Page:Religion in the Making.djvu/29

 The myth which meets the ritual is some exceptional vivid fancy, or recollection of some actual vivid fact — probably distorted in remembrance — which appears not only as explanatory both of ritual and emotion, but also as generative of emotion when conjoined with the ritual. Thus the myth not only explains but reinforces the hidden purpose of the ritual, which is emotion.

Then rituals and emotions and myths reciprocally interact; and the myths have various grades of relationship to actual fact, and have various grades of symbolic truth as being representative of large ideas only to be apprehended in some parable. Also in some cases the myth precedes the ritual. But there is the general fact that ritualism precedes mythology. For we can observe ritualism even among animals, and presumably they are destitute of a mythology.

A myth will involve special attention to some persons or to some things, real or imaginary. Thus in a sense, the ritual, as per-