Rituals predate the mythologies and creeds built around them

Evidence

In 1889 Smith published his Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, which dealt with the rituals of sacrifice, communion and atonement as practised by early Hebrew and Arab tribesmen. He argued that rituals arise before the mythologies or creeds that are constructed around them and that all primitive religions pass through a totemistic stage. True religion originates in magic and superstition but outgrows them. Prophets tailored their messages to the societies and circumstances they spoke to and, if this applied to Samuel and Ezekiel, it also applied to Muhammad. Smith’s study of the Hadiths, the body of traditions associated with the Prophet, persuaded him that these had been invented and compiled over a long period in much the same way as Pentateuchal law had been. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 327

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Robertson Smith’s ritual-before-myth thesis that later anthropology (Frazer, Harrison, the Cambridge ritualists) built on.
• ADDENDUM: Ritual sacrifice as the basis of communal religion directly parallels the argument of ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind, with Corpses’ — Robertson Smith’s Semitic ritual theory is a foundational scholarly source for that essay.