Myth, ritual, and cult

In the early twentieth century the “Cambridge ritualists,” as they are known, shocked Classicists by pointing out the similarity of certain Greek religious practices to those of so-called “primitive” tribal peoples. Insisting on the priority of ritual in the study of Greek religion, they argued (in the most extreme form of the theory) that myths were nothing more than “misunderstood rituals.” Although much of their work is outmoded today, the work of the ritualists (James G. Frazer, Jane Ellen Harrison, Gilbert Murray, and others) coincided with the great surge of interest in folklore and popular culture that influenced continental scholars from Wilhelm Mannhardt to Martin P. Nilsson. Their influence endures in that “Greek religion” as a discipline now has a strong anthropological/comparative strain, and focuses on rituals and material culture as much as (if not more than) myth. Countering this trend is the continuing impact of the “Chicago school” founded by Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade. Their phenomenological method emphasizes the importance of myth, symbol, and the experience of the sacred, and sees ritual as a response to myth.

The fact that there are no broadly accepted definitions for either “myth” or “ritual” complicates the continuing discussion about their relationship. If we think of ritual as “performance,” it may include a retelling of a myth or presuppose knowledge of it, so that the assumed distinction begins to dissolve. Many rituals were perceived as recapitulations of acts originally performed by a founder: Theseus and the youths he rescued from the Minotaur were the first to perform the crane dance on Delos. Often, a rite had to be performed as expiation for an ancient offense against a god (thus, the Attic Arkteia appeased Artemis’ anger at the slaughter of her sacred bear). Still, many traditional narratives about gods and heroes appear to have no corresponding rituals (in the sense of acts to be performed with reference to the narrative), and vice versa. In this book, “cults” are understood to include both rituals and, where applicable, corresponding myths.