Myth and ritual

Myth is the story people tell

Ritual is the enforcement of this myth story in so to make it real

Myth and ritual are actually also two central components of religious practice, but it is also used to illustrate how it works to create illusions and manipulate.

How to use myth and ritual which are commonly united as parts of religion – the exact relationship between them has been a matter of controversy among scholars, who now believe that myth and ritual share common paradigms, but not that one developed from the other.

The relationship between myth and ritual could be comparable to the relationship between science and technology. 

The pioneering anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor is the classic exponent of this view. He saw myth as an attempt to explain the world: for him, myth was a sort of proto-science.

Ritual is secondary: just as technology is an application of science, so ritual is an application of myth, an attempt to produce certain effects, given the supposed nature of the world: 

For Tylor, myth functions to explain the world as an end in itself. Ritual applies that explanation to control the world.

Many 19th-century anthropologists supported the opposite position: that myth and religious doctrine result from ritual. This is known as the “primacy of ritual” hypothesis.

In The Golden Bough (1890; 1906–1915), Frazer famously argues that man progresses from belief in magic (and rituals based on magic), through belief in religion, to science. 

His argument is as follows.

Man starts out with a reflexive belief in a natural law. He thinks he can influence nature by correctly applying this law: 

“In magic man depends on his own strength to meet the difficulties and dangers that beset him on every side. He believes in a certain established order of nature on which he can surely count, and which he can manipulate for his own ends.”

However, the natural law man imagines (magic) does not work. When he sees that his pretended natural law is false, man gives up the idea of a knowable natural law and “throws himself humbly on the mercy of certain great invisible beings behind the veil of nature (gods), to whom he now ascribes all those far-reaching powers which he once arrogated to himself.”

In other words, when man loses his belief in magic, he justifies his formerly magical rituals by saying that they reenact myths or honour mythical beings. 

According to Frazer,

“Myth changes while custom remains constant; men continue to do what their fathers did before them, though the reasons on which their fathers acted have been long forgotten. 

The history of religion is a long attempt to reconcile old custom with new reason, to find a sound theory for an absurd practice.”

For what I want to say here, in the same fashion:

Myth (story) becomes ritual, ritual (bed time story telling) becomes habit (belief), habit becomes your life, and you subconsciously believe the myth (stories), you see it as the truth.