Ted Hoffman

Introduction

In Quest of The Hero comprises three parts that are in fact three works: An exploration of The Myth of the Birth of The Hero (1909), by Otto Rank, An outline of The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth (1956), by Lord Raglan and Drama and The Hero Pattern and the Life of Jesus (1976), by Alan Dundes. The book presents analysis of myths found in various cultures all over the ancient world by anthropologists, psychologists, folklorists and comparative religion scholars like James Frazer (The Golden Bough), Joseph Campbell (The Hero with a Thousand Faces) and Herman Gunkel.
This book showcases the work of Otto Rank and Lord Raglan and at the end, Alan Dundes, the eminent folklorist from University of Carlifornia at Berkeley, wraps it up with a survey of all works that have been done by scholars on comparative religion and applies their theories in assessing the life of Jesus as presented in the Gospels.

Otto Rank, the Viennese psychoanalyst (1884-1939) was the most influential analyst of the hero patterns, compared to the American mythographer Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) and English folklorist, Lord Raglan (1885-1964). The bulk of the book is an exposition of Rank’s work. Rank was a theoretical ally of James Frazer (whose works have come under attack in recent years) and Sigmud Freud, whose psychoanalytic theories have come to be questioned by modern psychology.

This review, coming sixteen years after the publication of In Quest of The Hero, and close to a century after Rank’s work will also address issues and criticisms that have beset the comparativists since the times of Frazer because, as expected, new modes of thinking, new methodologies, even new evidence has come in, forcing scholars in the field to rethink earlier views, and sometimes revise them. Thus, at the appendix is a review of criticisms of Frazer.

Rank’s Freudian Hero

Per, Rank, as per Jungians and Freudians, heroism deals with what they call the first half of life: birth, childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. In this first half of life, the individual seeks to establish themselves as an independent person in the external world.
Generally, that independence entails separation from the parents and securing oneself a mate and a job/career, and overcoming one’s instincts. According to Freudian psychology, if one has a lingering attachment to one’s parents or instincts, they are considered to be fixated, or stuck at childhood because it entails depending on one’s parents for satisfaction of their own instincts, or satisfying these instincts in antisocial ways. The hero is a hero because he rises from obscurity to become a hero – a king, or a god.
Rank outlines the path the hero takes from his birth to the attainment of a career as follows:

The hero is the child of most distinguished parents, usually the son of most distinguished parents, usually the son of a king. His origin is preceded by difficulties, such as continence, or prolonged barrenness, or secret intercourse of the parents due to external prohibition or obstacles. During or before the pregnancy, there is a prophecy, in the form of a dream or oracle, cautioning against his birth, and usually threatening danger to the father (or his representative). As a rule, he is surrendered to the water, in a box. He is then saved by animals or by lowly people (shepherds), and is suckled by a female animal or by a humble woman. After he has grown up, he finds his distinguished parents, in a highly versatile fashion. He takes revenge on his father, on the one hand, and is acknowledged, on the other. Finally he achieves rank and honors

(The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, p.57).

Typically, the hero is a legendary figure like Oedipus. In some myths, the hero kills his father (Theseus, Romulus, Perseus), who, as is the case with most of the myths, attempts to kill the infant hero (Oedipus, Zeus, Asclepius, Pelops, Jason, Perseus, Romulus). The patricide therefore comes as a deserved comeuppance on the father. Psychoanalysts see this patricide not as an act of revenge, but as motivated by frustration at the father who has refused to surrender his wife, the hero’s mother and the real object of his son’s efforts. Rank writes that “the deepest, generally unconscious root of the dislike of the son for the father or of two brothers for each other, is related to competition for the tender devotion and love for the mother� Thus, the true meaning of the myth is covered up in a fabricated story that portrays the hero, not as the culprit, but as a justified avenger. Rank adds that “The fictitious romance is the excuse, as it were, for the hostile feelings that the child harbors against his father, and which in this fiction are projected against the father�

Robert A. Segal writes in the introduction:

What the hero seeks gets masked as power, not incest. Most of all, who the hero is, becomes some third party, a historical or legendary figure, rather than ether the creator of the myth or anyone stirred by it. Identifying himself with the literal hero, the mythmaker or reader vicariously revels in the hero’s triumph, which in fact is his own. He is the real hero of the myth.

Because the wish that the hero myth fulfills (attainment of his father’s throne, marrying his mother [Oedipus] etc) does not entail detachment from his parents and from antisocial instincts (incest), the myth vents the wish of a child of 3-5 years. Rank notes:

Myths are, therefore, created by adults, by means of retrograde childhood fantasies, the hero being credited with the mythmaker’s personal infantile history.

The myth fulfilled, of course, is the Oedipal wish to kill one’s father in order to attain the mother. The mythmakers, or stirred readers are adults who never outgrew these wishes and therefore vent them by inventing or using the myths. Freud classified adults who never developed an ego strong enough to master their instincts, as neurotic.
Segal notes:

By identifying himself with the hero, the creator or reader of the myth acts out in his mind deeds that he would dare not act out in the proverbial real world. Still, the myth does provide fulfillment of a kind and, in light of the conflict between the neurotic’s impulses and the neurotic’s morals, provides the best possible fulfillment.

Segal identifies some criticisms of Rank’s theory:
1. One can grant the pattern while denying the Freudian meaning, which, after all, reverses the manifest one. Or one can deny the pattern itself.
2. The pattern only fits the hero myths, or the portions of them that cover the first half of the life of the heroes. Adult heroes like Aeneas are excluded.
3. Rank’s examples come from Europe, the Near East and India and may not fit examples from elsewhere.

In defense of the disparity between the Moses saga, for example, and the pattern, Rank resorted to non-Biblical versions of the Moses saga that came closer to his pattern. He interpreted the disparity between the patterns and the Freudian meaning as motivated by subconscious concealment by the mythmaker. Segal writes that the myth “bears too ugly a truth for the creator or user of the myth to confront�. This reviewer finds the first criticism above to be void because it does not address the point it “denies� or provide any valid reasons for justifying such a denial. The myth is about vicarious fulfillment of the Oedipal needs and it is not necessary that the hero contained in the myth be an adult himself: what is key is that the myth vents these infantile wishes. Thus the second criticism fails. The third criticism is not accompanied by supporting examples and is therefore difficult to evaluate. But suffice it to say that in the story of Jesus, some scholars have argued that we find hidden incestuous messages. We know that the word touch, in 1 Cor 7:1-2, for example, implies sexual intercourse when it says “It is good for a man not to touch a woman�. We find this sexual meaning of touch in Gen 20:6 and in Proverbs 6:29. Alan Dundes writes that “So when Jesus tells Mary Magdalene, the very first person to see him ‘arisen’ not to touch him, it is at least within the realm of logical possibility that Jesus is fending off a sexual advance�( The Hero Pattern and The Life of Jesus, in In Quest of The Hero, p.209)

Magdalene as Mary’s Double

Mary Magdalene is generally identified as the repentant woman that Jesus forgave (in Luke 7:37-50) and Phipps (Was Jesus Married?, 1970:64-67) and Garth (Saint Mary Magdalene in Mediaeval Literature, 1950:21) argue that the implication of this is that Magdalene was a prostitute. But narrative critics, would ask, as does Dundes: “Why should Jesus appear first to a reformed prostitute whose name just coincidentally happens to be the same as that of his own mother?� Dundes reminds us of a tradition that declared Magdalene to be the wife of Jesus in the Gospel of Philip: “And the consort of [Christ is] Mary Magdalene. [The Lord loved Mary] more than [all] the disciples and kissed her on her [mouth] often� (see Phipps op. cit., p.137-38, Wilson, The Gospel of Philip, 1962:35 and Leach, Jesus John and Mary Magdalene, 1975).

In mythological terms, Magdalene is a “double�. Doubles, which we find for example in Herodotus’ version of the Cyrus sage, are not inserted merely for ornamentation but are an integral part of myth formation and are reflective of its tendency. The implication of this is that in the mother-son pattern, Jesus is a son-consort.

Campbell’s Jungian Hero

Unlike Rank, Campbell’s heroism involves the second half of life even more. Segal explains:

For Freud and Rank, heroism involves relations with the parents and instincts. For Jung, heroism in even the first life involves, in addition, relations with the unconscious. Heroism here means separation, not only from parents and anti-social instincts but also from the unconscious: every child’s managing to forge consciousness of the external world, is for Jung, heroic.

Freud regarded the unconscious as the product of repressed instincts while Jung considered it as inherited and comprising more than repressed instincts. Thus for Jung, independence entails more than overcoming of instincts, but also formation of consciousness, which is the goal of the second half of life for both Freud and Jung. The second half of life thus aims to supplement the first half, not to abandon the achievements of the first half. Unlike Freud, Jungian problems entail failure to reestablish oneself internally.
Campbell restricts heroism to the second half of life. Birth is dismissed as unheroic because the hero does not do it consciously. He demotes Rank’s youthful heroism as a prelude or preparation for adult heroism. Campbell’s hero does not have to possess royal lineage or return to his birthplace: he marches to a strange, new world. Campbell writes:

destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown. This fateful region of both treasure and danger may be variously represented: as a distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, a secret island, a lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state

(The Hero With a Thousand Faces, p. 58)

In Freudian psychology, gods symbolize parents. In Jungian psychology, parents symbolize gods. And gods symbolize father and mother archetypes, which are components of the personality of the hero. So, unlike Rank and Freud, Campbell sees the relationship with gods as representative of the relationship between the subconscious and the ego – different sides of the personality.
Archetypes, which comprise the father and mother, are unconscious not because they are repressed but are dormant and have simply not been awakened or made conscious. Segal notes:
For Jung and Campbell, myth originates and functions not, as for Freud and Rank, to satisfy neurotic urges that cannot be manifested openly but to express normal sides of the personality that have just not had a chance at realization...While identifying himself with the hero of a myth, Campbell’s mythmaker vicariously lives out in his mind an adventure that even when directly fulfilled, would still take place in his mind. For parts of his mind are really what he is really encountering.

Raglan’s Frazerian Hero

Lord Raglan’s model of the Hero was influenced by James Frazer and S.H. Hooke among others and unlike Rank’s hero, who wins at the expense of everyone and then dies, Raglan’s hero, like Campbell’s saves people and does not have to die. Raglan’s hero must be a King and is expelled from his community.

Hooke, like Frazer, held that the ritual of the killing of the King enacted the myth of the god of vegetation, and it is upon concepts like this that Raglan based his hero. This ritual enactment at the end of each winter had the magical purpose of engendering the yield of the crops. The King, while not an incarnation of the god of vegetation, represented and imitated that god. According to Hooke, the King was thus symbolically and not literally killed and his death represented the death of the god who died at the hands of the enemy. On the other hand, according to Raglan, the King is actually a god. His death does not magically induce the death of a god but is actually the death of a god and of vegetation. Segal notes that “For Raglan, as for Frazer and Hooke, the myth describes the life of the god and the ritual enacts it�

The ritual, performed upon the King becoming weak or completing his term, helped the community by magically bringing victory in war, fertility and health. Raglan went beyond Frazer and Hooke and developed a hero pattern that comprised 22 parts. Among criticisms of Raglan’s hero pattern is the lack of synchronicity between the myth and the ritual: the protagonist in the myth is always human while he is always divine in the ritual. The myth covers the entire life of the hero whilst the ritual only covers one portion of his life. A god, one would suppose is not supposed to lose power. Raglan explains that it is the hero, not the god, who loses power, even though they are identical!

Segal does a good job of criticizing Raglan’s hero pattern and demonstrates the incongruence between Raglan’s conception of myth and ritual.
Segal notes, against Raglan, Francis Lee Utley’s tongue-in-cheek application of Raglan’s pattern to Abraham Lincoln (in Lincoln Wasn’t There or Lord Raglan’s Hero, 1965), who scores a full twenty two points. This reviewer is unaware that Lincoln was seriously reputed to be a son of a god/King, or that his conception was unusual. One can thus doubt the validity of Utley’s test. Raglan maintained that while the hero could be a historical figure, the high points of his heroism are not. For Rank, the apparent historicity of the gospel would be a distortion invented to keep the real, symbolic meaning from surfacing.

Raglan’s understanding of the hero and his historicity was pretty much muddled and this discredits his hero pattern and its applicability in determining the historicity of the hero. Segal notes:

By contrast to both Rank and Campbell, Raglan reads myth literally. Stories about heroes are really about heroes. While Raglan relentlessly impugns the historicity of heroes, he takes for granted that stories about them are meant literally...heroes do not symbolize gods. They are gods. For Rank, hero myths originate and function to fulfill a blocked need: the need to fulfill socially and personally unacceptable impulses. The fulfillment that myth provides is compensatory: it is a disguised, unconscious, and merely fantasized venting of impulses that cannot be vented directly. The meaning of myth is therefore unconscious. One cannot face it openly.
For Raglan, the myths had a functional purpose, which was to help meet the practical, day-to-day needs of the people by controlling the physical word (rain, crops etc).

Dundes shows how the works of Campbell, Raglan and Rank illustrate the folkloristic life of Jesus and he notes that Jesus’ ‘life’ typifies the options that were forced on Mediterranean males. Jesus’ celibacy represents submission to the father’s opposition to the son’s budding sexuality and the crucifixion is a preemptive execution of the fathers threatened punishment of castration. Jesus triumphs over the tyrannical father both through his resurrection and by winning the affection of his mother, who is represented by Mary Magdalane. His ascent to heaven and subsequently becoming a reigning equal of his father also represents this triumph. Segal notes that “One does not have to concur wholly in Dundes’ interpretation of the folkloristic life of Jesus to admire this imaginative use of the hero pattern�

The Myth of the Birth of the Hero

At early stages, the prominent civilizations like the Babylonians, Hebrews, Sumerians, Hindus, Greeks, Romans and Egyptians glorified their national heroes, who were founders of religions, empires, dynasties and mythical princes, in legends and tales. The birth narratives of these heroes invariably got injected with fantastic features that, despite being widely separated by space and time, demonstrate remarkable similarity to each other.
These similarities intrigued many researchers including Adolf Bastian, Adolf Bauer, Theodor Benfey and Rudolf Schubert, who propounded mythological theories that sought to unravel the elemental ideas behind these legends. It is from this background that Sigmud Freud’s former protégé’, Otto Rank, made his contribution.

On the one hand, Rank was guided by the idea of the interdependence of mythological structures, which Braun saw as illustrative of the basic nature of the human mind: “Nothing new is ever discovered as long as it is possible to copy�. And on the other hand, the idea that myths are structures of the human faculty of imagination which were for certain reasons projected upon the heavens and secondarily transferred to the heavenly bodies. As has been noted in this review, the myths had motifs of incest, which, according to Freudian psychology come from an infantile psyche, with its peculiar interpretation of the world and its inhabitants. The ready revulsion that this idea meets reflects the dimly felt painful recognition of the actuality of these relations. It is this recognition, and the need for their own subconscious rehabilitation, that impels the mythmakers to assign these motifs meanings that are entirely different from their original significance. Rank notes:
The same internal repudiation prevents the myth-creating people from believing in the possibility of such revolting thoughts, and this defense was probably the first reason for projecting these relationships onto the firmament. The psychological pacifying through such rehabilitation, by projection upon external and remote objects, can still be realized – to a certain degree, by a glance at one of these interpretations.

One of these interpretations is that of the Oedipus fable, which has Oedipus kill his father, marry his mother and die old and blind. Otto Rank issues the following challenge: “One must either be reconciled to these indecencies, provided they are felt to be such, or one must abandon the study of psychological phenomena�

Confident of the psychic origin of the myths Rank then proceeds to attempt a psychological interpretation of the myths on a large scale.
He applies this interpretation to biographical hero myths including Sargon – the mighty King of Argade, who never knew his father, whose mother was a vestal, whose infancy was threatened by death, whose mother laid him on a vessel and dropped him down a river, was raised by a letter carrier and later became King.

The biography of the Biblical Moses closely parallels that of Sargon, except, he is raised by the Pharaoh’s daughter; a royal, not a lowly person.
In the Hindu Epic Mahabharata, we find an account that closely parallels the Sargon Legend: that of Karna. Karna is conceived through a virgin birth as son of sun-god Surya. He is put in a basket of rushes and dropped in a river from where he is picked by a charioteer.

Oedipus is son of King Laius and queen Jocasta. His birth is preceded by visions. Some accounts say he was exposed in a box by the sea and was picked by Periboa, king of King Polybus and Polybus raised him as his own son. He later kills his father and marries his mother.
The Greek legend of Paris has him as the son of King Priam of Troy and his wife Hecuba. His birth is preceded by visions. His life is in danger at infancy and he is hidden on a mountain and is nursed by a she-bear for five days. The slave Agelaos raises him and his father later accepts him as his son.
Telephus is the son of Hercules and his life is in danger from the King at infancy. His birth is preceded by visions. His mother refuses to have intercourse with him. He becomes King of Mysia.

Perseus is conceived immaculately (Zeus in form of a golden shower). His birth is preceded by visions. The King wants him killed and casts him, enclosed in a box with his mother, in the sea. A fisherman, Dictys, saves them. He stops Dictys from seducing his mother by managing to fetch the head of Gorgon Medusa. He later becomes King of Argos, then of Tiryns.
Gilgamesh, king of Bablylonia, was thrown as an infant, from a great height on the king’s orders and was saved by an eagle before he struck the ground.
Herodotus’ account of Cyrus the great has Cyrus’ birth preceded by visions. The King wants him killed. He is brought up by a herder’s wife. He later became the King of Persia.

Tristan is protected from his father’s wrath by lying to his father that he was born dead. He later vanquishes his father and is banished by the King, his uncle, after the best maid of Tristan’s bride sacrifices her virginity to the king.
The twins Romulus and Remus were borne by a King Numitor’s daughter, Ilia, from the embrace of the war-god mars. The King condemned them to be cast into the river. They are dropped in a tub into the river. A she-wolf nurses them. Royal herdsmen pick them and they get raised by King Faustulus. King Romulus founded Rome, so the legend says.
Hercules is son of Zeus and Alcmene. Hera, Zeus’ spouse, seeks to kill Hercules and his mother. But he escapes the infanticide and grows to be very strong.

Jesus’ birth is preceded by visions and visits by angels. He is conceived immaculately. He is delivered in a stable and laid in a manger. King Herod seeks to kill him but his parents flee to Egypt with him. He has the affection of Mary Magdalene, who is his mother’s namesake. He is killed but resurrects and rises to reigns with his father as an equal.
Rank also includes the legend of Siegfried and Longherin in his list. All of these legends, with the appearance of the common motifs of threat of infanticide, patricide and incest among others demonstrate a common pattern in the saga. Of course there are deviations, just as we see in all our bodies, voices, shapes, weight, colour and behaviour, yet the human skeleton retains the same structure amongst all of us.
Rank maintains that variations of the crude prototype can be unraveled via myth interpretation. And he provides the method for doing this.
What is the skeleton of the standard saga?

The hero is typically the child of distinguished parents. His origin is preceded by difficulties such as continence or secret intercourse by his parents due to certain societal prohibitions. His birth is preceded by a prophecy. His father or the ruler tries to kill him. He is surrendered to the water then saved by animals or lowly people. He finds his parents upon growing up. He takes revenge on his father, vanquishes him or is acknowledged somehow. Then he achieves rank and honor.

Rank uses the remembered psychic emotions of childhood years to help in the interpretation of the myths. The imaginative faculty, represented by daydreams, which continue long past puberty, serve the function of wish-fulfillment in the individual. Within psychoneurotics, the juvenile psychic life, instead of being overcome or modified, is strengthened or fixed and within their psychology is the motive of revenge and retaliation, typically in reaction to punishment by parents. These emotions are played out in the imagination and are ultimately legitimized through the plotting of the myths that involve patricide and so on. The attempted infacticide is purely meant to justify the hostile feelings that the child harbors against his father, which in the fiction, are projected against the father. The birth from the virgin, Rank says, is the most abrupt repudiation of the father. The true hero of the family romance is actually the ego, which finds itself in the hero. Rank provides psychological interpretations for the water (which symbolizes amniotic fluid), the basket of reeds that the hero is exposed in (which symbolizes the womb) and the resurrection and empty tombs as symbolic of the fantasy of being born again. The details of the interpretations are beyond the scope of this article but he does try to account for just about every motif found in the saga of the hero.

Conclusion
Rank’s theory requires a thorough review that involves a reexamination of Freuduan psychology, particularly on the origin of myths and the nature of consciousness, the Oedipal impulses and the phenomena of psychoneurosis. It is also important to examine the recent works of comparative religion scholars especially those that have criticized Frazer, like Burkitt, so as to determine which parts of Frazer’s theory can be salvaged or otherwise.
In any event, Rank’s studies expose certain undeniable patterns (incest, infabticide, patricide etc) that are observable across the myths in different cultures and as he so unforgettably puts it: “One must either be reconciled to these indecencies, provided they are felt to be such, or one must abandon the study of psychological phenomena�
There is a lot of work that needs to be done in the area of studying myths as psychological phenomena.


APPENDIX
Reviewing Criticisms of Frazer – Joel Ng

Freke and Gandy argue in The Jesus Mysteries that Jesus was modeled after the category of dying and rising gods that was identified as a category by Frazer and others. The Jesus Mysteries has faced a lot of criticism. Most of the criticisms have merit. Amongst these criticisms is their thematic reliance on James Frazer’s work. Below is a brief examination of eight such criticisms by one critic. This examination is restricted to the criticisms of Frazer as they are presented on the internet and at this stage, I have made no effort to read the texts that inform the critic, like Walter Burkert’s Ancient Mystery Cults or Mark S. Smith’s The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts.

Joel Ng writes in Putting the Mystery to Rest that Frazer’s “disappearance from scholarship� came about because his work about dying and rising gods exhibited “poor evidence, failure to make functional distinctions, and a lack of grounding in primary texts�
Joel criticizes Frazer’s work in a summary of Mark S. Smith’s The Origins of Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts, from chapter 6, where Smith presents a methodological critique of the “dying and rising gods� category and in his summary of Walter Burkert's Ancient Mystery Cults (1987)
Joel’s criticisms include:

1. Frazer’s comparative method was not backed by a fieldwork carried out within the cultures he examined.

This is a critique of Frazer’s methodology, not of his theory. So we will evaluate the practicality of this methodology Frazer is faulted for his non-compliance with, and also analyze the significance of the omission Frazer is being accused of. Carrying out the fieldwork within the culture one is examining can help a lot but it is important to remember that Frazer himself lived thousands of years after the cultures he was studying, like the Akkadian civilization (where we find Tammuz), the Egyptian civilization (for Osiris) and so on. Because of occupation of the sites by various peoples across the ages, the vagaries of time, the rise and decline of empires and so on, the syncretism of various cultures, migrations, conquests and other influences, the cultures and ritualistic practices would have changed. In other words, the cultures Frazer was examining did not exist any more because they had evolved or had been replaced. This means that the critique above demands that Frazer was to engage in archaeological explorations of more than half the planet. This is not realistic or even possible.

But more importantly, one must note that several theories have been developed via linguistic and comparative study of the relevant texts without necessarily visiting the cultures under examination. For example, the German scholar Hermann Gunkel (1862-1932) explored oral traditions, genres and settings in life of the old testament texts and developed comparisons between the Bible and literature scattered all over the world and published his seminal work Legends of Genesis. He showed with respect to Genesis, that there was Egyptian influence in the Joseph romance. He showed Moabite influence in the Lot legends and demonstrated Babylonian influence in the stories of creation, flood and tower of Babel. His work also exposed Greek parallels in narratives such as the three visitors to Abraham, Reuben’s curse, and the quarrel between Esau and Jacob. In addition, he illustrated how Israel adapted foreign themes and content to serve her own religious interests. This pursuit for parallels, Phyllis Tribble notes in Rhetorical Criticism, Context, Method and the Book of Jonah (1994), p.23, “dislodged provincial interpretation to show that, far from being an isolated document, the Bible belonged to world literature�
This means that it is not sufficient for critics to fault Frazer’s methodology on the grounds that he did not visit the cultures he studied. The critics must demonstrate how his failure to do that made his theory incorrect.

2. Frazer’s abstractions were isolated from the historical and cultural contexts which were poorly attested and poorly understood, and resulted in imaginary categories.

A critique based on the paucity of the evidence is a critique of the entire field of Old and New Testament and ANE studies. Not a critique of Frazer. This paucity of evidence explains why we have maximalists and minimalists, and why we have had successive quests for the historical Jesus. So this criticism is not on target. The first section of the criticism is a conclusion based on the assumption that failure to visit the cultures one is studying results in incongruence between the actual cultural contexts and the resulting theories. It is an assumption that must first be demonstrated then shown to be applicable in Frazer’s case.

3. Frazer’s presentation of the similarities of rites failed to address the role of the human feelings and thoughts in the “patternism� – this was an argument made by Ludwig Wittgenstein.

The criticism here is that Frazer failed to factor in the role of the human feelings and thoughts in his work. But it does not, by itself, show that Frazer’s categories were incorrect. In the same fashion, one can argue that Frazer failed to elucidate the role of sexual fantasies in the make-up of fertility rituals. This criticism therefore fails to address Frazer’s theory.

4. Frazer’s similarities revealed more about Frazer’s own assumptions than about the cultures he studied. Frazer and like-minded scholars “abstracted generalizations and then assumed their validity�. This incongruence, critics assert, is an artifact of the fact that Frazer et al were outsiders to the religions they studied and as a result, “interpreted Semitic deities through identifications between gods of different religions�

This is a combination of the first two criticisms, which I have adequately addressed above.

5. The myth of dying and rising god is not clearly linked to the fertility rituals. For Baal, for example, the ritual was a royal funerary ritual and was not a celebration of the death and resurrection of the god.

The criticism above appears inattentive to the fact that myths vary with the rituals and both tend to reflect the political and economic conditions. Why would a king/royal need a funerary ritual? History is meaningless to the ritualist. History happens only once yet the ritualist is concerned with things that are done again and again. We know that crops are harvested and planted seasonally, every year. Braun, we recall, said about the human mind: “Nothing new is ever discovered as long as it is possible to copy�. Is it possible that this royal funerary ritual grew from a fertility ritual? In his summary of Smith, Joel himself indicates that in Baal’s myth, like the myth involving Osiris and Seth, “there is some association with fertility�. In addition, Joel’s summary of Smith indicates that “Seth is often actually identified with Baal in the New Kingdom Period� and that “Seth represents the fertility of the Nile valley with the river which regularly flooded it.� Of course, Joel points out that the “similarities end there�. The similarities have to be there and they do not damage Frazer’s theory because they are integral to it. Lord Raglan explains in The Hero: A Study in Tradition:

[Emphasis mine]

The result of this is that it is not enough to assert that there is no link between myth and ritual as has been done in the criticism above. Especially since myths follow rituals. S. H. Hooke, in Myth and Ritual, p.17, describes myth as “the spoken part of a ritual: the story which the ritual enacts�. The myth is the narrative linked to a ritual. For example, the ritual of circumcision being linked to the story of Abraham, or Moses, or Joshua. In several cases, myths (the explanations for the ritual) have got nothing to do with rituals and serve to appropriate or explicate rituals. Raglan states:


At this point, it should be reasonably clear that the argument that “For Baal, the ritual was a royal funerary ritual and was not a celebration of the death and resurrection of the god,� is not sufficient as a basis for excluding Baal as an example of a dying and rising god, whose myth possibly underwent change because of political situations, like the presence of royal class/King in a pastoralist society, as opposed to having a society centered on an agrarian economy.
The fact that at one point the ritual was a royal funerary ritual does not mean that that is what the ritual always was. Plus, royal funerary rituals like the Egyptian ones, were closely linked to the flooding and receding of the Nile, and consequently crop fertility.

6. Frazer’s categories assume applicability across thousands of miles, multitudes of cultures and thousands of years.

People traveled thousands of miles and myths were copied across cultures as Herman Gunkel demonstrated. For transmission across generations, and across cultures, time is required, the longer the period the greater the chances of both transmission and evolution. It is unclear how the above is a criticism against Frazer’s theory.

7. The deities vary widely in character and some do not rise. Some are not even gods. Some are too poorly attested to comment conclusively about them.

I have already dealt with the “poor attestation� argument. I have also dealt with the variation in the characters of the deities, which is to be expected as the times, political, economic and cultural situations differ.

8. The bulk of the evidence regarding the dying and rising gods come from late classical authors whose information second hand. This evidence is also potentially anachronistic and likely to be misleading.

This may very well be the case, but it has to be demonstrated, on a case by case basis, and specifically, how the second-handedness of the sources impacts on Frazer’s theory. The presumption cannot be that the evidence is anachronistic or misleading without clear illustrations of how this happens to be the case. The above argument tells us more about the skepticism of the critics and not necessarily the sources in question.[/