1 00:00:04,780 --> 00:00:09,152 Before we move on to tragedy, we've got another tool to put into our toolbox. 2 00:00:09,152 --> 00:00:13,812 You'll recall that we're take, taking a step back at certain points in the course, 3 00:00:13,812 --> 00:00:17,551 and making some theoretical observations on how these myths work. 4 00:00:17,551 --> 00:00:22,038 We've talked about structuralism, and psychoanalysis, and functionalism as ways 5 00:00:22,038 --> 00:00:24,972 to get a grip on the myths that we're working with. 6 00:00:25,145 --> 00:00:28,539 Wanted to introduce another one to us here, myth and ritual. 7 00:00:28,712 --> 00:00:31,531 Myth and ritual school of thinking about myth. 8 00:00:31,531 --> 00:00:34,810 Two figures to introduce to get our conversation started. 9 00:00:34,810 --> 00:00:37,744 Emil Durkheim, dates 1858 to 1917. And Jane Harrison. 10 00:00:37,744 --> 00:00:42,035 Her dates, 1850 to 1928. Durkheim, important figure in all, many different 11 00:00:42,035 --> 00:00:47,007 human sciences, who's really interested in, the social phenomenon of what it is to 12 00:00:47,007 --> 00:00:49,433 human. When humans get together in groups, 13 00:00:49,433 --> 00:00:53,872 amazing thing start to happen. Jane Harrison, is for us the bringer of 14 00:00:53,872 --> 00:00:58,430 these ideas in, about ritual in general over specifically into the reading of 15 00:00:58,430 --> 00:01:01,626 classical myth. We're going to focus on her as we talk 16 00:01:01,626 --> 00:01:06,716 about some of the relevance of Durkheim's ideas, that we're made relevant through 17 00:01:06,716 --> 00:01:10,030 Harrison's work. So Durkheim realizes that human beings, 18 00:01:10,030 --> 00:01:16,057 when they get together in groups have amazing kinds of feelings that show up a 19 00:01:16,057 --> 00:01:19,909 term that he had coined, called collective effervescence, talks about the added plus 20 00:01:19,909 --> 00:01:23,317 of, To an experiential level of what life is 21 00:01:23,317 --> 00:01:28,576 like when whole groups of people get together to do things this is not 22 00:01:28,576 --> 00:01:34,724 reducible to, but it's not that separate from big groups of people doing anything, 23 00:01:34,798 --> 00:01:41,094 showing up to watch the same football game and tens of thousands of people doing the 24 00:01:41,094 --> 00:01:46,280 same thing you are has a way of urgency and power to what's happening. 25 00:01:46,280 --> 00:01:50,254 Durkheim went so far as to say that, actually, this feeling of collective 26 00:01:50,254 --> 00:01:54,670 effervance, effervescence, way back in the dawn of time, was the reason that human 27 00:01:54,670 --> 00:01:57,320 beings started thinking about divinities at all. 28 00:01:57,492 --> 00:02:02,211 That the divine was an epiphenomenon of the feeling of collective effervescent 29 00:02:02,211 --> 00:02:06,699 that happens when people get together. There is something quite stunning about 30 00:02:06,699 --> 00:02:11,475 the, those affective feelings and they were they seemed to be absolutely just as 31 00:02:11,475 --> 00:02:16,309 true now as they surely were in Durkheim's time and Durkheim projects them into the 32 00:02:16,309 --> 00:02:20,164 very early times of human existence. Now this feeling of collective 33 00:02:20,164 --> 00:02:25,055 effervescence that, that Durkheim points to is so important, he says gets harnessed 34 00:02:25,055 --> 00:02:29,710 when human beings engage in ritual. Ritual behavior is something that's 35 00:02:29,710 --> 00:02:35,136 observed across, human groups. All, all universally across many different 36 00:02:35,136 --> 00:02:41,585 cultures. what humans do is get together. They behave in collective ways, issuing 37 00:02:41,585 --> 00:02:46,490 different kind of, sometimes strange, always very stylized behaviors. 38 00:02:46,490 --> 00:02:49,638 These happen at certain heightened moments. 39 00:02:49,638 --> 00:02:55,276 So the importance around things like transitions are were also taken to mark 40 00:02:55,276 --> 00:03:00,474 new obligations and new duties with, that are important to a society. 41 00:03:00,694 --> 00:03:06,551 And these rituals anchor that commitment and sense of transaction, the newness of 42 00:03:06,771 --> 00:03:09,919 someone's possession within a social group. 43 00:03:09,919 --> 00:03:17,495 This Durkheim says is the, the function of ritual is to anchor these moments in our 44 00:03:17,495 --> 00:03:20,928 lives. And it's confusing enough as all of us 45 00:03:20,928 --> 00:03:23,419 would probably acknowledge, to be a human being. 46 00:03:23,578 --> 00:03:26,493 People make promises. Sometimes those promises are kept, 47 00:03:26,493 --> 00:03:29,725 sometimes they aren't. People let, allow debts to go unpaid. 48 00:03:29,884 --> 00:03:32,799 Sometimes it's hard to discern the truth behind things. 49 00:03:32,958 --> 00:03:37,092 People make transitions and it's not clear when that transition has been made. 50 00:03:37,092 --> 00:03:41,066 Durkheim says rituals solve this ambiguities for us by making them utterly 51 00:03:41,066 --> 00:03:44,829 clear to a group as a whole, and so actually does more than just mark a 52 00:03:44,829 --> 00:03:48,486 transition or a promise, it actually enacts a transition or a promise. 53 00:03:48,486 --> 00:03:51,725 Let me give you a, An example. If someone asks me, hey, do 54 00:03:51,725 --> 00:03:54,750 you want a sandwich?" I may say, Yes, I do. 55 00:03:54,750 --> 00:03:58,831 And after saying I do I get a sandwich. And all I've done is convey a preference 56 00:03:58,831 --> 00:04:02,606 to someone and someone, yeah, I'm sure, goes ahead and fulfills it and gives me a 57 00:04:02,606 --> 00:04:04,850 sandwich and then I can eat that and thanks. 58 00:04:04,850 --> 00:04:08,263 Now we've had lunch together. There's another context though, in which 59 00:04:08,263 --> 00:04:11,896 those same words might be uttered in a slightly different way. 60 00:04:12,071 --> 00:04:16,348 At American wedding ceremonies that typically lead to a moment of, really 61 00:04:16,348 --> 00:04:20,977 important, grand, grand importance, where someone asks a question will you two 62 00:04:20,977 --> 00:04:24,961 become spouses to each other? Will you stay with each other for ever, 63 00:04:24,961 --> 00:04:28,476 and ever, and ever. And at a certain point someone's supposed 64 00:04:28,476 --> 00:04:31,534 to say I do. Now, those same words, those same simple 65 00:04:31,534 --> 00:04:34,190 words. In English, those two words, I do in 66 00:04:34,190 --> 00:04:37,993 answer to someone wanting to give you a sandwich are one thing. 67 00:04:37,993 --> 00:04:42,709 Maybe oblige you to accept the sandwich and carried forward on the fact that you 68 00:04:42,709 --> 00:04:45,547 really were hungry for it, and you wanted to eat it. 69 00:04:45,547 --> 00:04:48,998 In the context of a ritual, though, they're much more important. 70 00:04:48,998 --> 00:04:53,228 They're actually efficacious speech. They do more than just mark something, a 71 00:04:53,228 --> 00:04:56,735 preference that you have. They actually commit you to it, change 72 00:04:56,735 --> 00:05:01,299 your status such that, within the society, you now all of a sudden become something 73 00:05:01,299 --> 00:05:04,249 different. You've made a transition that is marked, 74 00:05:04,249 --> 00:05:08,757 and taken an oath that is marked in the society, and is made to be efficacious. 75 00:05:08,757 --> 00:05:12,064 Rituals have the power to do this, According to Durkheim. 76 00:05:12,064 --> 00:05:17,593 Now, when the talk about rituals early in the previous century starts to come up to 77 00:05:17,593 --> 00:05:22,866 a higher and higher level of importance, people realize just how important rituals 78 00:05:22,866 --> 00:05:27,430 are in anchoring human life. Those who are interested in myths start to 79 00:05:27,430 --> 00:05:31,157 take notice. And upon reading, not just the, the 80 00:05:31,157 --> 00:05:34,286 specific myths that we've been reading this week. 81 00:05:34,286 --> 00:05:39,650 But many myths where it seems pretty clear that myths and rituals are intimately 82 00:05:39,650 --> 00:05:42,309 tied. People who are interested in myths start 83 00:05:42,309 --> 00:05:46,930 to say you know what, there is this deep connection between rituals and myths, and 84 00:05:46,930 --> 00:05:51,210 in order to understand how myths are working, we've got to understand their 85 00:05:51,210 --> 00:05:54,804 connections with ritual. At this point Harrison comes along and 86 00:05:54,804 --> 00:05:59,255 publishes several important works where she starts to develop, and others join 87 00:05:59,255 --> 00:06:03,102 her, a claim that says that, in fact, behind all of Greek mythology, 88 00:06:03,102 --> 00:06:08,120 What we're going to find as the core thing that makes them tick is going to be some 89 00:06:08,120 --> 00:06:11,561 ritual behaviour. We've seen this in our Homera camps. 90 00:06:11,561 --> 00:06:15,262 It's clearly true, that the writers of these hymns and, 91 00:06:15,262 --> 00:06:20,675 Well let's, let's not say clearly true. But It's absolutely plausible and the 92 00:06:20,675 --> 00:06:23,376 best. Interpretation of the evidence that we 93 00:06:23,376 --> 00:06:27,990 have that the writers of these hymns were presented with ritual behaviors that were 94 00:06:27,990 --> 00:06:32,494 happening around them and drew up a mythic story in order to explain those mythic 95 00:06:32,494 --> 00:06:35,131 behaviors. So the strange drink that we drink in 96 00:06:35,131 --> 00:06:38,976 honor of Demeter at the Eleusinian mysteries, where did that come from? 97 00:06:38,976 --> 00:06:42,985 Where did the rites of Eleusis come? Why do we celebrate them in honor of 98 00:06:42,985 --> 00:06:45,567 Demeter? What's the connection with everlasting 99 00:06:45,567 --> 00:06:47,874 life? How do these things all tie together? 100 00:06:47,874 --> 00:06:52,323 Well, Harrison's suggestion, the myth and ritual school, is that what's happened is 101 00:06:52,323 --> 00:06:57,319 ritual behaviors have been going on and on and on for many generations in very old 102 00:06:57,319 --> 00:07:01,000 times, pre, back to prehistoric times, very old times. 103 00:07:01,000 --> 00:07:04,250 And, at a certain point, those ritual behaviors that are, 104 00:07:04,250 --> 00:07:08,661 Keep getting repeated every year, strikes some people as sort of strange. 105 00:07:08,661 --> 00:07:12,644 Why is it that we do this? When people start to ask that question, 106 00:07:12,644 --> 00:07:16,766 this is where myth rushes in. Myth rushes in to the vacuum of sense and 107 00:07:16,766 --> 00:07:21,044 understanding that we have around bizarre, stylized behaviors that we practice in 108 00:07:21,044 --> 00:07:23,210 rituals. Now, the ritual behaviors that we 109 00:07:23,210 --> 00:07:25,692 practice. Yeah, we'll find meaningful, ways of 110 00:07:25,692 --> 00:07:29,495 trying to, trying to understand them. But mostly, what we do when we're 111 00:07:29,495 --> 00:07:33,457 performing them, is we just want to make sure we perform them the way they're 112 00:07:33,457 --> 00:07:36,626 always performed. You want to make sure that your particular 113 00:07:36,626 --> 00:07:40,852 version of a ceremony matches up with the version of the ceremony last time, the 114 00:07:40,852 --> 00:07:43,598 time before, the time before, back to time immemorial. 115 00:07:43,598 --> 00:07:47,700 The pure repetition of the action seems to be what's most important. 116 00:07:47,700 --> 00:07:50,612 Now, that can carry forward in its own trajectory. 117 00:07:50,612 --> 00:07:54,417 It has a momentum of its own. Just let me repeat these behaviors. 118 00:07:54,417 --> 00:07:57,152 At a step, at, the myth and ritual says, you know, 119 00:07:57,152 --> 00:08:02,086 At a certain point, these behaviors, after people engage in them and keep them 120 00:08:02,086 --> 00:08:05,237 carrying forward. They acq-, they require some kind of 121 00:08:05,237 --> 00:08:08,388 explanation. Someone steps back and says, why do we do 122 00:08:08,388 --> 00:08:10,884 this? And when they step back and ask that 123 00:08:10,884 --> 00:08:13,670 question, That's when myth rushes in. 124 00:08:13,841 --> 00:08:16,650 We've seen it with the Homerican to Demeter. 125 00:08:16,650 --> 00:08:19,973 Clearly, Apollo very carefully tied in with mythic stories. 126 00:08:20,145 --> 00:08:23,698 We've already seen this in our discussion of, Hesiod's Theogony. 127 00:08:23,698 --> 00:08:27,481 Remember the episode at Mekone, The connection there is very clear. 128 00:08:27,653 --> 00:08:31,951 Hesiod seems to be giving us a mythic story that helps us understand why it is 129 00:08:31,951 --> 00:08:36,707 that we Greeks sacrifice the bones to the gods, and keep the good stuff for ourself. 130 00:08:36,879 --> 00:08:41,579 And it even seems we're trying to trick the gods by wrapping them in fat, and then 131 00:08:41,579 --> 00:08:47,177 keeping all the rich meats for ourselves. Now, that may well be fits perfectly into 132 00:08:47,177 --> 00:08:50,326 Hesiod's story. It's we talked about how it makes sense 133 00:08:50,326 --> 00:08:53,149 with respect to what Hesiod has before and after it. 134 00:08:53,312 --> 00:08:57,709 But the myth and rituals would say, you know, this is what's really motivating and 135 00:08:57,709 --> 00:09:02,518 driving this part of the story and is an attempt by human beings to come up with an 136 00:09:02,518 --> 00:09:07,367 explanation for some kind of strange ritual behavior that they otherwise could 137 00:09:07,367 --> 00:09:10,313 not figure out, they otherwise could not explain. 138 00:09:10,313 --> 00:09:13,690 Now ritual behaviors, just on their own are provocative. 139 00:09:13,690 --> 00:09:17,038 They are not typically normal kinds of behaviors. 140 00:09:17,038 --> 00:09:22,369 We've got things like processions, and chanting, stylized gestures of all kinds, 141 00:09:22,369 --> 00:09:27,631 odd foods and strange names come out. There's all kinds of foreign strange not 142 00:09:27,631 --> 00:09:30,912 normal not every kind of day things that happen. 143 00:09:30,912 --> 00:09:35,491 Ritual actions are provocative. The myth and ritual says that, that 144 00:09:35,491 --> 00:09:38,430 provocativeness is what makes myths happen. 145 00:09:38,430 --> 00:09:43,400 Now, we've seen example of this with the Homeric hymns and also, we mention Mekone 146 00:09:43,560 --> 00:09:47,835 the myth and rituals who's really pressing this line is going to say, you know what, 147 00:09:47,835 --> 00:09:52,180 all of myths that we have, have some ritual underneath them. 148 00:09:52,180 --> 00:09:56,219 There is some ritual behind them that is driving the myth. 149 00:09:56,219 --> 00:10:01,861 And the myth has shown up as, let's call it a sound track, for ritualized behavior 150 00:10:01,861 --> 00:10:05,676 that just, is something we want to do every year, not quite knowing what it 151 00:10:05,676 --> 00:10:07,745 meant. The myth shows up as a soundtrack 152 00:10:07,745 --> 00:10:11,936 narrativizing that for us and giving us a sense of why we do the things we do, in 153 00:10:11,936 --> 00:10:15,040 our ritual behaviors. So the, myth and rituals jumps into any 154 00:10:15,040 --> 00:10:18,610 part of a myth, and tries to find the, ritual that might lie behind it. 155 00:10:18,610 --> 00:10:24,392 And, the, the more that we learn about ancient rituals the more we can bring to, 156 00:10:24,392 --> 00:10:30,175 to bear a stock of understanding of how rituals work and try to say that make, 157 00:10:30,175 --> 00:10:36,029 make a whatever legitimate claims we can, that behind each pieces of the myth some 158 00:10:36,029 --> 00:10:39,456 ritual is there as the spur to that mythic tale. 159 00:10:39,456 --> 00:10:44,240 If myth and rituals were looking to a tale the tale about. 160 00:10:44,240 --> 00:10:48,813 Odysseus of the cyclops for example. Now there wouldn't be a lot of discussion 161 00:10:48,813 --> 00:10:52,918 about food and not food as we did in kinda a structural thing earlier. 162 00:10:52,918 --> 00:10:57,492 Instead a myth and ritualist would say, huh, we got a hero here who goes into a 163 00:10:57,492 --> 00:11:02,359 cave, slays a beast, has this awful experience and emerges in now, a kind of 164 00:11:02,359 --> 00:11:06,170 new life, having preserved himself from mortal danger. 165 00:11:06,170 --> 00:11:10,627 Well in fact when we look back in Greek rituals there's quite a lot of them. 166 00:11:10,803 --> 00:11:15,200 So called Katabasis rituals where individuals that are getting involved in 167 00:11:15,552 --> 00:11:19,873 or individuals that are going through certain kinds of rituals, enter into 168 00:11:19,873 --> 00:11:22,903 caves. There are scary things that happen to them 169 00:11:22,903 --> 00:11:25,817 and they emerge into a kind of new life situation. 170 00:11:25,817 --> 00:11:30,304 It may well be that behind the Cyclops Episode was some, one of these kind of 171 00:11:30,304 --> 00:11:33,917 catabasis rituals. To do a proper myth and rituals reading 172 00:11:33,917 --> 00:11:36,889 requires a very broad knowledge of Greek ritual. 173 00:11:36,889 --> 00:11:39,861 This is not something we're covering in the course. 174 00:11:40,036 --> 00:11:44,290 So it's, it's not going to be expected at any point in the course that, 175 00:11:44,290 --> 00:11:48,475 All of a sudden, all of us have lots of, detailed information about Greek ritual. 176 00:11:48,475 --> 00:11:52,020 But what I want to use with this tool is to say that, when we start to see 177 00:11:52,020 --> 00:11:55,910 connections, between myths and rituals, and there are, we've already seen many of 178 00:11:55,910 --> 00:11:58,175 them. We surely saw them this week with the 179 00:11:58,175 --> 00:12:00,440 Homeric hymns, and we'll see many more to come. 180 00:12:00,440 --> 00:12:04,893 When we see those connections the myth and ritual says, yes, that's indeed how myths 181 00:12:04,893 --> 00:12:07,469 work. They're there as the soundtrack for ritual 182 00:12:07,469 --> 00:12:11,493 behaviors, strange ritual behaviors that provoke people trying to invent 183 00:12:11,493 --> 00:12:14,712 explanations of them. And when they do, they tell stories, and 184 00:12:14,712 --> 00:12:17,020 these stories are what you and I call myth.