[2] Campbell's Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands, p. 152.
[CHAPTER IX]
RITUAL AND MYTH
Ritual is worship organized, the detail and circumstance of adoration. The study of ritual is one of the branches of the science of comparative religion, but much light is often cast upon myth by its consideration, and here we have to discuss it only in its relationship to myth.
This almost resolves itself into an argument upon the vexed question whether myth is a product of ritual or not. As this question has been already fully discussed (pp. [62]-[64]), there is no necessity to renew it here; but it possesses a pendent question. When the original reason for a certain ritual became forgotten and lost, a myth might arise to account for it. Such a myth would, of course, be 'secondary' in its nature, and is, properly speaking, more of the nature of folklore than myth. Ritual thus arises from an original myth and gives birth to secondary myth or folklore.
It is not essential that ritual should originate in a definite original myth—a concrete story having dramatis personæ, plot, and counterplot. The savage may conceive a deity without endowing it with any characteristics. "The sun-being lives up there," says the savage, or "I fear the wind. I will placate him." The only myth created is: "The supernatural wind-being lives on the earth." All the same this statement is myth; it is primitive theobiography.
Marett thinks that primitive religion was something "to be danced out." The religious dance of the savage is both myth and ritual; it combines myth, tale, and worship. Many myths were and are acted in dance, especially among the aborigines of Australia and America. The Eleusinian mysteries of Greece were almost certainly relics of mythic dances such as Red Indians and Black-fellows still participate in. We have then a meeting-place for myth and ritual in the tribal dance, which at the same time as it represents the adventures of the gods chants their praises in psalm and hymn (that is, in ritual) and performs the mystic movements that are the most ancient ritual. Dance itself may be purely ritualistic rather than explanatory. When David "danced before the Lord" he did not 'dance out' a myth. He danced ritualistically, with ritual movements—probably traditional and unchangeable—to suit the cadence of his chant or psalm. It is such ritual movements that mechanics unconsciously employ when at work. The blacksmith when he strikes the anvil with his hammer in the intervals of shaping the shoe he holds between the tongs does not do so because he requires to. The blows are needless and he gives them because all other craftsmen give them; but they were not always unmeaning. Once, perchance, they filled in the lapses of a song (like that of Joe Gargery in Great Expectations), or perhaps he thought they rounded off the music his hammer made on the hot iron he shaped on his stithy. Now they are merely part of the ritual of his craft and he is 'forced' by the immemorial usage of his 'mystery' to employ them, just as we all employ certain stereotyped expressions, for custom's sake.