sympathy, without any moral idea, just as modern man is touched
with melancholy at the falling of the autumn leaves.
(Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, p. 392)
In other words, originally, there was just the ritualistic sacrifice of the god Adonis, plus whatever nonmythic reason was given for it. That ritual involved not only the killing but also the mourning and, too, the hope for Adonis’ rebirth. Once the reason for the ritual was forgotten, the myth of Adonis as the dying and rising god of vegetation was created to account for the ritual. As pagan rather than Christian, the myth did not judge the killing sinful.
One major limitation of Smith’s theory is that it explains only myth and not ritual, which is simply presupposed. Another limitation is that the theory obviously restricts myth to ritual, though Smith does trace the subsequent development of myth independent of ritual. Yet in so far as myth as even an explanation of ritual typically involves the action of a god, myth from the start is about more than sheer ritual, as Smith himself grants.
E. B. Tylor
In claiming that myth is an explanation of ritual, Smith was denying the standard conception of myth, espoused classically by E. B. Tylor. According to Tylor, let us recall, myth is an explanation of the physical world, not of ritual, and operates independently of ritual. Myth is a statement, not an action, and amounts to creed, merely presented in the form of a story. For Tylor, ritual is to myth as, for Smith, myth is to ritual: secondary. Where for Smith myth presupposes ritual, for Tylor ritual presupposes myth. For Tylor, myth functions to explain the world as an end in itself. Ritual applies that explanation to control the world. Ritual is the application, not the subject, of myth. The subject remains the world. Both because ritual depends on myth and, even more, because explanation is for Tylor more important than control, myth is a more important aspect of religion than ritual. Smith might as
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Myth
well, then, have been directing himself against Tylor in stating that ‘religion in primitive times was not a system of beliefs with practical applications’ but instead ‘a body of fixed traditional practices’.
Smith is like Tylor in one key respect. For both, myth is wholly ancient. Modern religion is without myth – and without ritual as well. Myth and ritual are not merely ancient but primitive. In fact, for both Tylor and Smith, ancient religion is but a case of primitive religion, which is the fundamental foil to modern religion. Where for Tylor modern religion is without myth and ritual because it is no longer about the physical world and is instead a combination of ethics and metaphysics, for Smith modern religion is without myth and ritual because it is a combination of ethics and creed. For Tylor, modern religion, because bereft of myth, is a come-down from its ancient and primitive height. For Smith, modern religion, because severed from myth and, even more, from ritual, is a leap beyond its ancient and primitive beginnings. The epitome of modern religion for Smith is his own vigorously anti-ritualistic, because anti-Catholic, Presbyterianism. The main criticism to be made of both Tylor and Smith is their confinement of myth and ritual alike to ancient and primitive religion.
J. G. Frazer
In the several editions of The Golden Bough J. G. Frazer developed the myth-ritualist theory far beyond that of his friend Smith, to whom he dedicates the work. While The Golden Bough is best known for its tripartite division of all culture into the stages of magic, religion, and science, the bulk of the tome in fact concerns an intermediate stage between religion and science – a stage of magic and religion combined. Only in this in-between stage, itself still ancient and primitive, is myth-ritualism to be found, for only here do myths and rituals work together.
Frazer, rarely consistent, actually presents two distinct versions of myth-ritualism. In the first version, the one already discussed in
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Chapter 1, myth describes the life of the god of vegetation, the chief god of the pantheon, and ritual enacts the myth describing his death and rebirth. 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 clearest example of this brand of magic
is voodoo. The ritual directly manipulates the god of vegetation, not vegetation itself, but as the god goes, so automatically goes vegetation. That vegetation is under the direct control of a god is the legacy of religion. That vegetation can be controlled, even if only indirectly through the god, is the legacy of magic. The combination of myth and ritual is the combination of religion and magic:
Thus the old magical theory of the seasons was displaced, or rather supplemented, by a religious theory. For although men now attributed the annual cycle of change primarily to corresponding changes in their deities, they still thought that by performing certain magical rites they could aid the god who was the principle of life, in his struggle with the opposing principle of death. They imagined that they could recruit his failing energies and even raise him from the dead.
(Frazer, The Golden Bough, p. 377)
The ritual is performed when one wants winter to end, presumably when stored-up provisions are running low. A human being, often the king, plays the role of the god and acts out what he thereby magically induces the god to do.
In Frazer’s second, till now unmentioned, version of myth-ritualism the king is central. Here the king does not merely act
the part of the god but is himself divine, by which Frazer means that the god resides in him. Just as the health of vegetation depends on the health of its god, so now the health of the god depends on the health of the king: as the king goes, so goes the god of vegetation, and so in turn goes vegetation itself. To ensure a steady supply of food, the community kills its king while he is
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still in his prime and thereby safely transfers the soul of the god to his successor:
Myth
For [primitives] believe . . . that the king’s life or spirit is so sympathetically bound up with the prosperity of the whole country, that if he fell ill or grew senile the cattle would sicken and cease to multiply, the crops would rot in the fields, and men would perish of widespread disease. Hence, in their opinion, the only way of averting these calamities is to put the king to death while he is still hale and hearty, in order that the divine spirit which he has inherited from his predecessors may be transmitted in turn by him to his successor while it is still in full vigour and has not yet been impaired by the weakness of disease and old age.
(Frazer, The Golden Bough, pp. 312–13)
The king is killed either at the end of a short term or at the first sign of infirmity. As in the first version, the aim is to end winter, which now is attributed to the weakening of the king. How winter can ever, let alone annually, ensue if the king is removed at or even before the onset of any debilitation, Frazer never explains.
In any event this second version of myth-ritualism has proved the more influential by far, even though it actually provides only a tenuous link between religious myth and magical ritual. Instead of enacting the myth of the god of vegetation, the ritual simply changes the residence of the god. The king dies not in imitation of the death of the god but as a sacrifice to preserve the health of the god. What part myth plays here, it is not easy to see. Instead of
reviving the god by magical imitation, the ritual revives the god by a transplant.
In Frazer’s first, truly myth-ritualist scenario myth arises prior to ritual rather than, as for Smith, after it. The myth that gets enacted in the combined stage emerges in the stage of religion and therefore antedates the ritual to which it is applied. In the combined stage myth, as for Smith, explains the point of ritual, but from the outset.
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Myth gives ritual its original and sole meaning. Without the myth of the death and rebirth of that god, the death and rebirth of the god of vegetation would scarcely be ritualistically enacted. Still, myth for Frazer, as for Tylor, is an explanation of the world – of the course of vegetation – and not just, as for Smith, of ritual. But for Frazer, unlike Tylor, explanation is only a means to control, so that myth is the ancient and primitive counterpart to applied science rather than, as for Tylor, to scientific theory. Ritual may still be the application of myth, but myth is subordinate to ritual.
The severest limitation of Frazer’s myth-ritualism is not only that it, like Smith’s, precludes modern myths and rituals but also that it restricts even ancient and primitive myth-ritualism to myths about the god of vegetation, and really only to myths about the death and rebirth of that god.
Where Smith discusses the case of Adonis only in passing, Frazer makes Adonis a key example of the myth and ritual of the dying-and-rising god of vegetation. Consistently or not, Frazer actually places Adonis in all three of his pre-scientific stages of culture: those of magic, of religion, and of magic and religion combined.
Frazer locates the celebrated potted gardens of Adonis in his first, magical stage. In this stage humans believe that impersonal forces rather than gods cause events in the physical world. Ancient Greeks would have been planting seeds in earth-filled pots not to persuade a god to grant growth but, by the magical Law of Similarity, to force the impersonal earth itself to grow: ‘For ignorant people suppose that by mimicking the effect which they desire to produce they actually help to produce it.’ Because there are no gods in this stage, Adonis can hardly be a god of vegetation. Rather, he is vegetation itself. Vegetation does not symbolize Adonis; Adonis symbolizes vegetation.
In Frazer’s second, religious stage gods replace magical laws as the
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