Rituals in Religion

As E. B. Tylor noted in his seminal work, Primitive Culture (1871), "it is generally easier to obtain accurate accounts of ceremonies by eyewitnesses, than anything like trustworthy and intelligible statements of doctrine; so that very much of our knowledge of religion in the savage and barbaric world consists of acquaintance with its ceremonies" (1958 ed., vol. 2, p. 449). Such a division of religion into "doctrine" and "ceremony," into "belief" and "ritual," reflected an even more fundamental dualism in European thought between "mind" and "body." The unquestionably racist implications of the idea that, among "savages," ritual is more developed than doctrine is that their mental faculties are less developed than their physical ones.

Tylor and Frazer.

Tylor was one of the key figures in the institutionalization of the modern discipline of anthropology; indeed, in 1884, he was appointed to the first university post in anthropology in Britain, at Oxford no less. Tylor and his contemporaries looked to so-called primitive societies for insights into the origins of modern institutions, such as marriage, the family, the state, and property. These scholars relied heavily on the accounts of European travelers, few of whom were conversant enough in the languages and cultures of the peoples they described to provide accurate and detailed accounts of religious belief. Consequently, Tylor depended upon descriptions of ritual in his attempt to infer a generalized idea of "primitive religion" that he argued was centered on "animism," the belief that humans, but also animals and even inanimate objects, have souls. To support his theory, he cited legions of examples from around the world of "water worship," of "tree worship," of the sacrifice of objects, animals, and humans at funerals so that their souls might assist the deceased, and other ritual practices. Tylor's ultimate aim was to demonstrate that religion as a whole was a holdover from primitive misconceptions about the world. Thus he also used ritual to demonstrate the existence of primitive "survivals" in contemporary religious practice: "throughout the rituals of Christendom stand an endless array of supplications unaltered in principle from savage times—that the weather may be adjusted to our local needs, that we may have the victory over all our enemies, that life and health and wealth and happiness may be ours" (p. 456).

Sir James Frazer shared Tylor's methods of argumentation as well as his opposition to Christianity. For Frazer, religions emerged from earlier forms of belief in magic, based on principles of analogy and imitation. The Golden Bough (1890) cited countless examples of rain-making and wind-making rites as illustrations of such principles of "sympathetic magic." Frazer's analysis revolved around the figure of the divine priest-king responsible for the rites ensuring the fertility and prosperity of the land, who had to be put to death once his powers gave signs of waning. For instance, he drew parallels between instances where divine kings in Japan or Mexico were prohibited from seeing the sun or touching the ground and similar interdictions in girls' puberty rites from around the world: "The uncleanness … of girls at puberty and the sanctity of holy men are only different manifestations of the same supernatural energy" (vol. 2, p. 242). For Frazer as well as for Tylor, primitive rituals provided a code with which to decipher imperfectly articulated systems of belief.

Robertson Smith.

W. Robertson Smith's The Religion of the Semites (1889) aimed, like the work of Tylor and Frazer, to uncover the primitive roots of modern religion. However, he conceived of the relationship between ritual and belief in radically different terms. Premising that "the antique religions had for the most part no creed; they consisted entirely of institutions and practices" (1972 ed., p. 16), he concluded that ritual was prior not only to doctrine, but even to myth. Sacrifice, the most ancient of all rituals, addressed the relationship between the clan, its god, and its totem animal, all of whom were considered kin to one another. The god, as a member of the clan, was particularly concerned with maintaining harmony among fellow members. The original form of sacrifice was a holy meal for which the totem animal, whose flesh was otherwise strictly forbidden, was ritually killed and shared by the assembled clan and its god. The act simultaneously expressed and guaranteed the solidarity of the clan. If the theories of Tylor and Frazer were primarily intellectualist, attempts to use ritual as a key to primitive thought, Robertson Smith pioneered a more thoroughly sociological approach.