ritualThe centrality of ritual for religion is argued by turn of the century
scholars such as William Robertson Smith (1846–1894) and Edward B.
Tylor (1832–1917). The former argues that sacrifice is fundamental
because it focuses on the relationship between humans and their totems,
whereas Tylor uses the gift model to comprehend ritual sacrifice, arguing
that humans make offerings to ancestors in return for blessings.
Similar to Smith, the anthropologist James George Frazer (1854–1941)
thinks that sacrifice is the primary ritual, functioning as the primary
source of many forms of culture. Due to the social context of ritual, these
scholars emphasize the central part that ritual plays in society, and they
stress its social function. According to Frazer, ritual represents an enact-
ment of the death and resurrection of a god or divine being, which is
symbolically connected to fertility and human welfare. Joining with
Frazer and others to form the so-called Myth and Ritual School, Jane
Ellen Harrison argues that ritual is a source of myth, rendering myth a
secondary position to ritual, which correlates to the actions narrated in
myth. But in the wider view, rituals tend to die before myths, which often
continue to exist after the extinction of a ritual. At a later date, the anthro-
pologist Clyde Kluckhohn reacts to the claims of the Myth and Ritual
School by stating that not all myths are connected to ritual because it is
possible to discern a variety of relations between myth and ritual.
In France, the sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) connects ritu-
als with rules of conduct governing human society, and he argues that
ritual internalizes gods into a society. French sociologists Henri Hubert
(1872–1927) and Marcel Mauss (1873–1950) attempt to isolate the struc-
ture of rites, whereas René Girard (b. 1923) stresses the way that rites,
especially sacrifice, operate to control the flow of violence in a society.
Instead of society destroying itself in an orgy of collective violence,
members kill a designated scapegoat that functions to channel violence
in a safe way and preserve society. In Germany, Walter Burkert (b. 1931)
focuses on the anxiety and aggression associated with ritual activity.
According to the Dutch phenomenologist Gerardus van der Leeuw (d.
1950), a ritual is a drama and a game governed by rules with the intention
of gaining control over the vicissitudes of life and to draw power from it.
Sacrifice, for instance, preserves the cycle of power by strengthening the
power of the community and binding its members firmly together into a
more powerful group. The acquisition of power enables a person or group
to dominate the world by utilizing the potency inherent with the natural
powers. Thus it is ritual that enables religious people to develop power and
exercise it. On the other hand, Mircea Eliade (d. 1986), a historian of reli-
gions, discusses ritual in terms of its ability to symbolically repeat paradig-
matic actions of the gods embodied in myths, and this repetitive action gives