erhard Schüttpelz, Die Moderne im Spiegel des Primitiven (Paderborn: Fink, 2005), 112; Robert Alun Jones, “Robertson Smith, Durkheim, and Sacrifice: An Historical Context for The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life,” in Emile Durkheim: Critical Assessments, ed. Peter Hamilton (London: Routledge, 1990), 3:376–404.
23. Versnel, Transition, 21.
24. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. J. W. Swain (New York: Free Press, 1965).
25. Ibid., 51.
26. Erhard Schüttpelz, “Wunsch, Totemist zu warden: Robertson Smiths totemistische Opfermahlzeit und ihre Fortsetzungen bei Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud und Elias Canetti,” in Verschlungene Grenzen: Anthropophagie in Literatur und Kulturwissenschaften, ed. Annette Keck, Inka Kording, and Anja Prochaska (Tübingen: Narr, 1999), 279. See Kippenberg, “Robertson Smith,” 30.
27. James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, 1st ed. (London: MacMillan, 1894).
28. Robert Ackermann, The Myth and Ritual School: J. G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists (New York: Garland, 1991), 49. As Frazer clearly stated in his foreword: “I have made great use of the works of the late W. Mannhardt, without which, indeed, my book could scarcely haven been written.”
29. Ibid., 55.
30. Segal, “Myth and Ritual,” 101–21, 105.
31. See Ulrike Brunotte, Das Wissen der Dämonen: Gender, Performativität and Materielle Kultur im Werk von Jane Ellen Harrison (Würzburg: Ergon, 2013).
32. For Evan’s discoveries and their immediate importance for Harrison, see Jane Ellen Harrison, Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens (London: Macmillan, 1890).
33. Ibid., iii.
34. Ackermann, The Myth and Ritual School, 3.
35. Segal, “Myth and Ritual,” 108.
36. Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis: A Study of the Social Origin of Greek Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912).
37. Ibid., 48.
38. Ibid., 16.
39. Ibid., 328.
40. Cf. Henrik S. Versnel, “From Harrison to Burkert,” in Transition and Reversal in Myth and Ritual (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 51.
41. Erika Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetik des Performativen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004), 45ff.
42. Segal, “Myth and Ritual,” 111.
43. Kluckhohn, “Myths and Rituals,” 54.
44. Edmund Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure (London: Athlone, 1954), 11–12.
45. Samuel Henry Hooke, ed., Myth and Ritual: Essays on the Myth and Ritual of the Hebrews in Relation to the Culture Pattern of the Ancient East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933).
46. Cf. the term by Mircea Eliade.
47. Samuel Henry Hooke, “The Myth and Ritual Pattern of the Ancient East,” in Myth and Ritual (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1933), 1–14, 3.
48. Cf. Versnel, Transition, 35.
49. Talal Assad, “Toward a Genealogy of the Concept of Ritual,” in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
50. Ray A. Rappaport, Religion and Ritual in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 27.
51. Ibid., 3.
52. Ibid., 26.
53. Andrea Bellinger and David J. Krieger, eds., Ritualtheorien: Ein einführendes Handbuch (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1998), 21.
54. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 112–13.
55. Bell, Ritual Theory, 19.
56. Frits Staal, “The Meaninglessness of Ritual,” Numen 26 (June 1979): 2–22.
57. Ibid., 3.
58. Ibid., 9.
59. Ibid., 11.
60. Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw, The Archetypal Actions of Ritual (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 266.
61. Klaus-Peter Köpping, “Transformationen durch performative Verkörperung in japanischen Ritualen,” in Im Rausch des Rituals: Gestaltung und Transformation der Wirklichkeit in körperlicher Performanz, ed. Klaus-Peter Köpping and Ursula Rao (Hamburg: LIT, 2000), 188.