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Where the Theory Went After It Failed

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Where the Theory Went After It Failed

The myth-and-ritual school's collapse as a general theory did not end its influence; the influence simply moved into other fields. The Cambridge Ritualists, Jane Harrison, Gilbert Murray, F. M. Cornford and A. B. Cook working in classics rather than theology from around 1900, read Greek myth and tragedy as ritual in origin, Harrison's Themis (1912) being the school's fullest statement. Their specific ritual-origin claims about Greek drama are not generally accepted now, but their habit of reading literature against the ritual practices behind it shaped literary criticism directly, feeding into Northrop Frye's archetypal criticism decades later, well outside the study of religion the theory began in.

Within religious studies itself, the debate continues in a different vocabulary. Harvey Whitehouse's modes-of-religiosity theory, developed from the 1990s, argues that how often a ritual is performed shapes what kind of religious transmission results, frequent low-arousal ritual producing routinised, doctrine-heavy religion and rare high-arousal ritual producing intensely bonded, imagery-heavy religion. It is not a revival of Hooke's claim that myth and ritual are one thing, but it is the same underlying question, how the enacted and the narrated halves of religion relate to each other, pursued with cognitive and anthropological tools the Cambridge school did not have.

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