Jane Ellen Harrison's Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912), with contributions from Murray and Cornford, argued that ritual precedes myth: the dromenon, the thing done, generates the legend. James Frazer's Golden Bough (1890-1915) supplied the comparative scaffolding. The school's myth-ritual thesis dominated until mid-century critics dismantled its evolutionary assumptions.
The thesis leaked into popular culture as a universal solvent: every myth is a fossilized rite, every rite a forgotten drama. It survives in everything from Wiccan historiography to film-analysis channels, long after classicists qualified it into caution.
The Ritualists' enduring provocation is directional: practice is older than story, and meaning is a latecomer apologizing for behavior. Read this way, scripture is commentary on choreography, and belief is the myth the body tells about what it has always done.
If the ritual came first and the myth was invented to explain it, which of your beliefs are explanations of a forgotten practice?