Death and Rebirth

Abstract

LORD RAGLAN dedicates this book to the memory of A. M. Hocart, the most original anthropologist of this century, whose “Kingship” (Oxford, 1927) and “Kings and Councillors” (Cairo, 1936) are still less well known than they should be. “Kingship” is an analysis of the complex pattern of kingship in its prehistoric heyday, which can perhaps be correlated with Gordon Childe's 'urban revolution' (in “Man Makes Himself”), and in its modern survivals. Hocart points to a single origin of the institution and of the archaic culture of which kingship was the unifying symbol, in the fourth or third millennium B.C. in the Near East, and to its diffusion from there. Lord Raglan's “Hero” (1936) was an extension of Hocart's work and argued that myths of heroes all over the world exhibit the same pattern, a threefold repetition of the ritual life of the divine king covering his birth, his coronation and marriage, and his death. In “How Came Civilization” (1939) Lord Raglan developed some of the ideas which Hocart had thrown off and left uncompleted in his “Progress of Man” (1933), ably supporting the diffusionist hypothesis and giving particular examples of artefacts, like bows or the potter's wheel, or of techniques, like the domestication of animals or mummification. He ended with a striking chapter on the dominance of ritual in the 'archaic civilization', which is the foundation of ours to an extent which few of us begin to suspect. “Death and Rebirth” continues the argument in the sphere of beliefs about immortality and life after death.

Death and Rebirth

A Study in Comparative Religion. By Lord Raglan. Pp. vi + 106. (London: Watts and Co., Ltd., 1945.) 5s. net.