The Myth and Ritual School: J.G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists

251 Pages·2002·1.414 MB·English

by  Robert Ackerman

The Myth and Ritual School
Theorists of Myth
RobertA. Segal, Series Editor
Jung and the Jungians on Myth
An Introduction
by Steven F. Walker
René Girard and Myth
An Introduction
by Richard J. Golsan
Political Myth
A Theoretical Introduction
by Christopher G. Flood
The Poetics of Myth
by Eleazar M. Meletinsky
translated by Guy Lanoue and Alexander Sadetsky
Northrop Frye on Myth
An Introduction
by Ford Russell
Cassirer and Langer on Myth
An Introduction
by William Schultz
Myth and Religion
Mircea Eliade
by Douglas Allen
The Myth and Ritual School
J. G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists
Robert Ackerman
Routledge
New York and London
Published in 2002 by
Routledge
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New York, NY 10001
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Published in Great Britain by
Routledge
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Copyright © 1991 by RobertAckerman
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
Printed in the United States of America on acid free paper.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or in
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from the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data forthcoming.
Ackerman, Robert, 1935–
The myth and ritual school : J.G. Frazer and the Cambridge ritualists /
Robert Ackerman
p. cm. — (Theorists of myth)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-415-93963-1
1. Myth and ritual school—England—Cambridge—History. 2. Classical
philology—Study and teaching—England—Cambridge—History. 3. Literature
and anthropology—England—Cambridge—History. 4. Frazer, James George,
Sir, 1854–1941—Influence. 5. Cambridge (England)—Intellectual life. 6.
Mythology, Classical—Historiography. 7. Harrison, Jane Ellen, 1850–1928. 8.
Ritual—Historiography. I. Title. II. Theorists of myth (Routledge (Firm))
BL304.2.A35 2002
801'.95'0904—dc21 2002021329
Contents
Series Editor’s Foreword vii
Preface xi
One The Eighteenth Century—
Rationalism and Reaction 1
Two Romantic Historicism and Philology 17
Three The Rise of Anthropology:
Lang, Tylor, and Smith 29
Four J. G. Frazer 45
Five Jane Ellen Harrison: The Early Work 67
Six Jane Ellen Harrison and
the Cambridge Ritualists 89
Seven Years of Achievement—1912–14 119
Eight Aftermath 159
Appendix: The Golden Boughand
The Mediaeval Stage 199
Notes 201
Bibliography 223
Index 231
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Series Editor’s Foreword
For most theorists of myth, there is no special connection between
myth and ritual. Any connection that exists is either irregular or
happenstance. For those theorists labeled “myth-ritualists,” myth is
necessarily linked to ritual. Myth-ritualists assume not that all ritu-
als are inherently linked to myths but that all myths are inherently
linked to rituals.
What the link is varies from myth-ritualist to myth-ritualist. For
Biblicist William Robertson Smith, the pioneering myth-ritualist,
myth is inferior to ritual. It arises as an explanation of a ritual only
after the ritual, which antedates myth, is no longer considered mag-
ically potent and so is no longer understood. For James Frazer, the
classicist and anthropologist, myth is the equal of ritual and arises
alongside it to serve as its script: myth explains what ritual enacts.
Myth operates while ritual retains its magical power. The classicist
Jane Harrison and the Biblicist S. H. Hooke follow Frazer’s version
of myth-ritualism but in addition bestow magical efficacy on myth
itself, not just on ritual.
The Semiticist Theodor Gaster and the anthropologist Adolf
Jensen offer versions of myth-ritualism that make myth superior to
ritual. Claude Lévi-Strauss, the structural anthropologist, argues
that whenever myth and ritual work together, they work as dialecti-
cal opposites. Not only myths and rituals but also texts and practices
of other kinds have been traced back to one version or another of
myth-ritualism. Other leading myth-ritualists include anthropolo-
gist A. M. Hocart, Lord Raglan, and Clyde Kluckhohn; historians of
religion E. O. James and Margaret Murray; classicists Gilbert Murray,
F. M. Cornford, A. B. Cook, George Thomson, and Rhys Carpenter;
Biblicists Ivan Engnell, Aubrey Johnson, and Sigmund Mowinckel;
and literary critics Jessie Weston, E. M. Butler, Francis Fergusson,
viii Series Editor’s Foreword
John Speirs, C. L. Barber, William Troy, most fervently Stanley Edgar
Hyman, while at times Herbert Weisinger.
Robert Ackerman’s The Myth and Ritual School is the first book-
length analysis of the most famous and influential school of myth-
ritualists; the Cambridge Ritualists, a group of classicists all but one
of whom were affiliated with Cambridge. The central member of the
group was Jane Harrison. The others were Gilbert Murray, alone
affiliated with Oxford; F. M. Cornford; and, more marginally, A. B.
Cook.
Beginning with a comprehensive overview of theorizing about
myth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Ackerman pro-
ceeds to trace the varying influences on the Cambridge group. He
then analyzes the chief works of each member. By profession an
intellectual historian rather than either a classicist or an anthropol-
ogist, Ackerman reconstructs the cultural milieu of the Ritualists. In
analyzing their views, he scrutinizes their unpublished as well as pub-
lished writings.
The prime influence on the group was James Frazer, on whom
the prime influence in turn was William Robertson Smith. Smith
was the first to see the era of primitive, though not modern, religion
as practice rather than belief—as ritual rather than either creed or
myth. Myth for Smith arises to account above all for the ritual of the
annual killing of the totem, or god.
From Smith, Frazer took both the association of myth with ritual
and the ritual of killing the god. He altered the exact connection
between the myth and the ritual, made the god the god of vegeta-
tion, and made the function of the ritual agricultural: causing the
crops to grow. Frazer also introduced the role of the king, the incar-
nation of the god of vegetation. Where Smith restricts himself to
Semitic cultures, Frazer boldly generalizes to primitive and ancient
ones worldwide. Strictly speaking, myth-ritualism for Frazer arises
neither in his stage of magic nor even in his stage of religion but only
in a subsequent, less clearly demarcated stage of magic and religion
combined—the stage to which nearly all of The Golden Bough is
devoted.
As Ackerman documents, Frazer was in fact an inconsistent myth-
ritualist. He was simultaneously both a Tylorian intellectualist and
Series Editor’s Foreword ix
euhemerist as well as a myth-ritualist and is even singled out by
Hooke as the nemesis of myth-ritualists! Frazer turns out to have
been a myth-ritualist above all at the outset of his career, when he
was most under the influence of the uncompromising ritualist
Smith.
Nevertheless, it is Frazer quamyth-ritualist who most influenced
the Cambridge Ritualists. From him, they took his myth-ritualist sce-
nario, though not his set of stages. More broadly, they took an
anthropological and comparativist rather than a philological and
particularistic approach to Greek myth, ritual, and religion. The
Ritualists argue that ancient Greeks were far closer to primitives than
had been assumed—indeed, were much more like primitives than
like moderns.
At the same time the Ritualists were interested not just in the
primitive origin of Greek myth, ritual, and religion but also in the
myth-ritualist origin of some other, seemingly secular, Greek phe-
nomena: tragedy, comedy, epic, philosophy, art, and even sport. It is
on the myth-ritualist origin of Greek tragedy and comedy that
Ackerman focuses on. In his final chapter he summarizes the appli-
cation of the myth-ritualist approach to non-Greek literature of all
kinds. As often as not, that application has skirted the Ritualists
themselves and has gone back directly to Frazer, though often alter-
ing his own formulation of the scheme. Still, it is the Cambridge
Ritualists who pioneered the analysis of literature as myth. In liter-
ary lingo, they were the first “myth critics.” Contemporary literary
critics like Northrop Frye are their successors.
Ackerman is concerned to show that Frazer was by no means the
sole influence on the Cambridge group. Other influences range
from cultural luminaries like Durkheim, Nietzsche, Bergson, Freud,
and Jung to local academicians like the classicists William Ridgeway
and A. W. Verrall. Moreover, even as a myth-ritualist Frazer views
myth, ritual, and religion differently from the Ritualists. Where he
deems all three fundamentally intellectual in nature, the Ritualists
deem them primarily sociological and psychological affairs. The
Ritualists prove far closer to William Robertson Smith, even though
they were influenced by him only indirectly through Durkheim and
others.