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all myths were part of primitive religions that centered on fertility rites, and he collected and coordinated hundreds of myths and folktales from all over the world. Frazer was most intrigued by what he called the “Great Mother,” and her relationship with a younger male consort who was often sacrificed as a sacred king. According to Frazer, this theme of the dying and reborn god appears in almost every ancient mythology, either directly or symbolically. Some of the most significant examples he singled out were Ishtar and Tammuz from Mesopotamia, and Isis and Osiris in Egypt, but he also made a connection between this idea and Jesus and Mary.

Much of Frazer’s work is now dismissed by modern scholars, and aspects of The Golden Bough have been discredited—including most of the story of the king of the woods at Nemi. But at the time, Frazer’s work was revolutionary. He gave credibility to mythology as a serious study that explained the primitive roots of religion. He also profoundly influenced a whole generation of anthropologists and, perhaps just as important, a generation of writers. James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and William Butler Yeats were among the twentieth-century writers whose work was shaped in part by Frazer’s ideas. (Eliot’s famed poem The Wasteland makes reference to The Golden Bough, though Frazer reportedly said he couldn’t make sense of it.)

Closely related to Frazer’s ideas were those of the so-called ritualists, who believed that all myths are derived from rituals or ceremonies. One of the first scholars to develop this theory was Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928), a British classicist of the late 1800s and early 1900s, who argued that people create myths in order to justify already-established magical or religious rituals. “Gods and religious ideas generally reflect the social activities of the worshipper,” she wrote in a 1912 book about Greek religion, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion.

A colleague of Frazer, Harrison disagreed with many of his ideas. One of her key contributions was to emphasize the importance of female divinities. “The Great Mother is prior to the masculine divinities,” she argued, introducing an idea that is being revived with the so-called Goddess worship, which has enjoyed renewed popularity in recent years. Harrison’s theories, while clearly influential, have also been diminished, because it is difficult to say what came first—the ritual or the myth.

MYTHIC VOICES

One of the reasons why religion seems irrelevant today is that many of us no longer have the sense that we are surrounded by the unseen. Our scientific culture educates us to focus our attention on the physical and material world in front of us. This method of looking at the world has achieved great results. One of its consequences, however, is that we have…edited out the sense of the “spiritual” or “holy” which pervades the lives of people in more traditional societies at every level and which was once an essential component of our human experience of the world.

—KAREN ARMSTRONG, A History of God (1993)

When does myth become religion? And what’s the difference?

For most people, the answer to this question might be this simple formulation: “If I believe it, it is religion. If you believe it, it is a myth.”

For most of the past two centuries, people educated in the world of science and the rational explanation for the workings of the universe readily dismissed myths as the primitive beliefs of backward people who didn’t know better. But to the ancient people of Mesopotamia, Greece, Egypt, India, or China, myths were not myths at all, but religion. They dictated life and formed the basis of the social structure.

As best-selling religious historian Karen Armstrong writes in A History of God, “It seems that creating gods is something that human beings have always done. When one religious idea ceases to work for them, it is simply replaced. These ideas disappear, like the Sky God, with no great fanfare.”

Consider the Lord’s Prayer, or the “Our Father,” familiar to millions of Christians