Myth and Ritual - Overview

Overview

The "myth and ritual school" is the name given to a series of authors who have focused their philological studies on the "ritual purposes of myths." Some of these scholars (e.g., W. Robertson-Smith, James Frazer, Jane Ellen Harrison, S.H. Hooke) supported the "primacy of ritual" hypothesis, which claimed that "every myth is derived from a particular ritual and that the syntagmatic quality of myth is a reproduction of the succession of ritual act."

Historically, the important approaches to the study of mythological thinking have been those of Vico, Schelling, Schiller, Jung, Freud, Lávy-Bruhl, Lévi-Strauss, Frye, the Soviet school, and the Myth and Ritual School.

In the 1930s, Soviet researchers such as Jakov E. Golosovker, Frank-Kamenecky, Olga Freidenberg, Mikhail Bakhtin, "grounded the study of myth and ritual in folklore and in the world view of popular culture."

Following World War II, the semantic study of myth and ritual, particularly by Bill Stanner and Victor Turner, has supported a connection between myth and ritual. However, it has not supported the notion that one preceded and produced the other, as supporters of the "primacy of ritual" hypothesis would claim. According to the currently dominant scholarly view, the link between myth and ritual is that they share common paradigms.