Review of Joseph Fontenrose, The Ritual of Myth

The ritual theory of myth inspired some of the highest literary achievements of the twentieth century, such as T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, but at the same time it also created one of the most attractive fallacies to his humanistic scholarship: the origin of myth in ritual and ritual only. This theory influenced anthropology and archaeology, biblical scholarship and literary criticism. Folklore resisted its lure, yet was occasionally vulnerable to its devastating effects. A few years ago the ritual theory of myth appeared to be all but dead, but recently, like divine kingship itself, this idea has shown signs of resurrection.