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The Cambridge Ritualists
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17422 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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1 / 1990 |
5,179 Words |
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Robert Ackerman
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The year 1909, the centenary of Charles Darwin's birth, was the occasion for much intellectual stocktaking, especially in Cambridge, where Darwin himself had been an undergraduate. As part of the commemoration, the university press brought out a volume on the larger cultural effects of evolutionism, featuring a chapter on the history of religion by the pioneering classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison. She began thus: "The title of my paper might well have been 'The creation by Darwinism of the scientific study of Religious,' but that I feared to mar my tribute to a great name by any shadow of exaggeration.” Although there were times when she did exaggerate, this was not one of them. In the half century following the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, evolution, both as theory and as cultural metaphor, had been everywhere triumphant, in the history of religion as in every other field that aspired to the exalted name of science.
But evolution was only one of many assumptions that underlay the study of religious history at the time. Because scholars were much less methodologically self-conscious then than they are now, it is perhaps not surprising that they tended to understand classical antiquity in terms drawn from and appropriate to their own time. That is, in the best nineteenth-century liberal tradition, they saw the ancient world as composed of atomic individuals, each striving to advance private interests, and they presupposed a social order based on private property. Furthermore, the mind (in both its primitive and developed versions) was then understood to be a fairly simple mechanism that operated primarily by trial and error and association.
Another obsession of these scholars, a consequence of their evolutionary perspective, was origins. Many (including Jane Harrison) felt driven to go as far back as possible in tracing the development of their subject in the belief that its earliest phase was somehow the most authentic and contained the key to all that followed. Finally, for nearly all educated people a belief in progress based on the rational control of both nature and self seemed as "natural" as breathing.
This sort of anachronistic naiveté produced what has been termed the “if-I-were-a-house" fallacy: In order to "feel their way" into the mental world of antiquity, classical historians asked themselves what they would have thought and felt had they been ancient Greeks. Needless to say, the answers of highly educated nineteenth-century European gentlemen to such a question did not have much relevance to those that the Greeks themselves might have given. Obvious as that may seem to us today, it was not so then, except to the small number of exceptional scholars who had become aware of some of their own intellectual and cultural biases. Among them were the handful of classical scholars knows today as the Cambridge Ritualists.
In the decade before the First World War the Ritualists - Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928), Francis Macdonald Cornford (1874-1943), and Gilbert Murray (1866-1957) - produced a radical evolutionary reinterpretation of Greek mythology and religion. Their analysis was called ritualism because they derived myth, and in consequence literature influenced by myth (like drama), from antecedent ritual performances, usually of the agricultural and magical kind. Because they emphasized ritual at the expense of myth and primitive behavior at the expense of literary text, and because Harrison and Cornford were attached to the University of Cambridge, the group became known as
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