Although myth and ritual are commonly united as parts of religion, the exact relationship between them has been a matter of controversy among scholars.
[4] In the 1930s, Soviet researchers such as Jakov E. Golosovker, Frank-Kamenecky, Olga Freidenberg, Mikhail Bakhtin, "grounded the study of myth and ritual in folklore and in the world view of popular culture.
[1] On the whole, Smith argues, ancients tended to be conservative with regard to rituals, making sure to pass them down faithfully.
Worshipers mourned Adonis's mythical death in a ritual that coincided with the annual withering of the vegetation.
According to Smith, the ritual mourning originally had a nonmythical explanation: with the annual withering of plants, "the worshippers lament out of natural sympathy [...] just as modern man is touched with melancholy at the falling of autumn leaves.
"[6] In his essay "The Ritual View of Myth and the Mythic", (1955) Stanley Edgar Hyman makes an argument similar to Smith's: "In Fiji [...] the physical peculiarities of an island with only one small patch of fertile soil are explained by a myth telling how Mberewalaki, a culture hero, flew into a passion at the misbehavior of the people of the island and hurled all the soil he was bringing them in a heap, instead of laying it out properly.
The famous anthropologist Sir James George Frazer claimed that myth emerges from ritual during the natural process of religious evolution.
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.
The history of religion is a long attempt to reconcile old custom with new reason, to find a sound theory for an absurd practice.
"[13]The classicist Jane Ellen Harrison and the biblical scholar S. H. Hooke regarded myth as intimately connected to ritual.
"[15] Harrison and Hooke gave an explanation for why ancients would feel the need to describe the ritual in a narrative form.
"[14] In time, people forgot the ritual's initiatory function and only remembered its status as a commemoration of the Adonis myth.
"[19] By performing the ritual of hunting together, an ancient society bonded itself together as a group, and also provided a way for its members to vent their anxieties over their own aggressiveness and mortality.
Like Malinowski, the religious scholar Mircea Eliade thinks one important function of myth is to provide an explanation for ritual.
Eliade notes that, in many societies, rituals are considered important precisely because they were established by the mythical gods or heroes.
[22] Eliade approvingly quotes Malinowski's claim that a myth is "a narrative resurrection of a primeval reality.
"[23] Eliade adds: "Because myth relates the gesta [deeds] of Supernatural Beings [...] it becomes the exemplary model for all significant human actions.
"[25]Recital of myths and enactment of rituals serve a common purpose: they are two different means to remain in sacred time.