THE RITUAL VIEW OF MYTH AND THE MYTHIC

BY STANLEY EDGAR HYMAN

THE ritual approach comes directly out of Darwin, and thus, I suppose, ultimately from Heraclitus, whose panta rei seems to be the ancestor of any dynamic account of anything. When Darwin concluded The Origin of Species (1859) with a call for evolutionary treatment in the sciences of man, he opened the door to a variety of genetic studies of culture, and when he showed in The Descent of Man (1871) that human evolution was insignificant organically although vastly speeded up culturally (we might not be so quick to say “ethically” as he was), he made cultural studies the legitimate heirs of evolutionary biology. The same year as The Descent, in response to The Origin, E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture appeared, drawing an immediate fan letter from Darwin. It staked off quite a broad claim to cultural studies in its subtitle “Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom.” Tylor’s general principle, almost his law, is that survivals are significant because they embody, sometimes in trivial or playful form, the serious usages of earlier stages. In material culture, it meant that such important tools as the bow and arrow, the fire drill, and the magician’s rattle evolved into the toys of children; in non-material culture, it meant that myths were based on rites, although, like many rationalists before him, Tylor believed that they had been consciously devised as explanations.

Tylor’s evolutionary anthropology, carried on by such successors as R. R. Marett and Henry Balfour, became the central tradition of British anthropology, but the emphasis gradually shifted from Tylor’s concern with belief and custom to the more tangible areas of social organization, economics, and material culture. Meanwhile, at Cambridge, a classicist named James G. Frazer had found Primitive Culture a revelation, and his interest in ancient survivals was broadened and extended by his friend William Robertson Smith’s studies of religion, in which Smith made use of the comparative method, invented by Montesquieu and developed by German philology. Weaving together the two main strands of Tylor’s evolutionary survivals and Smith’s comparative method, in 1885 Frazer began publishing a series of periodical articles on custom. When one of them, on a curious priesthood at Nemi in Italy, tied in with Smith’s ideas about the slain god and outgrew article size, he kept working on it and in 1890 published it as the first edition of The Golden Bough in two volumes, dedicated to Smith. For Frazer in The Golden Bough, myth is still Tylor’s rationalist “a fiction devised to explain an old custom, of which the real meaning and origin had been forgotten,”¹ and the evolution of custom is still Tylor’s “to dwindle from solemn ritual into mere pageant and pastime,”² but Frazer constantly approaches, without ever quite stating, a synthesis of the two, with myths not consciously-devised rational explanations, but the actual dwindling or later form of the rite. Long before 1915, when the third and final edition of The Golden Bough appeared, that synthesis had been arrived at.

Since 1882, Jane Ellen Harrison, Frazer’s contemporary at Cambridge, had been writing on Greek mythology and art, and in 1903, after she had seen a clay seal at Cnossos with its sudden revelation that the Minotaur was the king of Crete in a bull mask, she published Prolegomena to the Study of Gree\ Religion, which clearly stated the priority of ritual over myth or theology. Her book acknowledged the cooperation of Gilbert Murray at Tylor’s Oxford, and Frazer, F. M. Cornford, and A. B. Cook at Cambridge. Cook, whose book, Zeus, did not begin to appear for another decade, began publishing parts of it in periodicals about that time, and his important series “Zeus, Jupiter, and the Oak” in the Classical Review (1903) took an approach similar to Harrison’s. By the time Murray published The Rise of the Gree\ Epic (1907), reading such mythic figures as Helen and Achilles as ritual concretiza- tions, he was able to draw on some of this Cambridge work his earlier writings had influenced. By 1908, when the Committee for Anthropology at Oxford sponsored six lectures, published under Marett’s editorship later that year as Anthropology and the Classics, with the aim of interesting students of the humanities in “the lower culture,”³ students of the humanities at the sister university had been turning their attention to the lower cultures for two decades, and the seed Tylor planted had flowered elsewhere.

The watershed year was 1912, when Harrison published Themis, a full and brilliant exposition of the chthonic origins of Greek mythology, including an excursus on the ritual forms underlying Greek tragedy by Murray (to whom the book is dedicated), a chapter on the ritual origin of the Olympic Games by Cornford, and copious material from Cook’s forthcoming work. (Curiously, this book too had been inspired by a visit to Crete, where Harrison encountered the “Hymn of the Kouretes,” which suggested that ritual magic, specifically the rite of a year-daimon, was the central element in early Greek religion.) In Themis, Harrison made three important points with great clarity: that myth arises out of rite, rather than the reverse;⁴ that it is “the spoken correlative of the acted rite, the thing done; it is to legomenon as contrasted with or rather as related to to dromenon”⁵ (a Greek definition of myth is ta legomena epi tois dromenois ‘the things said over a ritual act’); and that it is not anything else nor of any other origin.⁶

Basic to this view, as Harrison makes clear, is a dynamic or evolutionary conception of process whereby rites die out, and myths continue in religion, literature, art, and various symbolic forms with increased misunderstanding of the ancient rite, and a compensatory transformation for intelligibility in new terms. Thus myths are never the record of historical events or people, but freed from their ritual origins they may attach to historical events or people (as Alexander was believed to be, or claimed to be, a god and the son of a snake, because mythic Greek kings like Cecrops had been ritual snake gods); they never originate as scientific or aetiological explanations of nature, but freed from their ritual origins may be so used (as stars have their positions in the sky because the mythic hero threw them there, but his origin is in rite, not primitive astronomy).

The ritual approach to mythology, or any form based on myth, thus cannot limit itself to genetic considerations. In the artificial division I have found most handy, it must deal with the three related problems of Origin, Structure, and Function. If the origin is the ancient anonymous collective one of ritual, the structure is intrinsically dramatic, the dromenon or thing done, but that form ceaselessly evolves in time in the chain of folk transmission. Here the considerations are not historic nor anthropological, but formal in terms of literary structure, principles of Gestalt organization, and dynamic criteria. In folk transmission, the “folk work” involves operations comparable to those Freud found in the “dream work”—splitting, displacement, multiplication, projection, rationalization, secondary elaboration, and interpretation—as well as such more characteristically aesthetic dynamics as Kenneth Burke’s principle of “completion” or the fulfillment of expectations, in the work as well as in the audience. In regard to function, as the myth or text alters, there is at once a changing social function, as the work satisfies varying specific needs in the society along Malinowskian lines, and an unchanging, built-in function best described by Aristode’s Poetics and Freudian psychology, carrying with it its own context, taking us through its structural rites. In other words, the book of Jonah in the reading satisfies our need to be reborn in the belly of the great fish as efficiently as the initiatory rites from which it presumably derived satisfied the same need in the initiates. If these are now as then “fantasy gratifications,” they are the charismatic experiences of great art now, as they were the charismatic experiences of organic religion then.

In a relatively short time, the ritual approach to folk study has met with remarkable success. There had of course been individual ritual studies in various areas long before 1912. Most of them were in the field of children’s lore, where ritual survivals, after Tylor had called attention to them, were readily apparent. Some of the earliest studies were William Wells Newell’s Games and Songs of American Children (1883), Henry Carrington Bolton’s The Counting-Out Rhymes of Children (1888), Alice Gomme’s The Traditional Games Of England, Scotland and Ireland (1894), and Lina Eckenstein’s Comparative Studies in Nursery Rhymes (1906). Much of this work has never been superseded, and similarly, the most impressive ritual studies we have of the Bible appeared at the turn of the century: for the Old Testament, William Simpson’s The Jonah Legend (1899), and for the New, John M. Robertson’s series of books on the mythic Jesus, beginning with Christianity and Mythology (1900). All of these people seem to have operated in relative isolation, independently working through to conclusions about their own material without knowing what was going on in other areas or recognizing the general application of their conclusions.

With the appearance of Themis, a powerful general statement of the theory buttressed by a prodigy of scholarship in several complicated areas of Greek culture, a “Cambridge” or “ritual” approach became generally available. Within a few years, its application to Greek studies had been enormously widened: Cornford’s From Religion to Philosophy (1912), traced the ritual origins of some basic philosophic ideas; Harrison’s Ancient Art and Ritual (1913), turned her theory on Greek plastic and pictorial arts; Murray tested his ritual forms on one tragic dramatist in Euripides and His Age (1913), (both it and Ancient Art and Ritual as popularizations for the Home University Library); Cornford tested the same forms on Greek comedy in The Origin of Attic Comedy (1914); and the first volume of Cook’s enormous storehouse of ritual interpretation, Zeus, appeared (1914).

The first application of the theory outside Greek studies was Murray’s 1914 Shakespeare Lecture, “Hamlet and Orestes,”⁷ a brilliant comparative study in the common ritual origins of Shakespeare and Greek drama. 1920 saw the appearance of Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, treating the Grail romances as the “misinterpreted” record of a fertility rite, and Bertha Phillpotts’ The Elder Edda and Ancient Scandinavian Drama, tracing the ritual sources of Northern epic poetry. The next year Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe appeared, claiming a real “Dianic cult,” the survival of the old pagan religion, persecuted by Christianity as witchcraft, the book constituting the first substantial excursion of the theory into history. In 1923, the widening ripples took in fairy tales, in P. Saintyves’ Les Contes de Perrault et les Recits Paralleles; folk drama, in R. J. E. Tiddy’s editing The Mummers Play; and law, in H. Goitein’s Primitive Ordeal and Modern Law. In 1927, A. M. Hocart’s Kingship appeared, tracing a great variety of material to a basic royal initiatory ceremony, and in 1929 Scott Buchanan’s Poetry and Mathematics (the first American work along these lines in the third of a century since Bolton) boldly proposed a treatment of experimental science in ritual terms, and imaginatively worked some of it out.

In the thirties, S. H. Hooke edited two important symposia, Myth and Ritual (1933) and The Labyrinth (1935), in which a number of prominent scholars studied the relationships of myth and ritual in the ancient Near East; Lord Raglan published Jocasta’s Crime, a ritual theory of taboo (1933), and his enormously influential The Hero (1937), which broadly generalized the ritual origins of all myth, as against the historical; Enid Welsford investigated the sources of an archetypal figure in The Fool (1935); Allen, Halliday, and Sikes published their definitive edition of The Homeric Hymns (1936), extending previous considerations of Greek epic and dramatic poetry into sacred lyric; and in the late thirties William Troy began publishing his as yet uncollected ritual studies of such writers as Lawrence, Mann, and Fitzgerald.

By the forties, old subjects could be gone back over with greatly augmented information. George Thomson combined a ritual and Marxist approach in Aeschylus and Athens (1941) and Studies in Ancient Gree\ Society (the first volume of which appeared in 1949); Rhys Carpenter amplified Murray’s earlier treatment of Homer in Fol\ Tale, Fiction and Saga in the Homeric Epics (1946); Lewis Spence brought Newell, Bolton, and Lady Gomme somewhat up to date in Myth and Ritual in Dance, Game, and Rhyme (1947); and Hugh Ross Williamson expanded Margaret Murray’s brief account (in The God of the Witches, 1933) of the deaths of Thomas a Becket and William Rufus as Dianic cult sacrifices in The Arrow and the Sword (1947). Venturing into fresh fields, Gertrude Rachel Levy in The Gate of Horn (1948), traced some ritual sources of culture down from the stone age, paying considerable attention to plastic and pictorial art; and in 1949 there were two important literary applications: Francis Fergusson’s The Idea of a Theater, a reading of modern drama in terms of the ritual patterns exemplified in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, and John Speirs’ “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” in Scrutiny, Winter 1949, the first of an important series of ritual studies of medieval English literature.

So far in the fifties half a dozen new territories have been explored and to some extent colonized. Theodor H. Gaster’s Thespis (1950) generalized a ritual origin for the whole body of Near East sacred literature; Gertrude Kurath’s articles on dance in the Funk and Wagnalls’ Dictionary of Folklore the same year embraced a body of primitive and folk dance forms in the same approach; Cornford’s luminous “A Ritual Basis for Hesiod’s Theogony” was published posthumously in The Unwritten Philosophy (1950, although it had been written in 1941); and C. L. Barber published an ambitious exploration of Shakespeare in “The Saturnalian Pattern in Shakespeare’s Comedy” in The Sewanee Review, Autumn 1951. Since then we have had the publication of Levy’s second volume, The Sword from the Stone (1953), a ritual genesis of epic; Herbert Weisinger’s Tragedy and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall (1953), a similar treatment of tragedy; and Margaret Murray’s third book on the Dianic cult, The Divine King in England (1954). In this listing I have made no attempt at completeness, confining it to those writers with whose work I am most familiar, and only one or two titles by each (Murray, Cornford, and Harrison have written about a dozen books each), but the breadth and variety of even this truncated list should make it obvious that the “Cambridge” view has gone far beyond the confines of Greek mythology, and that it is apparently here to stay.

Since the ritual approach to myth and literature does not claim to be a theory of ultimate significance, but a method of study in terms of specific significances, it can cohabit happily with a great many other approaches. If its anthropology has historically been Frazerian, the comparative generalization across many cultures, many of its most successful works, from Themis to Speirs on Gawain, have stayed narrowly within one area, and where it deals with social function, its anthropology is most profitably Malinowskian (if an unusually historical Malinowskian). The Boas tradition in American anthropology, with its bias against cross-cultural generalization and evolutionary theory, in favor of empirical cultural studies and known history, has often seemed inimical to the ritual approach at those key points. Many of the Boas rigidities, however, seem to have softened in the decade since his death: the new culture and personality anthropology from Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934) to E. Adamson Hoebel’s The haw of Primitive Man (1954) seems as cheerfully comparative as The Golden Bough; we are all neo-evolutionists once again; and Primitive Heritage (1953), Margaret Mead’s anthology with Nicholas Calas, calls for “the restoration of wonder,” and means, apparently, let us take Frazer and Crawley more seriously. If out of this comes a neo-Frazerian generalizing anthropology, based, not on dubious material wrenched out of its configuration, but on detailed and accurate field studies done with Boasian rigor, no one would welcome it more than the ritualists.

In regard to psychology, the ritual approach can draw centrally on Freudian psychoanalysis, informed by new knowledge and less circumscribed by ethnocentric patterns. This requires modernization without the loss of Freud’s central vision, which is tragic where such rebels as Adler and Jung and such revisionists as Fromm and Horney are cheery faith-healers; unshrinking where they bowdlerize; stubbornly materialist where they are idealist and mystic; and dynamic, concerned with process, where they are static and concerned with one or another variety of timeless elan vital. After we have brought the Frazerian anthropology of Totem and Taboo up to date and restored Freud’s “vision” of the Primal Horde, in Burke’s terms, to its place as “essence” rather than “origin,” the book remains our most useful and seminal equation of primitive rite with neurotic behavior, and thus the bridge to Burke’s own “symbolic action,” the private, individual symbolic equivalent for the ancient collective ritual. In the form of “symbolic action,” psychoanalytic theory gives us the other dimension of function, the wish-fulfillment or fantasy gratification, and can thus answer some of our questions about the origins of origins.

As Jung’s work increasingly seems to move toward mystic religion and away from analytic psychology, it appears to be of increasingly little use to a comparative and genetic approach. Strong as Jungian psychology has been in insisting on the universal archetypal identity of myth and symbol, its explanation of this identity in terms of the collective unconscious and innate awareness militates directly against any attempt to study the specific forms by which these traits are carried and transmitted in the culture (as did Freud’s own “memory traces”). As Jung is used in the work of Maud Bodkin⁸ or Joseph Campbell, as a source of suggestive insights, it seems far more to our purposes, and we can readily utilize Campbell’s universal “great myth” or “monomyth,” a concept itself derived from Van Gennep’s rites de passage: “a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power, and a life- enhancing return.”⁹ We must first, however, put the Jungian myth back on its roots, either a specific myth and text (literary study) or a specific culture and rite (anthropology). The ritual approach is certainly compatible with varieties of mysticism, as the conclusions of Weston’s From Ritual to Romance or Harrison’s Epilegomena to the Study of Gree\ Religion (1921) make clear, and Harrison was herself strongly drawn to Jung as well as to Bergson. Despite their examples, and the opinions of even so impressive a ritual poet as William Buder Yeats, the job of mythic analysis would seem to require a basic rational materialism, and a constant pressure in the direction of science and scholarship, away from mysticism and the occult. Within these limits of naturalism, and on the frame of this central concern with ritual, all possible knowledge and all approaches to myth, from the most meticulous motif- classification to the most speculative reconstruction of an z/r-text, can be useful, with pluralism certainly the desirable condition.

There are only two varieties of approach, I think, with which the ritual view cannot usefully coexist. One is the euhemerist, the idea that myths are based on historic persons or events. This theory has been driven back from rampart to rampart over the years, but it stubbornly holds to each new defensive position: if it is forced to give up a historic William Tell, it retreats to a historic Robin Hood; if the historic Orpheus even Harrison’s Prolegomena accepted in 1903 seems no longer tenable, perhaps Moses is; if there was no Leda and no egg, could there not have been a real Helen? By now, in regard to the great myths, we know that none of these is possible, even at those key points the Trojan War and the figure of Jesus. With stories unquestionably made up about real people, whether fictions about Napoleon or Eleanor Roosevelt jokes, it becomes a simple matter of definition, and if the euhemerists of our various schools want to call those stories myths, they are welcome to them. We find it more useful to apply some other term, insofar as the distinction between myth and history is a real and a basic one.¹⁰

The other approach to mythology that seems to offer no point of juncture with the ritual view is the cognitionist idea that myths derive from a quest for knowledge. In its nineteenth century forms, the theories that myths were personifications of nature, or the weather, or the sun and moon, it seems substantially to have died out; in various insidious twentieth century forms, the theories that myths are designed to answer aetiological questions about how death came into the world or how the bunny got his little furry tail, or that taboo is primitive hygiene or primitive genetics, it is still pervasive. Again, all one can say is that myths do not originate in this fashion, that primitive peoples are speculative and proto-scientific, surely, but that the lore they transmit is another order of knowledge. If they knew that the tabooed food carried trichinosis or> that the tabooed incestuous marriage deteriorated the stock, they would not save the first for their sacred feasts and the second for their rulers. Once more, if our various cognitionists want to call myth what is unquestionably primitive proto-science, like techniques for keeping a pot from cracking in the firing or seasonal lore for planting and harvesting, that is their privilege. The Alaskan Eskimos who took the Russian explorers for cuttlefish “on account of the buttons on their clothes,” as Frazer reports,¹¹ obviously had speculative minds and a sense of continuity between the animal and human orders not unlike that informing Darwin’s theory, but the difference between their myth of “The Great Cuttlefish That Walks Like a Man” (if they had one) and The Origin of Species is nevertheless substantial.

If we keep clearly in mind that myth tells a story sanctioning a rite, it is obvious that it neither means nor explains anything; that it is not science but a form of independent experience, analogous to literature. The pursuit of cognition in myth or folk literature has led to all the worst excesses of speculative research, whether the political slogans and events Katherine Elwes Thomas found hermetically concealed in nursery rhymes in The Real Personages of Mother Goose (1930), the wisdom messages, deliberately coded and jumbled, that Robert Graves uncoded in The White Goddess (1948), or, most recently, the secret fire worship Flavia Anderson discovered hidden behind every myth in The Ancient Secret (1953).

Among the important problems facing the ritual view at present is an adequate working-out of the relationship between ritual, the anonymous regular recurrence of an action, and history, the unique identifiable experience in time. The problem is raised dramatically in the latest book by Margaret Murray, one of the pioneers of ritual studies. Called The Divine King in England, it is the third in her series on the Dianic cult and easily her wildest. Where The Witch-cult in Western Europe named two historical figures, Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais, as voluntary sacrificial figures in the cult, and her second book, The God of the Witches, added two more, Thomas a Becket and William Rufus, the new book makes the bold claim on English history that “at least once in every reign from William The Conqueror to James I the sacrifice of the Incarnate God was consummated either in the person of the king or in that of his substitute,”¹² generally in a regular seven-year cycle. Since I have already reviewed the book at length for a forthcoming issue of Midwest Folklore, I can here only briefly summarize the problem. Murray’s historical excursion is not only dubious history (as reviewers have pointed out, showing the errors of dates and durations by which she gets her seven-year victims, the number jugglery by which she gets her covens of thirteen), it is totally unnecessary history. She is certainly right about survivals of the old religion into modern times, but she seems to be basically in error about the manner in which it survives, to be confusing origins with events. As the ancient rites die out in literal practice, their misunderstood and transformed record passes into myth and symbol, and that is the form in which they survive and color history, without being themselves the events of history. In English history, assuming as she does that the primitive divine king was once slain every seven years, the monarch and his subjects might very well feel an ominousness about each seventh anniversary, and might welcome the death of the king or some high personage, but the step from that to the idea that the dead man was therefore the voluntary victim of a sacrificial cult is the unwarranted one. Murray’s witch cult was a genuine wor^ ship of the old gods, surviving into modern times in a distorted form, but her Royal Covens are only the travesty of historical scholarship.

If the fallacy of historicity is still with us, the fallacy of aetiology may finally be on its way out. In Themis, as far back as 1912, Harrison wrote:

The myth is not at first aetiological, it does not arise to give a reason; it is representative, another form of utterance, of expression. When the emotion that started the ritual has died down and the ritual though hallowed by tradition seems unmeaning, a reason is sought in the myth and it is regarded as aetiological.¹³

In his recent posthumous volume edited by Lord Raglan, The Life-Giving Myth (1952), A. M. Hocart finally shows the process whereby myth goes beyond explaining the ritual to explaining other phenomena in nature, thus functioning as general aetiology. In Fiji, he reports, the physical peculiarities of an island with only one small patch of fertile soil are explained by a myth telling how Mberewalaki, a culture hero, flew into a passion at the misbehavior of the people of the island and hurled all the soil he was bringing them in a heap, instead of laying it out properly. Hocart points out that the myth is used aetiologically to explain the nature of the island, but did not originate in that attempt. The adventures of Mberewalaki originated, like all mythology, in ritual performance, and most of the lore of Hocart’s Fijian informants consisted of such ritual myths. When they get interested in the topography of the island or are asked about it, Hocart argues, they do precisely what we would do, which is ransack their lore for an answer. Our lore might include a body of geological process, and we would search through it for an explanation; theirs has no geology but tells the acts and passions of Mberewalaki, and they search through it similarly and come up with an explanation. It should take no more than this otie pointed example, I think, to puncture that last survival of the cosmological origin theories, the aetiological myth, except as a category of function.

After the relationship to history and to science or cognition, we are left with the relationship of ritual theory to belief. For Harrison, as for Frazer, ritual studies were part of comparative religion, and a hoped-for result, if not the ultimate aim, was finding a pattern in which a person of sense or sensibility could believe. Harrison concludes her essay in the Darwin centenary volume: “It is, I venture to think, towards the apprehension of such mysteries, not by reason only, but by man’s whole personality, that the religious spirit in the course of its evolution through ancient magic and modern mysticism is ever blindly yet persistently moving.”¹⁴ In the course of his researches, Darwin himself lost most of his faith, but for Asa Gray, as for some Darwinians since, the doctrine of evolution celebrated God’s powers and strengthened Christian faith. For John M. Robertson, the demolition of the historicity of Jesus was a blow against Christianity on behalf of free-thought; for W. B. Smith and Arthur Drews it was a way of purifying Christianity by purging it of legendary accretions. William Simpson seems to have hit on the idea of Jonah as an initiation ritual because he was preoccupied with such matters as a Freemason. There is apparently no necessary correlation between knowledge and belief; to know all is to believe all, or some, or none.

Most contemporary ritual students of myth, I should imagine, are like myself unbelievers, and it would seem to get progressively more difficult to acknowledge the essential identity of religious myths, and their genesis from the act of worship itself, the god out of the machinery, while continuing to believe in the “truth” of any one of them (or of all of them, except in the woolliest and most Jungian fashion). On the other hand, in Cults and Creeds in Graeco-Roman Egypt (1953), we saw Sir Harold Idris Bell, a professional papyrologist, produce a learned and impressive study of the pragmatic competition of religions in Hellenistic Egypt, with the constant proviso that one of those systems, Christianity, was not only morally superior to the others, but was the divinely inspired true faith. So perhaps to know all is to believe all.

Finally, then, a number of technical problems remain. In its brief history, the ritual view has illuminated almost the whole of Greek culture, including religion, philosophy, art, many of the forms of literature, and much else. It has done the same for the games, songs, and rhymes of children; the Old and New Testaments, epic and romance, edda and saga, folk drama and dance, folktale and legend, Near East religion, modern drama and literature, even problems in history, law, and science. A few forms of folk literature have not yet been explored in ritual terms, prominent among them the English and Scottish popular ballads (the present writer has made a tentative foray in that direction)¹⁵ and the American Negro blues. A ritual origin for the ballads presumes a body of antecedent folk drama, from which they evolve as narrative songs (as it in turn derives from ritual sacrifice), which hardly exists except in a few late poor fragments such as Robin Hood plays, and which must consequently be conjectured. Such conjecture is not impossible, but it is a hard job involving heavy reliance on that frail reed analogy, and it still awaits its doer. The blues raise serious problems. If they are a true folksong of ancient anonymous collective ritual origin, rather than a folk-transmitted song of modern composition, then they precede any American conditions experienced by the Negro and must have an African source. No trouble here, except that nothing like them has ever been found in Africa, perhaps because it does not exist, perhaps because it would look so different before its sea change that no one has yet identified it. In any case, a ritual origin for the blues constitutes a fascinating problem, although not a critical issue (too much obviously convincing ritual interpretation has been produced for the theory to stand or fall on any single form). A ritual account of the ballads and the blues would close two large chinks, and might keep out drafts even in the coldest climate of opinion.

The relationship of ritual and ritual myth to formal literature has hardly yet been touched. The brilliant work that should have inaugurated such a movement in literary criticism was Murray’s 1914 Shakespeare Lecture, “Hamlet and Orestes,” in which he showed the essential identity of the two dramatic heroes, not as the result of any direct linkage between the two, but because Shakespeare’s Hamlet, through a long Northern line of Amlethus, Amlodi, and Ambales, derived from precisely the same myth and rite of the Winter King—cold, mad, death-centered, bitter, and filthy—that Orestes derived from in his warmer clime. The plays are neither myth nor rite, Murray insists, they are literature, but myth and rite underly their forms, their plots, and their characters. (Greek drama itself represents a fusion of two separate derivations from ritual: the forms of Attic tragedy arise out of the sacrificial rites of tauriform or aegiform Dionysos, the plots of Attic tragedy come mostly from Homer; and the bloody plots fit the ritual form so well, as Rhys Carpenter showed most fully, because the Homeric stories themselves derive from similar sacrificial rites far from Mount Olympus.) In the four decades since Murray’s lecture, literary criticism has scarcely noticed it. A student of Murray’s, Janet Spens, published a ritual treatment of Shakespeare, An Essay on Shakespeare’s Relation to Tradition (1916), which I have never seen, but which Barber describes with serious reservations, and until his own essay almost nothing had been done along that line. Troy and Fergusson have dealt with a handful of novels and plays in ritual terms, Carvel Collins has written several essays on Faulkner, and the present writer has similarly tackled Thoreau and a few others, but there has been very little else.

The chief difficulty seems to lie in the need to recognize the relationship of literature to folk tradition, while at the same time drawing Murray’s sharp line between them. Literature is analogous to myth, we have to insist, but is not itself myth. There has been a great deal of confusion on this point, best exemplified by Richard Chase’s Quest for Myth and Herman Melville (both in 1949). Chase simply equates the two, defining myth in the former as “the aesthetic activity of a man’s mind,”¹⁶ turning Melville’s works in the latter into so many myths or mythic organizations. Here we ought to keep in mind a number of basic distinctions. Myth and literature are separate and independent entities, although myth can never be considered in isolation, and any specific written text of the protean myth, or even fixed oral text, can fairly be called folk literature. For literary purposes, all myths are not one, however much they may be one, the monomyth or ur-myth, in essence or origin. What such modern writers as Melville or Kafka create is not myth but an individual fantasy expressing a symbolic action, equivalent to and related to the myth’s expression of a public rite. No one, not even Melville (let alone Moritz Jagendorf) can invent myths or write folk literature.

The writer can use traditional myths with varying degrees of consciousness (with Joyce and Mann perhaps most fully conscious in our time), and he often does so with no premeditated intention, working from symbolic equivalents in his own unconscious. Here other arts closer to origins, like the dance, where the ritual or symbolic action is physically mimed, can be profoundly instructive. Just as there are varying degrees of consciousness, so are there varying degrees of fruitfulness in these uses of traditional patterns, ranging from dishonest fakery at one extreme to some of the subtlest ironic and imaginative organizations in our poetry at the other. The aim of a ritual literary criticism would be the exploration of all these relations, along with missionary activity on behalf of some of the more fruitful ones.

What begins as a modest genetic theory for the origin of a few myths thus eventually comes to make rather large claims on the essential forms of the whole culture. If, as Schroedinger’s Nature and the Gree\s (1954) shows, the patterns of Greek myth and rite have been built into all our physics until the last few decades, perhaps ritual is a matter of some importance. Raglan and Hocart argue that the forms of social organization arise out of it, Goitein throws in the processes of law, Cornford and Buchanan add the forms of philosophic and scientific thinking (perhaps all our thinking follows the ritual pattern of agon or contest, sparagmos or tearing apart, then anagnorisis or discovery and epiphany or showing-forth of the new idea). Even language itself suggests at many points a ritual origin. From rites come the structures, even the plots and characters, of literature, the magical organizations of painting, the arousing and fulfilling of expectation in music, perhaps the common origin of all the arts. If ritual is to be a general theory of culture, however, our operations must get more tentative and precise in proportion as our claims become more grandiose. We then have to keep distinctions even clearer, know so much more, and use every scrap of fact or theory that can be used. Having begun so easily by explaining the myth of the Sphinx, we may yet, working humbly in cooperation with anyone who will and can cooperate, end by reading her difficult riddle.

Bennington College
Bennington, Vermont

¹ J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, IV (London, 1915), 153.

² Frazer, The Golden Bough, IV, 214.

³ Anthropology and the Classics, ed. R. R. Marett (Oxford, 1907), p. 5.

⁴ J. E. Harrison, Themis (Cambridge, 1912), p. 13.

⁵ Harrison, Themis, p. 328.

⁶ Harrison, Themis, p. 331.

⁷ In Gilbert Murray, The Classical Tradition in Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1927), pp. 205-240.

⁸ Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (London, 1934), and Studies of Type-Images in Poetry, Religion, and Philosophy (London, 1951).

⁹ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York, 1949), pp. 10, 35.

¹⁰ Myth must also be distinguished from all the other things we loosely call by its name: legend, tale, fantasy, mass delusion, popular belief and illusion, and plain lie.

¹¹ Frazer, “Some Primitive Theories of the Origin of Man,” Darwin and Modern Science, ed. A. C. Seward (Cambridge, 1909), p. 159.

¹² M. A. Murray, The Divine King in England (London, 1954), p. 13.

¹³ Harrison, Themis, p. 16.

¹⁴ Harrison, “The Influence of Darwinism on the Study of Religions,” Darwin and Modern Science, ed. A. C. Seward, p. 511.

¹⁵ S. E. Hyman, “The Raggle-Taggle Ballads O,” The Western Review, XV (1951), 305-313.

¹⁶ Richard Chase, Quest for Myth (Baton Rouge, La., 1949), p. vii.