A very thought provoking book. Some excellent ideas, unfortunately marred by a shed-load of bollocks.

The main thesis is that myth and ritual are essentially one thing, and that the written myths we have inherited were the text recited during the rituals. I’m not sure that this is correct. I first came across the idea in another of Hooke’s books, ‘In the Beginning’. This is otherwise an excellent book. There he says that the Enuma Elish (the creation myth) was used as the performance text during the Babylonian New Year festival. I assumed at the time that there was no question about this. It was only when I later read the Enuma Elish that I realised that the actual situation is open to question. Hooke presents it as fact because he has a pet theory to uphold. He doesn’t present the other points of view and an argument for his own. I suspect this is because he doesn’t have a good argument. There doesn’t appear to be any direct evidence against the idea, but I would note that it’s not in accordance with common human practice. In the case of our creation myth we have the formal account of creation, written in the language of mathematics, but when we perform the ritual (or possibly comedy routine) of educating our children we tell the story of the Big Bang in English (or other language of our choice) and it’s rather a slap-dash affair. Similarly, when we engage in the ritual of the school Nativity Play we don’t pick the formal accounts of the myth from Luke or Matthew and read out the relevant verses while the kids shuffle about on stage. The script is an ephemeral thing made up of narration, speech and singing. Likewise going back in time, they didn’t just read the Bible out at Corpus Christi, but composed their own cycles of Mystery Plays. I suspect that the Enuma Elish is the formal account of the myth, quite different from an Order of Service. If the Babylonians did things differently, where’s the evidence?

Now I want to complain about the assertion in A. M. Blackman’s essay that the Shambako Stone “bears a much mutilated copy of a very ancient drama”. What an inverted pyramid of piffle. If that stone had a play written on it, it would have changed the fundaments of the history of the theatre. Why tell such an outrageous lie? Perhaps Blackman has confused himself because, seeing that theatre is ritualistic, has thought that all ritual is theatre and he then needs some “evidence” to link surviving written text to performance. You could get away with this in 1933, but not today when we can google it and have the actual text before us in a moment. It’s a shame, because as I understand it the Egyptians did have quite elaborate public performances of some kind, but any point that could be made is obscured by this and other lies about the texts of Egyptian plays that have supposedly survived.

Gadd’s essay on the Babylonians is not quite as bad. Some of their ritual texts have survived and as we’d expect they are ephemera, very different from the Enuma Elish or the Gilgamesh epics. Unlike Blackman, he doesn’t actually lie about what has survived. However, these texts are fragmentary. Gadd describes them as a “soulless inventory” and he’s big enough to admit that they have “no visible connection with myth”. Then he goes on to say that the Enuma Elish myth-text must be connected to the rituals of the sixth to eleventh days of the New Year Festival “for all of which days the ritual is lost”. Oh right, so if there’s a great gap in the archaeological record we can just plug with whatever we like can we? Well, there’s a bloody great watery gap west of Europe. I’m gonna plug it with Atlantis in a farcical aquatic ceremony.

Next I’d like to complain about Oesterley’s essay where he refers to the Ramasseum Dramatic Papyrus as a “mystery-drama”. Pull the other one. It’s a liturgical ritual. Sure it’s ‘dramatic’. Sure it’s ‘theatrical’, but to identify it as an example of the Medieval European art-form is just ludicrous. Mystery plays may have developed out of the liturgy in Europe, but it’s obviously not a foregone trajectory or the Egyptians would have invented theatre. It’s not like they didn’t have the time. Just because some thing is similar, or because some thing may have developed out of the other, or uses uses similar techniques does not magically change it into the other. Having read a couple of Oesterley’s books I think it would not be unfair to say that he saw the world as an upward progression from primitive to cultured, from African Animism to European Anglicanism, which is handy for him as it places him at the top of the pile and closest to God. I suspect that this world view rather impedes him from seeing things as they are but rather on a value-scale in relation to other things. When someone arguing against your position on myth and ritual has recourse to mentioning school Nativity Plays then you really need to reassess your position.

Look, one star is perhaps a little unfair. There’s lots in the book that is good, but there must be other books out there which cover the same ground without veering into the ridiculous. ( )