Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells
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many other cultural practices. They have myths of their own. Myth and ritual are therefore not coextensive.
Mircea Eliade applied a similar form of the theory but, going beyond Malinowski, applied the theory to modern as well as to ‘primitive’ cultures. Myth for Eliade, too, sanctions phenomena of all kinds, not just rituals, by giving them a primeval origin. For him, too, then, myth and ritual are not coextensive. But Eliade again goes beyond Malinowski in stressing the importance of the ritualistic enactment of myth in the fulfillment of the ultimate function of myth: when enacted, myth acts as a time machine, carrying one back to the time of the myth and thereby bringing one closer to God.
The most notable application of the myth-ritualist theory outside religion has been to the arts, especially literature. Jane Harrison (1913) daringly derived all art from ritual. She speculates that gradually people ceased believing that the imitation of an action caused the action to occur. Yet rather than abandoning ritual, they now practiced it as an end in itself. Ritual for its own sake became art, Harrison’s clearest example of which is drama. More modestly than she, Murray and Cornford rooted specifically Greek epic, tragedy, and comedy in myth-ritualism. Murray then extended the theory to Shakespeare.
Other standard-bearers of the theory have included Jessie Weston on the Grail legend, E. M. Butler on the Faust legend, C. L. Barber on Shakespearean comedy, Herbert Weisinger on Shakespearean tragedy and on tragedy per se, Francis Fergusson on tragedy, Lord RaglanÂon hero myths and on literature as a whole, and Northrop Frye and Stanley Edgar Hyman on literature generally. As literary critics, these myth-ritualists have understandably been concerned less with myth itself than with the mythic origin of literature. Works of literature are interpreted as the outgrowth of myths once tied to rituals. For those literary critics indebted to Frazer, as the majority are, literature harks back to Frazer’s second, not first, myth-ritualist version. ‘The king must die’ becomes the familiar summary line.
For literary myth-ritualists, myth becomes literature when myth is severed from ritual. Myth tied to ritual is religious literature; myth cut off from ritual is secular literature, or plain literature. When tied to ritual, myth can serve any of the active functions ascribed to it by myth-ritualists. Myth can even change the world. Bereft of ritual, myth is demoted to mere commentary.
Literary myth-ritualism is a theory not of myth and ritual themselves, both of which are assumed, but of their impact on literature. Yet it is a not a theory of literature either, for it firmly refuses to reduce literature to myth. Literary myth-ritualism is an explanation of the transformation of myth and ritual into literature.
The French-born literary critic René Girard (b. 1923) (1977) offers an ironic twist to the theory of Raglan. Where Raglan’s hero is willing to die for the community, Girard’s hero is killed or exiled by the community for having caused its present woes. Indeed, the ‘hero’ is initially considered a criminal who deserves to die. Only subsequently is the villain turned into a hero, who, as for Raglan, is heroic exactly for dying selflessly for the community. Both Raglan and Girard cite Oedipus as their fullest example. (Their doing so makes neither a Freudian. Both spurn Freud.) For Girard, the transformation of Oedipus from reviled exile in Sophocles’s Oedipus the King to revered benefactor in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus typifies the transformation from criminal to hero.
Yet this change is for Girard only the second half of the process. The first half is the change from innocent victim to criminal. Originally, violence erupts in the community. The cause is the inclination, innate in human nature, to imitate others and thereby to desire the same objects as those of the imitated. Imitation leads to rivalry, which leads to
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violence. Desperate to end the violence, the community selects an innocent member to blame for the turmoil. This ‘scapegoat’ can be anyone and can range from the most helpless member of society to the most elevated, including, as with Oedipus, the king. The victim is usually killed, though, as with Oedipus, sometimes exiled. The killing is the ritualistic sacrifice, as in Frazer’s second myth-ritualist scenario. Rather than directing the ritual, as for Frazer, or inspiring it, as for Raglan, myth for Girard is created after the killing to excuse it. Myth comes from ritual, as for Smith, but it comes to justify rather than, as for Smith, to explain the ritual. Myth turns the scapegoat into a criminal who deserved to die and then turns the criminal into a hero, who has died voluntarily for the good of the community. Typical of twentieth-century rather than nineteenth-century approaches to myth, the function of myth and ritual for Girard is social rather than physical: myth serves to alter the community, not the earth.
Ritual
Some theorists consider belief the heart of religion, others ritual. Whatever else ritual means, it means action. Whatever else myth means, it means a text. Myth is thus closer, or apparently closer, to belief than ritual is. William Robertson Smith pioneered the emphasis on ritual over belief in the study of ‘primitive’ religion. He argued that ‘we’ modern scholars, ingrained as we are ‘to look at religion from the side of belief rather than of practice,’ ‘naturally assume’ that in primitive no less than in modern religion ‘our first business is to search for a creed, and find in it the key to ritual and practice’ (Smith 1894: 16). In actuality, primitive religions ‘had for the most part no creed; they consisted entirely of institutions and practices’ (Smith 1894: 16). Smith even declared that ‘ritual and practical usage were, strictly speaking, the sum-total of ancient religions’ (Smith 1894: 20).
Smith rigidly distinguished primitive and ancient religion from modern, where the heart of religion really is belief and not ritual. Since his time, ever more theorists of religion have come to deem ritual the core of all religion. Belief, especially when formalized as creed, has come to be seen as abstract and artificial, as the religion of philosophers and theologians. Ritual has come to be embraced as folk religion, as religion as it is lived. Most scholars of religion today view religion as ritual first and belief second.
But what has also changed is the characterization of ritual itself. Ritual has come to be seen ever less as distinct from belief and ever more as part of belief. Even though ritual has remained action, that action has come to be regarded as the expression of belief and even the instillment of belief. Rather than succeeding belief as the heart of religion, ritual has come to subsume belief under itself.
Classical theories
Within the social sciences there have been two main classical views of ritual. One view has considered ritual a matter of feelings, which ritual either implants or releases. This view, by far the more common one, is found above all in Émile Durkheim (1915, esp. Bk. 3), A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1922, esp. Chapter 5), Malinowski (1925), Karl Marx (1957), and Sigmund Freud (1953). For Durkheim and Radcliffe-Brown, ritual creates feelings – for Durkheim, feelings of dependence on society and of possession by society; for RadcliffeBrown, feelings of dependence on society and also of love and hatred toward phenomena which, respectively, help and hurt society. For Malinowski, Marx, and Freud, ritual discharges
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feelings – for Malinowski, feelings of helplessness before nature; for Marx, pent-up economic desires; for Freud, pent-up instinctual ones.
The other main classical view of ritual has deemed it fundamentally a matter of belief, which ritual applies. This view is found above all in Tylor and Frazer. For both, ritual controls the world by applying prescientific beliefs about it. Frazer gives far more attention to ritual than Tylor, for whom myth, working by itself as an explanation of the world, is by far the more important component of religion.
Contemporary theories
Ritual as the expression of belief
Among contemporary theorists, the English-born anthropologist Victor Turner (1920–83) (1967, 1968, 1969), the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1926–2006) (1973, 1983), and the English anthropologist Mary Douglas (1921–2007) (1970, 1973) follow Tylor and Frazer in taking ritual as belief. Unlike Tylor and Frazer, the three consider ritual the expression, not the application, of belief. Even more unlike them, the three consider the belief expressed other than the primitive counterpart to science. For Tylor and Frazer, ritual is the primitive equivalent of applied science: for the purpose of controlling the world, ritual puts into practice the primitive belief that personal gods rather than impersonal laws of nature regulate the world. For especially Frazer, not just ritual but religion as a whole gives way to modern technology.
For Turner, Geertz, and Douglas, by contrast, ritual is a modern as well as primitive phenomenon. It can be modern exactly because even as part of religion it does not compete with science and therefore does not get superseded by science. Rather than either explaining or controlling the world, ritual for all three describes the place of human beings in the world. For the three, ritual does what for Bultmann and Jonas myth does. Ritual describes the place of humans in not only the cosmos but also society. It describes the place of humans vis-à-vis not only the physical world and god but also other humans. Strikingly, all three credit ritual, not myth, with this function, and myth barely garners any attention in their writings.
For Turner and Geertz, the need for a place is existential: a fixed, certain place makes life secure, fair, and tolerable. For Douglas, the need is intellectual: a fixed, certain place makes life intelligible. Perhaps because Turner and Geertz deal with changing societies, they are more attentive to ‘existential’ anxiety than Douglas, who, dealing with stable societies, is freer to concentrate on purely intellectual issues.
As concerned as Turner, Geertz, and Douglas are with the function of ritual for the individual, they also are concerned with its function for society. As resolutely as they reject Durkheim and Radcliffe-Brown for the pair’s ‘emotivist’ view of ritual, they accept the view of Durkheim and Radcliffe-Brown that the function served by ritual is social, not merely individual. Turner, Geertz, and Douglas assert that ritual serves at once to uphold society and to give humans places in both it and the cosmos.
As an example, take Turner, the contemporary most celebrated as a theorist of ritual.5 The Drums of Affliction typifies his approach. He begins by defining ritual as a process of communication: it serves ‘the highly important functions … of storing and transmitting information’ (Turner 1968: 1). The function of ritual is thus less instrumental than expressive. Ritual is expressive not because it, like an archaeological find, merely reflects beliefs but because it intentionally discloses them. To say that myth conveys information would be commonplace. To say that ritual does is not. Turner rejects the conventional
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split into nonverbal and verbal behavior. Physical as well as verbal behavior conveys information.
The information conveyed by ritual concerns both the present and the ideal place of the individual in society and the cosmos alike: ‘We are not dealing with information about a new agricultural technique or a better judicial procedure: we are concerned here with the crucial values of the believing community, whether it is a religious community, a nation, a tribe, a secret society, or any other type of group whose ultimate unity resides in its orientation towards transcendental and invisible powers’ (Turner 1968: 2).
The Drums of Affliction focuses on Ndembu rituals of affliction, or rituals performed on behalf of persons whose illnesses or misfortunes are blamed on either ancestors or witches. Symptoms of affliction include backache, fever, boils, and difficulties in childbirth and hunting. The ritual tries to placate the spirits responsible. In the Ndembu village studied by Turner there loomed economic, political, and social decay in the wake of the colonial government’s withdrawal of official recognition of the village chieftain. The loss of that recognition cost the village jobs, goods, and most of all clout. The village was also facing problems in hunting and farming.
The consequent frustration stirred previously suppressed tensions among individuals and among clans – tensions rooted ultimately in the clash between matrilineal descent and virilocal marriage. Because of both his particular lineage and his passive, effeminate personality, one villager, Kamahasanyi, became the scapegoat. Overwhelmed by the scorn of his relatives and neighbors, he developed various physical ills. His ancestors, he claimed, were punishing him for the failure of his line to retain the chieftainship, and his relatives and neighbors were bewitching him out of frustration at their own plight. Kamahasanyi demanded and received ritual curing. During the rituals all the personal antagonisms, which had been less unrecognized than ignored, were acknowledged and at least temporarily purged. Kamahasanyi himself was vindicated, and his ailments ceased, though the underlying tensions were scarcely eliminated.
On the one hand ritual for Turner serves to alleviate social turmoil: ‘Ndembu ritual … may be regarded as a magnificent instrument for expressing, maintaining, and periodically cleansing a secular order of society without strong political centralization and all too full of social conflict’ (Turner 1968: 21). On the other hand ritual for Turner also serves to alleviate existential turmoil:
In the idiom of the rituals of affliction it is as though the Ndembu said: ‘It is only when a person is reduced to misery by misfortune, and repents of the acts that caused him to be afflicted, that ritual expressing an underlying unity in diverse things may fittingly be enacted for him’ … It is as though he were stripped of all possessions, all status, all social connections, and then endowed with all the basic virtues and values of Ndembu society.
(Turner 1968: 22)
Ritual restores order to, at once, society and individuals’ lives. Existential turmoil may grow out of social turmoil, but it is more than an expression of social turmoil.
Ritual alleviates both kinds of turmoil by acting out, by literally dramatizing, the situation it remedies. To use one of Turner’s pet phrases, ritual is ‘social drama.’ As drama, ritual is not merely a part of social life but the depiction of it.6 Where for Harrison drama is the legacy of ritual, for Turner drama is part of ritual.
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Ritual for Turner describes not only how things are but also how they should be. It thereby serves as a model for altering society, not merely as a model of existing society:
Ritual is a periodic restatement of the terms in which men of a particular culture must interact if there is to be any kind of a [sic] coherent social life … It has been more than once suggested that religious ritual is mainly ‘expressive’, that it portrays in symbolic form certain key values and cultural orientations. This is true as far as it goes, but it points to only one of many properties it possesses. More important is its creative function
–it actually creates, or re-creates, the categories through which men perceive reality
–the axioms underlying the structure of society and the laws of the natural and moral orders. It is not here a case of life being an imitation of art, but of social life being an attempted imitation of models portrayed and animated by ritual.
(Turner 1968: 6–7)
Turner is claiming that ritual actually works, not merely is believed to work, and works by making sense of participants’ experiences, not merely, as for Malinowski, Marx, and Freud, by releasing or redirecting their emotions. The individual ills treated by ritual are psychosomatic, and Turner often compares Ndembu rituals with psychoanalysis. But he is not thereby reducing the ills to feelings. On the contrary, he is elevating them to thoughts, or beliefs. Ndembu rituals work precisely because, like psychoanalysis, they make manifest not only repressed or, here, suppressed feelings but also suppressed beliefs.
Ritual as the alleviation of fear and guilt
The German classicist Walter Burkert (b. 1931) (1979, 1985, 1989) has developed a theory of ritual that derives from the ethology of Konrad Lorenz and, more recently, from the sociobiology of Edward O. Wilson. For Burkert, as for Turner, ritual is drama. It is ‘as if’ behavior. To take his central example, ritual, as he uses the term, is not the customs and formalities involved in hunting but the transformation of actual hunting into dramatized hunting. The function is no longer that of securing food, as for Frazer, since the ritual proper arises only in agricultural times, when farming has supplanted hunting as the prime source of food. Where for Frazer ritual is exactly a pre-scientific means of getting crops to grow, for Burkert ritual serves social and psychological ends – a shift in subject and function that applies as much to twentieth-century theories of ritual as to twentieth-century theories of myth and of myth plus ritual. Rather than rooted in agriculture, as for Frazer, ritual for Burkert is rooted in the prior stage of hunting and is simply preserved in the wake of agriculture: ‘Hunting lost its basic function with the emergence of agriculture some ten thousand years ago. But hunting ritual had become so important that it could not be given up. Stability stayed with those groups who managed to make use of the social and psychological appeal of the ritual by transforming, by redirecting, it until the whole action became a ritual’ (Burkert 1979: 55).
Hunting, according to Burkert, stirred feelings of fear and guilt. The fear was not merely of getting killed by the animal hunted but also of killing a fellow hunter and, too, of depleting the food supply: ‘Killing to eat was an unalterable commandment, and yet the bloody act must always have been attended with a double danger and a double fear: that the weapon might be turned against a fellow hunter, and that the death of the prey might signal an end with no future, while man must always eat and so must always hunt’ (Burkert 1985: 58). The even deeper fear was of one’s own aggression and one’s own mortality. The guilt was over the