Before we move on to tragedy, we've got
another tool to put into our toolbox. You'll recall that we're take, taking a
step back at certain points in the course, and making some theoretical observations
on how these myths work. We've talked about structuralism, and
psychoanalysis, and functionalism as ways to get a grip on the myths that we're
working with. Wanted to introduce another one to us
here, myth and ritual. Myth and ritual school of thinking about
myth. Two figures to introduce to get our
conversation started. Emil Durkheim, dates 1858 to 1917.
And Jane Harrison. Her dates, 1850 to 1928. Durkheim,
important figure in all, many different human sciences, who's really interested
in, the social phenomenon of what it is to human.
When humans get together in groups, amazing thing start to happen.
Jane Harrison, is for us the bringer of these ideas in, about ritual in general
over specifically into the reading of classical myth.
We're going to focus on her as we talk about some of the relevance of Durkheim's
ideas, that we're made relevant through Harrison's work.
So Durkheim realizes that human beings, when they get together in groups have
amazing kinds of feelings that show up a term that he had coined, called collective
effervescence, talks about the added plus of,
To an experiential level of what life is like when whole groups of people get
together to do things this is not reducible to, but it's not that separate
from big groups of people doing anything, showing up to watch the same football game
and tens of thousands of people doing the same thing you are has a way of urgency
and power to what's happening. Durkheim went so far as to say that,
actually, this feeling of collective effervance, effervescence, way back in the
dawn of time, was the reason that human beings started thinking about divinities
at all. That the divine was an epiphenomenon of
the feeling of collective effervescent that happens when people get together.
There is something quite stunning about the, those affective feelings and they
were they seemed to be absolutely just as true now as they surely were in Durkheim's
time and Durkheim projects them into the very early times of human existence.
Now this feeling of collective effervescence that, that Durkheim points
to is so important, he says gets harnessed when human beings engage in ritual.
Ritual behavior is something that's observed across, human groups.
All, all universally across many different cultures. what humans do is get together.
They behave in collective ways, issuing different kind of, sometimes strange,
always very stylized behaviors. These happen at certain heightened
moments. So the importance around things like
transitions are were also taken to mark new obligations and new duties with, that
are important to a society. And these rituals anchor that commitment
and sense of transaction, the newness of someone's possession within a social
group. This Durkheim says is the, the function of
ritual is to anchor these moments in our lives.
And it's confusing enough as all of us would probably acknowledge, to be a human
being. People make promises.
Sometimes those promises are kept, sometimes they aren't.
People let, allow debts to go unpaid. Sometimes it's hard to discern the truth
behind things. People make transitions and it's not clear
when that transition has been made. Durkheim says rituals solve this
ambiguities for us by making them utterly clear to a group as a whole, and so
actually does more than just mark a transition or a promise, it actually
enacts a transition or a promise. Let me give you a,
An example. If someone asks me, hey, do you want a sandwich?" I may say,
Yes, I do. And after saying I do I get a sandwich.
And all I've done is convey a preference to someone and someone, yeah, I'm sure,
goes ahead and fulfills it and gives me a sandwich and then I can eat that and
thanks. Now we've had lunch together.
There's another context though, in which those same words might be uttered in a
slightly different way. At American wedding ceremonies that
typically lead to a moment of, really important, grand, grand importance, where
someone asks a question will you two become spouses to each other?
Will you stay with each other for ever, and ever, and ever.
And at a certain point someone's supposed to say I do.
Now, those same words, those same simple words.
In English, those two words, I do in answer to someone wanting to give you a
sandwich are one thing. Maybe oblige you to accept the sandwich
and carried forward on the fact that you really were hungry for it, and you wanted
to eat it. In the context of a ritual, though,
they're much more important. They're actually efficacious speech.
They do more than just mark something, a preference that you have.
They actually commit you to it, change your status such that, within the society,
you now all of a sudden become something different.
You've made a transition that is marked, and taken an oath that is marked in the
society, and is made to be efficacious. Rituals have the power to do this,
According to Durkheim. Now, when the talk about rituals early in
the previous century starts to come up to a higher and higher level of importance,
people realize just how important rituals are in anchoring human life.
Those who are interested in myths start to take notice.
And upon reading, not just the, the specific myths that we've been reading
this week. But many myths where it seems pretty clear
that myths and rituals are intimately tied.
People who are interested in myths start to say you know what, there is this deep
connection between rituals and myths, and in order to understand how myths are
working, we've got to understand their connections with ritual.
At this point Harrison comes along and publishes several important works where
she starts to develop, and others join her, a claim that says that, in fact,
behind all of Greek mythology, What we're going to find as the core thing
that makes them tick is going to be some ritual behaviour.
We've seen this in our Homera camps. It's clearly true, that the writers of
these hymns and, Well let's, let's not say clearly true.
But It's absolutely plausible and the best.
Interpretation of the evidence that we have that the writers of these hymns were
presented with ritual behaviors that were happening around them and drew up a mythic
story in order to explain those mythic behaviors.
So the strange drink that we drink in honor of Demeter at the Eleusinian
mysteries, where did that come from? Where did the rites of Eleusis come?
Why do we celebrate them in honor of Demeter?
What's the connection with everlasting life?
How do these things all tie together? Well, Harrison's suggestion, the myth and
ritual school, is that what's happened is ritual behaviors have been going on and on
and on for many generations in very old times, pre, back to prehistoric times,
very old times. And, at a certain point, those ritual
behaviors that are, Keep getting repeated every year, strikes
some people as sort of strange. Why is it that we do this?
When people start to ask that question, this is where myth rushes in.
Myth rushes in to the vacuum of sense and understanding that we have around bizarre,
stylized behaviors that we practice in rituals.
Now, the ritual behaviors that we practice.
Yeah, we'll find meaningful, ways of trying to, trying to understand them.
But mostly, what we do when we're performing them, is we just want to make
sure we perform them the way they're always performed.
You want to make sure that your particular version of a ceremony matches up with the
version of the ceremony last time, the time before, the time before, back to time
immemorial. The pure repetition of the action seems to
be what's most important. Now, that can carry forward in its own
trajectory. It has a momentum of its own.
Just let me repeat these behaviors. At a step, at, the myth and ritual says,
you know, At a certain point, these behaviors, after
people engage in them and keep them carrying forward.
They acq-, they require some kind of explanation.
Someone steps back and says, why do we do this?
And when they step back and ask that question,
That's when myth rushes in. We've seen it with the Homerican to
Demeter. Clearly, Apollo very carefully tied in
with mythic stories. We've already seen this in our discussion
of, Hesiod's Theogony. Remember the episode at Mekone,
The connection there is very clear. Hesiod seems to be giving us a mythic
story that helps us understand why it is that we Greeks sacrifice the bones to the
gods, and keep the good stuff for ourself. And it even seems we're trying to trick
the gods by wrapping them in fat, and then keeping all the rich meats for ourselves.
Now, that may well be fits perfectly into Hesiod's story.
It's we talked about how it makes sense with respect to what Hesiod has before and
after it. But the myth and rituals would say, you
know, this is what's really motivating and driving this part of the story and is an
attempt by human beings to come up with an explanation for some kind of strange
ritual behavior that they otherwise could not figure out, they otherwise could not
explain. Now ritual behaviors, just on their own
are provocative. They are not typically normal kinds of
behaviors. We've got things like processions, and
chanting, stylized gestures of all kinds, odd foods and strange names come out.
There's all kinds of foreign strange not normal not every kind of day things that
happen. Ritual actions are provocative.
The myth and ritual says that, that provocativeness is what makes myths
happen. Now, we've seen example of this with the
Homeric hymns and also, we mention Mekone the myth and rituals who's really pressing
this line is going to say, you know what, all of myths that we have, have some
ritual underneath them. There is some ritual behind them that is
driving the myth. And the myth has shown up as, let's call
it a sound track, for ritualized behavior that just, is something we want to do
every year, not quite knowing what it meant.
The myth shows up as a soundtrack narrativizing that for us and giving us a
sense of why we do the things we do, in our ritual behaviors.
So the, myth and rituals jumps into any part of a myth, and tries to find the,
ritual that might lie behind it. And, the, the more that we learn about
ancient rituals the more we can bring to, to bear a stock of understanding of how
rituals work and try to say that make, make a whatever legitimate claims we can,
that behind each pieces of the myth some ritual is there as the spur to that mythic
tale. If myth and rituals were looking to a tale
the tale about. Odysseus of the cyclops for example.
Now there wouldn't be a lot of discussion about food and not food as we did in kinda
a structural thing earlier. Instead a myth and ritualist would say,
huh, we got a hero here who goes into a cave, slays a beast, has this awful
experience and emerges in now, a kind of new life, having preserved himself from
mortal danger. Well in fact when we look back in Greek
rituals there's quite a lot of them. So called Katabasis rituals where
individuals that are getting involved in or individuals that are going through
certain kinds of rituals, enter into caves.
There are scary things that happen to them and they emerge into a kind of new life
situation. It may well be that behind the Cyclops
Episode was some, one of these kind of catabasis rituals.
To do a proper myth and rituals reading requires a very broad knowledge of Greek
ritual. This is not something we're covering in
the course. So it's, it's not going to be expected at
any point in the course that, All of a sudden, all of us have lots of,
detailed information about Greek ritual. But what I want to use with this tool is
to say that, when we start to see connections, between myths and rituals,
and there are, we've already seen many of them.
We surely saw them this week with the Homeric hymns, and we'll see many more to
come. When we see those connections the myth and
ritual says, yes, that's indeed how myths work.
They're there as the soundtrack for ritual behaviors, strange ritual behaviors that
provoke people trying to invent explanations of them.
And when they do, they tell stories, and these stories are what you and I call
myth.