The Cambridge Ritualists were a recognised group of classical scholars, mostly in Cambridge, England, including Jane Ellen Harrison,

F.M. Cornford Francis Macdonald Cornford (27 February 1874 – 3 January 1943) was an English classical scholar and translator known for work on ancient philosophy, notably Plato, Parmenides, Thucydides, and ancient Greek religion. Frances Cornford, his wif ...

, Gilbert Murray (actually from the University of Oxford),

A. B. Cook Arthur Bernard Cook (22 October 1868 in Hampstead – 26 April 1952 in Cambridge) was a British archeologist and classical scholar, best known for his three-part work, ''Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion''. Early life and education Arthur B ...

, and others. They earned this title because of their shared interest in ritual, specifically their attempts to explain

myth Myth is a folklore genre consisting of Narrative, narratives that play a fundamental role in a society, such as foundational tales or Origin myth, origin myths. Since "myth" is widely used to imply that a story is not Objectivity (philosophy), ...

and early forms of classical drama as originating in ritual, mainly the ritual seasonal killings of ''eniautos daimon'', or the Year-King. They are also sometimes referred to as the myth and ritual school, or as the

Classical Anthropologists Classical may refer to: European antiquity * Classical antiquity, a period of history from roughly the 7th or 8th century B.C.E. to the 5th century C.E. centered on the Mediterranean Sea * Classical architecture, architecture derived from Greek a ...

Sacrifice and drama

Inspired by ''

The Golden Bough ''The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion'' (retitled ''The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion'' in its second edition) is a wide-ranging, comparative study of mythology and religion, written by the Scottish anthropologist Sir ...

'', Gilbert Murray in 1913 proclaimed the killing of the year spirit as the "orthodox view of the origins of tragedy. The year Daimon waxes proud and is slain by his enemy, who becomes thereby a murderer, and must in turn perish". A decade later, however, the excessively rigid application of Frazer's thesis to Greek tragedy had already begun to be challenged; and by the Sixties Robert Fagles could state that "The ritual origins of tragedy are totally in doubt, often hotly debated".

Influences

Through their work in classical philology, they exerted profound influence not only on the Classics, but on literary critics, such as Stanley Edgar Hyman or Northrop Frye. Particularly affected by Émile Durkheim was F. M. Cornford, who used the French sociologist's notion of collective representations to analyze social forms of religious, artistic, philosophical, and scientific expression in

classical Greece Classical Greece was a period of around 200 years (the 5th and 4th centuries BC) in Ancient Greece,The "Classical Age" is "the modern designation of the period from about 500 B.C. to the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C." ( Thomas R. Marti ...

. Other significant influences on the group, particularly on Harrison, were

Darwin Darwin may refer to: Common meanings * Charles Darwin (1809–1882), English naturalist and writer, best known as the originator of the theory of biological evolution by natural selection * Darwin, Northern Territory, a territorial capital city i ...

, James Frazer, Marx, Nietzsche and

Freud Sigmund Freud ( , ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies explained as originating in conflicts in ...

References

External links

Bibliography of works by and about the Myth and Ritual School
Culture in Cambridge Ancient Greek theatre British literary theorists Ritual Classical philology Mythology {{England-stub

Sacrifice and drama

Influences

See also

References

Further reading

External links