Frazer on Myth and Ritual

I.-Ritualism is the theory that derives myth, and in consequence literature and folklore influenced by myth, from antecedent ritual performances, usually of the agricultural magical sort. Certainly the most illustrious ancestor in the pedigree of ritualism is Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941), who in the three editions of Golden Bough (1890, 2 vols.; 1900, 3 vols.; 1911-15, 12 vols.) made the sadhappy career of the dying but reviving god, divine kings, and fertility rites well known to all educated persons.2 In turn Dionysus, Attis, Osiris, Adonis, and the rest of their tribe profoundly affected the poets and novelists writing between the World Wars; the indebtedness to Frazer expressed by T. S. Eliot in the Notes to The Waste Land (1922) is only the most famous acknowledgement of such literary influence. In addition, Frazer directly inspired Gilbert Murray (18661957) and the three classicists known as the Cambridge RitualistsJane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928), F. M. Cornford (1874-1943), and A. B. Cook (1868-1952)-in their efforts to show that prehistoric Dionysian fertility rites were, historically, the structural models for Greek drama.3 These classical scholars have in turn given rise to a group of modern myth-and-ritual literary critics whose work, in the somewhat hyperbolic opinion of one of them, the late Stanley Edgar Hyman, given Frazer an importance in literary criticism at least equal to that of Marx and Freud.4 And although it has become harder to isolate the specifically Frazerian strain in the general cultural mixture as time has passed, it is clear that Frazer and ritualism have had definite, albeit limited, effects on biblical studies, comparative religion, and other disciplines as well.5 Consulting the work of Frazer himself, however, one finds that he