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The Cambridge Ritualists were a recognised group of classical scholars, mostly in Cambridge, England, including Jane Ellen Harrison, F.M. Cornford, Gilbert Murray (actually from the University of Oxford), A. B. Cook, George Thomson, and others. They earned this title because of their shared interest in ritual, specifically their attempts to explain myth and early forms of classical drama as originating in ritual, mainly the ritual seasonal killings of eniautos daimon, or the Year-King.[1] They are also sometimes referred to as the myth and ritual school, or as the Classical Anthropologists.[2]
Inspired by The Golden Bough, Gilbert Murray in 1913 proclaimed the killing of the year spirit as the "orthodox view of the origins of tragedy. The year Daimon waxes proud and is slain by his enemy, who becomes thereby a murderer, and must in turn perish".[3] A decade later, however, the excessively rigid application of Frazer's thesis to Greek tragedy had already begun to be challenged;[4] and by the sixties Robert Fagles could state that "The ritual origins of tragedy are totally in doubt, often hotly debated".[5]
Through their work in classical philology, they exerted profound influence not only on the Classics, but on literary critics, such as Stanley Edgar Hyman or Northrop Frye.[6] Particularly affected by Émile Durkheim was F. M. Cornford, who used the French sociologist's notion of collective representations to analyze social forms of religious, artistic, philosophical, and scientific expression in classical Greece. Other significant influences on the group, particularly on Harrison, were Darwin, James Frazer, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.[7]
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