MYTH AND RITUAL

BY LORD RAGLAN

IT IS easy to refute the old-fashioned theories of myth, such as that it is garbled history, or is the product of savage speculation, but since the purpose of this paper is to explain what a myth is, it is perhaps only necessary to say that in the view of many modern students it is simply a narrative associated with a rite.

Let us take a simple example. In Leviticus X we are told how Aaron performed a sacrifice: “his sons handed him the blood, which he splashed on the altar all round ... the fat he burned on the altar.” In Chapter XVII, in a later passage, we are told that “the priest must splash the blood on the altar ... burning the fat as a soothing odour for the Eternal.”

These are two descriptions of the same rite, but whereas the latter is in the form of a simple instruction, the former is a myth, that is to say an account of the rite told as a narrative of what somebody once did. It must have been written down at a time when it was still thought necessary to validate the rite by attributing its origin to an ancient and sacred person, and this is what myths often do. The latter passage must date from a time when the ritual had become so firmly established that a simple instruction was all that was required.

Myths as a rule are untrue historically, because most rituals have been developed gradually, and not as the result of some historical incident; but this is not necessarily so. Consider the pilgrimage to Canterbury, which resulted from the murder of Becket. As the pilgrims performed the ritual of touring the cathedral and singing hymns or praying at spots connected with Becket’s life and death, the story of these was recited. This story, since it explained the ritual, could properly be described as a myth.

An interesting case is that of Guy Fawkes. The fifth of November was the date of an ancient fire festival, of which the burning of a human victim must once have formed a part. Fawkes was in fact hanged and not burnt, but his story has nevertheless been adopted as the myth of this ritual.

We must make it clear, however, that myths, whether or not they have any historical basis, may be of the highest religious importance, and for this purpose we turn to Hooke. He says that “the story embodied in the myth of the slaying of Tiamat is not historical in the strict sense. . . . But it possesses a truth which is both wider and deeper than the narrow truth of history. . . . The essential truth of the myth lies in the fact that it embodies a situation of profound emotional significance, a situation, moreover, which is in its nature recurrent, and which calls for the repetition of the ritual which deals with the situation and satisfies the need evoked by it. ... It is in this sense that we may speak of the Christian myth, without the slightest reflection on the historical character of the events out of which the Christian religion sprang. The term is used to express the fact of the ever-recurring repetition of a situation in which human need is met by the life-giving potency of a sacral act.”¹

And James quotes Tennyson: “For wisdom dealt with mortal powers, / Where truth in closest words shall fail, / And truth embodied in a tale / Shall enter in at lowly doors.” He says that the term myth may be applied in this sense to the sacred story of Christian tradition, and so employed should give offense to none.²

According to Hooke, then, a myth with its associated ritual is something which meets a recurrent human need, and we can safely say that this need is for life and prosperity in one form or another. This applies to every genuine myth. Even in so simple a myth as that of Guy Fawkes, the implication of “I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot” is that if it were forgotten things might be easier for traitors. Hocart has shown that, in the case of the Hindu myths, “the myth itself confers, or helps to confer, the object of men’s desire—life.”³ We can then extend our definition and say that myth is not merely a narrative associated with a rite, but a narrative which, with or without its associated rite, is believed to confer life.

But some readers may say that this is not at all what they mean by myths. What they mean are highly imaginative stories about the miraculous rescue of a princess from a monster, or the vengeance of the gods on a king who has incurred their wrath; how could such stories be supposed to confer life? Anyone who makes this objection has obviously limited his study of mythology to those myths which the classical writers abstracted from their religious context and used as a basis for poetry and romance. Myths in their proper context are seen differendy, as will appear presently.

Those who regard myths as the products of the imagination have clearly not considered how the imagination works. Nobody can possibly imagine anything which has not been suggested to him by something which he has seen, heard, or read. Poets and novelists, by selecting from and combining ideas which have reached them in various ways, produce what are called works of the imagination, but those who formulated or recorded the myths could not have acted in this way. For the myths were so sacred that they could have been altered or added to only by those who believed themselves inspired, and even then to a very limited extent.

The kind of imagination which the myth-maker is, according to some, supposed to have possessed is in fact something which nobody has ever possessed. When Grote, for example, says that the ancient Greek, instead of seeing the sun as we see it, “saw the great god Helios, mounting his chariot in the morning in the east, reaching at midday the height of the solid heaven, and arriving in the evening at the western horizon with horses fatigued and desirous of repose,”⁴ he is postulating a type of mind which has never existed. The chariot of the sun was a ritual chariot, and the god Helios was seen in the ritual in the form of a priest who drove the chariot. The Christian believes that the consecrated wafer is the body of Christ, but what he sees is a wafer. In the same way, we may be sure, the ancient Greek believed that the sun was the god Helios, but what he saw was just the sun.

It has often been suggested that there is a myth-making stage through which all communities pass; but in that case all but the most primitive communities would have a mythology or traces of it, and if H. J. Rose is right that is not so. For he assures us that the earlier Romans had no mythology, and that the myths told of their gods by the later Roman writers were borrowings from the Greeks.⁵ The Romans had many rites, but these were not associated with myths because the gods were not fully personified, and without full personification there can hardly be mythology. But if the Romans had no mythology, how comes it that the Greeks, their neighbors and kinsmen, had such an elaborate mythology? The reason, unpopular with classical scholars but noted by many writers from Herodotus to Sir Arthur Evans and Hooke, is that many of the Greek myths were not native, but imported from Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia. Herodotus, as is well known, assigned an Egyptian origin to many elements in Greek religion and mythology; Hooke identifies Perseus with the Canaanite god Resheph; and Evans traces the Minotaur to the Euphrates. And in this connection Hooke notes that “both the Minotaur and Perseus myths involve an underlying ritual pattern of human sacrifice, and take us back to a stage in which the myth and ritual were united.”⁶

Even those scholars who are in general hostile to the view put forward in this paper have been driven to realize that in some cases at least myth is linked with ritual. Thus H. J. Rose, dealing with the mythical quarrel of Zeus and Hera, and the Plataean rite which “commemorated” it, says that “the legend has pretty certainly grown out of the rite, as usually happens.”⁷ And Sir William Halliday says “that the story of Lycaon, connected as it undoubtedly was with some form of human sacrifice which seems to have persisted up to the time of Pausanias, is an hieratic legend connected with the savage ritual of Lycaean Zeus, appears to me almost certain. The story of the serving up of Pelops by Tantalus may also have had a ritual origin and have been in the first place connected with some rite of human sacrifice and sacrament.”⁸

A. B. Cook refers the legend of Ixion, who was bound to a wheel, to a ritual in which a man was bound to a wheel and sacrificed in the character of the sun-god, and the legend of Triptolemus, who was borne over the earth in a winged chariot from which he introduced the blessings of corn, to a rite at Eleusis. “The protege of the goddess, mounting his winged seat, was swung aloft by means of a geranos or scenic crane.”⁹

We end our quotations from the classical scholars with one from J. A. K. Thomson, who says: “Not only is the Myth the explanation of the rite, it is at the same time, in part at least, the explanation of the god. To primitive minds it is of such transcendent importance to get the ritual exactly right (for the slightest deviation will ruin everything) that the worshippers will not proceed one step without authority. And who is their authority ? In normal circumstances the oldest man in the tribe, the worshipper who has been most frequently through this particular ceremony before. And his authority? Well, the oldest tribesman within his memory. And so the tradition goes back and back. . . . But it must end somewhere, and it ends, as a thousand instances show, in an imaginary divine founder of the rite, who becomes the centre of the Myth.”¹⁰

We may doubt whether the actual process was as Thomson suggests, but he correctly emphasizes the importance of the myth for the purpose of validating the rite. Hocart makes the same point when he writes: “If we turn to the living myth, that is the myth that is believed in, we find that it has no existence apart from the ritual.... Knowledge of the myth is essential to the ritual because it has to be recited at the ritual.”¹¹

Elsewhere, discussing Hindu mythology, he says that “we gradually come to realise that the sacrificer’s object is to get control of the’whole world—not temporal but ritual control; that is, he seeks to bend the forces of nature to his will so that they may produce plenty for him.... As the gods did, so must the sacrificer, for the sacri- ficer and his acolytes represent the gods. It is necessary that he should know the myth which describes how the gods succeeded.... The myth is a precedent, but it is more than that. Knowledge is essential for the success of the ritual.”¹²

Let us now turn to mythology as it is dealt with by students of the present-day savage, and begin with Malinowski. He says: “Myth, studied alive, is not symbolic but a direct expression of its subject-matter. . . . Myth fulfills in primitive culture an indispensable function; it expresses, enhances and codifies belief; it safeguards and enforces morality; it vouches for the efficiency and contains practical rules for the guidance of man.”¹³

Malinowski’s views have been amplified by Haimendorf in his account of the Raj Gonds, an Indian jungle tribe. He says: “The social norms regulating the tribal life of the Gonds are firmly rooted in mythology. They derive their validity from the rulings of culture-heroes and from the actions of deified ancestors recounted in epics and countless songs. The myths that tell of the origin of the Gond race and the establishment of the four phratries are more than history or folklore; they are the pragmatic sanction for institutions that determine the behaviour of every Gond towards his fellow-tribesmen, they are the vital forces inspiring the performance of the great clan feasts, and they define and authorise man’s relations with the divine powers on whom his welfare depends. A relationship of mutual enlivenment links myth and ritual: as the myths lend power to the ritual acts, so the symbolic enactment of mythical occurrences during the cardinal rites of the elan feasts endows the myths with reality. , . . It is in the sacramental rites based on the clan-myth that the unity of the clan attains realisation.”¹⁴

Of the Santals, a tribe of Northeastern India, Culshaw tells us that “many of the social activities of the Santals are based on myths, and the strength of their clan organisation is due in no small measure to its foundations in mythology. .. . When for any reason a piece of ritual associated with a myth falls into disuse, knowledge of the myth begins to die out; conversely, when the myth is looked upon as outmoded, the activity with which it is linked begins to lose its hold on the people’s imagination. . . . The decay of the ritual is leading to the disappearance of the ancient myth. It is nevertheless true that these stories do reveal the Santal view of the world. When they are told they call forth assent, and frequently in ordinary conversation the myths are cited in order to point a moral or clinch an argument.”¹⁵

Among the Tallensi of the Gold Coast, so Fortes tells us, “the complementary functions of chief ship and tendana-ship are rooted directly in the social structure, but are also validated by myths of origin and backed by the most powerful religious sanctions of the ancestor cult and the cult of the earth “¹⁶

Other examples could be given, but these should suffice to show that myth and ritual are as closely linked among modern savages as they were in the ancient civilizations. Are we justified, however, in concluding that every rite has or once had its associated myth and every myth its associated rite? I do not suggest that this can be proved, but I do suggest that it can be shown to be probable.

Let us first consider rites which have no myths, as, according to Rose, those of the early Romans. Had they lost their myths, or had they never had any? The Roman rites were largely of the character which is commonly called magical. Frazer and his followers took the view that magic was, to put it shortly, primitive religion, and since many magical rites have no myth, this if true would prove ritual to be older than myths. But I have elsewhere given reason to think that Frazer was mistaken, and that magic, far from,being primitive religion, is really degenerate religion, a form of religion, that is to say, in which people go on performing rites, but have forgotten why.¹⁷ In Europe and, I believe, in America, many people perform such rites as “touching wood” after boasting, throwing three pinches of spilled salt over the left shoulder, saluting a magpie, turning money in their pockets when they see the new moon. They do not know why they perform them, except that failure to do so would be followed by “bad luck.” It is difficult to believe that rites could have come into existence in such a vague and meaningless way, and it is probable that they were once associated with some deity or hero.

Evans-Pritchard spent some years in studying two tribes of the Southern Sudan, the Zande and the Nuer. Of the former he tells us that they have very few myths, and those he mentions have no close connection with the ritual.¹⁸ The Nuer, on the other hand, have many myths. Some of these explain the mythological relationships of the lineages, and “also explain the ritual symbols and observances of the lineages mentioned in them.”¹⁹ It seems more likely that the Zande myths should have become lost or detached from the ritual than that the Nuer myths and rites should have originated independently and then been fitted together.

We come now to what is perhaps the more important and interesting question, whether every myth once had its associated rite. That many myths, ancient and modern, have been associated with rites we have seen, but are or were there myths which were never associated with rites? That there are now such myths is obvious, but my suggestion is that these myths were once associated with rites, and that the rites ceased to be performed but the myths survived in the form of stories. Having become divorced from their rites and recited for other purposes, they gradually changed their character. How this comes about is discussed by W. J. Gruffydd. Of one story in the Mabinogion he says that “the four stages through which the tale has grown to its present form can be set down as follows: ist. stage—Mythology. Of Lugh-Leu as a god we have considerable evidence. 2nd. stage—Mythology becomes history. 3rd. stage—Mythological history becomes folklore. 4th. stage—Folklore is utilised to form literary tales.”²⁰ A deity or ritual figure may, that is to say, become in succession a pseudo-historical character, a fairy prince, and the hero of a saga or novel, and unscientific mythologists will assign to each of these four personages a totally different origin. It seems legitimate, however, to regard as myths such narratives, whether quasi-historical or quasi-fictitious, as suggest a ritual origin, and we shall now consider some such myths.

Human sacrifice, real or symbolical, has been a prominent feature of most religions. Nobody has succeeded in explaining it, and I shall make no attempt to do so, but its evolution seems to have been in four main stages. In the first it was the divine king who was regularly sacrificed; in the second somebody else was regularly sacrificed as a substitute for the divine king; with the progress of civilization came a third stage, in which a human victim was sacrificed in times of emergency, but at other times a pretense was made of killing him, but some other victim was substituted. In the fourth stage the victim was never human, but was usually treated in such a way as to indicate that it once had been.

Many myths describe or refer to the sacrifice of a human victim. Some of them, those of Lycaon, Pelops, and Ixion, have already been mentioned. I wish now to draw attention to some myths which suggest the pretended killing of a human victim. The best known of these is of course that of Abraham and Isaac. What happened at one time, no doubt, was that a human victim was brought to the sacrificing priest, who made a pretense of killing him but instead killed a ram, which was substituted at the last moment. The myth, in the usual way, explains and justifies this procedure by reference to an ancient hero.

A story which has a wide distribution in Europe and Asia is that of the Faithful Hound, which in its simplest form is as follows: “The master’s child is attacked by a wolf, but a hound which is guarding the child kills the wolf. The master on returning fails to see the child, but sees the hound covered with blood and believes that it has destroyed the child. He rashly kills the hound, but finds out his mistake when he discovers the child safe and the wolf killed.... It is generally agreed that this marchen is of Oriental origin.”²¹ I suggest that this was originally a myth describing and authorizing the substitution of an animal for a human victim.

The story of William Tell seems to have been told in many parts of Northern Europe long before it reached Switzerland,²² and is probably a myth, that is to say the account of a pretended or substitute human sacrifice.

I have already mentioned the Minotaur. His death is depicted on many Greek vases, where we see a man with a bull’s head being slain unresisting. He is said to have been the son of Queen Pasiphae, whom, incidentally, we know to have been a goddess worshipped in Laconia, by her intercourse with a bull. This does not suggest ritual until we compare it with the Vedic horse-sacrifice. Here, as so often, the wildest dreams of myth become the facts of ritual. A stallion was killed, the queen was made to lie beside it, and her next child was supposed to be its offspring. The king took part in this ritual, which most probably represents the substitution of a stallion for the king as victim. To be a ritually effective substitute the stallion had to be married to the queen. And at Athens the Queen Archon was married annually, in a building called the Ox-stall, to the bull-god Dionysus. (J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, VII [London, 1915] 30.) That these rites provide the clue to the myth of the Minotaur can scarcely be doubted.

Before considering myths which it is less easy to explain as narratives associated with ritual, we must discuss briefly two types of narrative which are not usually regarded as myths, the fairy tale and the saga. If we can show that these are, or were originally, associated with ritual, and can therefore on our definition be regarded as myths, we can avoid a good deal of hair-splitting. We can put all traditional narratives as regards their origin into one category, though it may be convenient to subdivide them according to the form which they have assumed.

Saintyves, in his study of Perrault’s Tales, has given us good reason to think that such familiar stories as Bluebeard, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Little Red Riding- hood are associated with rites, either seasonal rites or rites of initiation. He starts with the story called “The Fairies.” This story, variants of which are found in many countries, is of two sisters. One of them is kind to a fairy disguised as an old woman, and gives her food and drink; as a reward a jewel falls from her mouth whenever she speaks, and she marries a prince. The other sister is rude to the old woman and refuses to give her anything; as a punishment a frog falls from her mouth whenever she speaks, and she dies in misery. Saintyves shows that this story illustrates a ritual still performed in remote parts of France. On New Year’s Eve the women of the household prepare a room, with a table on which are a clean tablecloth, food, drink, and a lighted candle. The door and window are left open for the fairies to come in. Those who are punctilious in this will be prosperous throughout the year and if unmarried will make a successful marriage; those who are neglectful will meet with dire misfortunes.²³

This must suffice for the fairies, and we now turn to the sagas. It was formerly supposed that these were historical narratives, but it is now coming to be generally realized that they are novels based largely on myth. Danielli has found a pattern in many of the sagas, which briefly is as follows: The hero in youth is exiled and goes to the court of a king or chief, where he is insulted and treated with contempt. After some time a band of twelve berserks (which may mean “bear-men”) arrives under the leadership of one called Bjorn (Bear). These put the hero through various ordeals, and challenge him to fight one of them; he does so and is victorious. After this he successfully undertakes to kill a great bear or other monster which has been ravaging the neighborhood. He is then taken into favor by the chief, and is given a valuable sword and in some instances the chiefs daughter in marriage. The details vary, but there is enough regularity to leave little room for doubt that these are features of an installation ritual which have been adapted by the sagamen to their purpose of telling a good story.²⁴ In my book, The Hero, I have noted a number of other ritual features in the sagas.²⁵

The rites to which I refer are known to have existed, so that we may safely infer that the stories told in the sagas, in whatever form they reached the sagamen, were once genuine myths. There are, however, many stories in myth form which are not known to have had associated rites; are we justified in assuming that such rites once existed? It is useless to discuss such questions in the abstract; let us take an example. Malinowski tells the Trobriand story of the origin of death. In the olden days people did not die when they grew old, but were able to rejuvenate themselves by taking off their skins. They lost this power because once a girl failed to recognize her rejuvenated grandmother, and the latter in pique put her old skin on again.²⁶ This story is not an explanation; the Trobrianders, as Malinowski tells us, take no interest in explanations, and it obviously does not explain the fact of death. I suggest that it is a reminiscence of a new year ritual in the course of which an officiant, by taking off an old garment and putting on a new one, symbolically rejuvenated the world. I know of no such rite, but it may safely be postulated as the prototype of the many rites in which a change of dress symbolizes beginning of a new life.

In the foregoing I have drawn my evidence from books readily accessible to me, which unfortunately include few American ones. A cursory survey of American literature suggests, however, that in America as elsewhere many ethnologists have no idea that myths may have a function, and tell them as so many “Just So Stories.” I have found some exceptions. Thus Parsons, discussing the Hopi “emergence” myth, says “this myth is too explanatory of the ceremonial life to be told to rank outsiders.”²⁷Wheelwright says of the Navaho: “in the most complete versions of the myths the different forms of ceremonies are mentioned and often described.”²⁸ And Park, dealing with certain tribes of Colombia, says that the songs and dances conferred on the priests are among the themes which stand out in the myths.²⁹

In conclusion, I would ask what are the objections to the view which I have put forward. There are few students of mythology, I suppose, who would deny that there is in some cases a connection between myth and ritual, but there is what seems to me a surprising reluctance to accept the simple scientific principle that similar causes produce similar effects, and a belief that a wide range of causes, from the wildest speculation to the soberest regard for historical truth, may produce stories sufficiently similar to be classed together as myths. To explain this phenomenon some theorists invoke a mysterious force called convergence, which is apparently supposed to get hold of all kinds of different things and force them into the same mold. But it is divergence, rather than convergence, which obtains in matters of culture; hence the variety of sects and dialects, and of objects in our museums. Myths are similar because they arise in connection with similar rites. Ritual has been, at most times and for most people, the most important thing in the world. From it have come music, dancing, painting, and sculpture. All these, we have every reason to believe, were sacred long before they were secular, and the same applies to storytelling.

Cefntilla Court, Usk
Monmouthshire, England

¹ The Labyrinth, ed. S. H. Hooke (London, 1935), p. ix.

² E. O. James, Christian Myth and Ritual (London, 1933), p. viii.

³ A. M. Hocart, The Life-giving Myth (London, 1952), p. 16.

⁴ Quoted by A. M. Hocart, Social Origins (London, 1954), p. 5.

⁵ H. J. Rose, Primitive Culture in Italy (London, 1926), p. 43.

⁶ Myth and Ritual, ed. S. H. Hooke (London, 1933), pp. 2, 6.

⁷ H. J. Rose, A Handbook of Greek Mythology (London, 1933), P. 104.

⁸ W. R. Halliday, Indo-European Folktales and Greek Legend (Cambridge, 1933), p. 103.

⁹ A. B. Cook, Zeus, I (Cambridge, 1925), 211, 218.

¹⁰ J. A. K. Thomson, Studies in the Odyssey (Oxford, 1914), p. 54.

¹¹ A. M. Hocart, The Progress of Man (London, 1933), p. 223.

¹² Hocart, The Life-giving Myth, p. 13.

¹³ B. Malinowski, Myth in Primitive Psychology (London, 1926), p. 13.

¹⁴ C. von F. Haimendorf, The Raj Gonds (London, 1948), p. 99.

¹⁵ W. J. Culshaw, Tribal Heritage (London, 1949), p. 64.

¹⁶ M. Fortes, The Web of Kinship Among the Tallensi (Oxford, 1949), p. 3.

¹⁷ Lord Raglan, The Origins of Religion (London, 1949).

¹⁸ E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft among the Azande (Oxford, 1937), p. 442.

¹⁹ E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer (Oxford, 1940), p. 442.

²⁰ W. J. Gruffydd, Math vab Mathonwy (Cardiff, 1928), p. 81.

²¹ W. J. Gruffydd, Rhiannon (Cardiff, 1953), p. 59; cf. S. Baring-Gould, Curious Myths of the Middle Ages (London, 1892), p. 134.

²² Baring-Gould, Curious Myths, p. 119.

²³ P. Saintyves, Les contes de Perrault et les récits parallèles (Paris, 1923), p. 13.

²⁴ Mary Danielli, “Initiation Ceremonial From Norse Literature,” Fol\-Lore, LVI (1945), 229-245.

²⁵ Lord Raglan, The Hero (London, 1936), pp. 256, 264, 272, 278.

²⁶ Malinowski, Myth in Primitive Psychology, pp. 41, 81.

²⁷ E. C. Parsons, Pueblo Indian Religion, I (Chicago, 1939), 216.

²⁸ M. C. Wheelwright, Navaho Creation Myth (Santa Fe, 1942), p. 19.

²⁹ W. Z. Park, Handbook of South American Indians, II (Washington, 1946), 886.