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Prolegomena to the study of Greek religion
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Jane Ellen Harrison’s Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion is a scholarly investigation that sets out to re‑orient the study of Greek worship away from the familiar literary sources and toward the actual rites performed by the ancient Greeks. In the opening passage she argues that English scholarship has long privileged Homeric myth at the expense of ritual, and she proposes a systematic examination of “Olympian” and “Chthonic” ceremonies, from the communal sacrifices of Homeric festivals to the more austere, aversive rites of the Diasia, Anthesteria, Thargelia, and Thesmophoria. By tracing how these practices reveal underlying concepts of evil, purification, and fertility, Harrison builds a framework that moves from primitive magical actions to the later theological developments of Orphism and Dionysian mystery cults.
The work reflects the early‑20th‑century academic style of a classicist deeply versed in philology, archaeology, and comparative religion. Its prose is methodical, often dense, and assumes familiarity with Greek festivals, mythic figures, and the scholarly debates of the period. Readers who relish detailed ritual analysis, the evolution of Greek theological thought, and the interplay between myth and practice, particularly students of classics, historians of religion, and specialists in ancient mystery cults, will find Harrison’s rigorous, yet passionately argued, approach most rewarding.
The opening · free to read
Hunc Librum Dedico
INTRODUCTION.
The object of the following pages is to draw attention to some neglected aspects of Greek religion.
Greek religion, as set forth in popular handbooks and even in more ambitious treatises, is an affair mainly of mythology, and moreover of mythology as seen through the medium of literature. In England, so far as I am aware, no serious attempt has been made to examine Greek ritual. Yet the facts of ritual are more easy definitely to ascertain, more permanent, and at least equally significant. What a people does in relation to its gods must always be one clue, and perhaps the safest, to what it thinks. The first preliminary to any scientific understanding of Greek religion is a minute examination of its ritual.
This habit of viewing Greek religion exclusively through the medium of Greek literature has brought with it an initial and fundamental error in method—an error which in England, where scholarship is mainly literary, is likely to die hard. For literature Homer is the beginning, though every scholar is aware that he is nowise primitive; for theology, or—if we prefer so to call it—mythology, Homer presents, not a starting-point, but a culmination, a complete achievement, an almost mechanical accomplishment, with scarcely a hint of origines, an accomplishment moreover, which is essentially literary rather than religious, sceptical and moribund already in its very perfection. The Olympians of Homer are no more primitive than his hexameters. Beneath this splendid surface lies a stratum of religious conceptions, ideas of evil, of purification, of atonement, ignored or suppressed by Homer, but reappearing in later poets and notably in Aeschylus. It is this substratum of religious conceptions, at once more primitive and more permanent, that I am concerned to investigate. Had ritual received its due share of attention, it had not remained so long neglected.
I would guard against misapprehension. Literature as a starting-point for investigation, and especially the poems of Homer, I am compelled to disallow; yet literature is really my goal. I have tried to understand primitive rites, not from love of their archaism, nor yet wholly from a single-minded devotion to science, but with the definite hope that I might come to a better understanding of some forms of Greek poetry. Religious convention compelled the tragic poets to draw their plots from traditional mythology, from stories whose religious content and motive were already in Homer’s days obsolete. A knowledge of, a certain sympathy with, the milieu of this primitive material is one step to the realization of its final form in tragedy. It is then in the temple of literature, if but as a hewer of wood and drawer of water, that I still hope to serve.
As the evidence to be set before the reader is necessarily somewhat complex in detail, and the arguments of the successive chapters closely interdependent, it may be well at the outset to state, as simply as may be, the conclusions at which I have arrived, and to summarize briefly the steps of the discussion.
In Chapter I. it is established that the Greeks themselves in classical times recognized two forms of ritual, Olympian and Chthonic. It is further seen that the characteristic ritual of Homeric days was of the kind known to them as Olympian. Sacrifice in Homer takes the form of an offering to the god to induce his favour. Its formulary is do ut des. Moreover the sacrificial banquet to which the god is bidden is shared by the worshipper. In sharp contradistinction to this cheerful sacrificial feast, when we examine the supposed festival of Zeus at Athens, the Diasia, we find rites of quite other significance; the sacrifice is a holocaust, it is devoted, made over entirely to the god, unshared by the worshipper, and its associations are gloomy. The rites of the Diasia, though ostensibly in honour of Zeus, are found really to be addressed to an underworld snake on whose worship that of Zeus has been superimposed.
In the three chapters that follow, on the festivals of the Anthesteria, Thargelia, and Thesmophoria, held respectively in the spring, summer, and autumn, the Olympian ritual superimposed is taken as known and only alluded to in passing. The attention is focussed on the rites of the underlying stratum.
In the Anthesteria, ostensibly sacred to Dionysos, the main ritual is found to be that of the placation of ghosts. Ghosts, it is found, were placated in order that they might be kept away; the formulary for these rites is not, as with the Olympians, do ut des, but do ut abeas. The object of these rites of Aversion, practised in the spring, is found to be strictly practical; it is the promotion of fertility by the purgation of evil influences.
The ritual of the Thargelia is even more primitive and plain-spoken. In this festival of the early summer, ostensibly dedicated to Apollo, the first-fruits of the harvest are gathered in. The main gist of the festival is purification, necessary as a preliminary to this ingathering. Purification is effected by the ceremonial of the pharmakos. Though the festival in classical days was ‘sacred to’ Apollo, the pharmakos is nowise a ‘human sacrifice’ to a god, but a direct means of physical and moral purgation, and again with a view to the promotion and conservation of fertility.
Thus far it will be seen that the rites of the lower stratum are characterized by a deep and constant sense of evil to be removed and of the need of purification for its removal; that the means of purification adopted are primitive and mainly magical nowise affects this religious content.
This practical end of primitive ceremonies, the promotion of fertility by magical rites, comes out still more strongly in the autumn sowing festival of the Thesmophoria. Here the women attempt, by carrying certain magical sacra, the direct impulsion of nature. In connection with these sacra of the Thesmophoria the subject of ‘mysteries’ falls to be examined. The gist of all primitive mysteries is found to be the handling or tasting of certain sacra after elaborate purification. The sacra are conceived of as having magical, i.e. divine, properties. Contact with them is contact with a superhuman potency, which is taboo to the unpurified. The gist of a mystery is often the removal of a taboo. From the Olympian religion ‘mysteries’ appear to have been wholly absent.
In Chapter V. we pass from ritual to theology, from an examination of rites performed to the examination of the beings to whom these rites were addressed. These beings, it is found, are of the order of sprites, ghosts, and bogeys, rather than of completely articulate gods, their study that of demonology rather than theology. As their ritual has been shown to be mainly that of the Aversion of evil, so they and their shifting attributes are mainly of malevolent character. Man makes his demons in the image of his own savage and irrational passions. Aeschylus attempts, and the normal man fails, to convert his Erinyes into Semnai Theai.
In Chapter VI. the advance is noted from demonology to theology, from the sprite and ghost to the human and humane god. The god begins to reflect not only human passions but humane relations. The primitive association of women with agriculture is seen to issue in the figures of the Mother and the Maid, and later of the Mother and the Daughter, later still in the numerous female trinities that arose out of this duality. In Chapter VII. the passage from ghost to god is clearly seen, and the humane relation between descendant and ancestor begets a kindliness which mollifies and humanizes the old religion of Aversion. The culminating point of the natural development of an anthropomorphic theology is here reached, and it is seen that the goddesses and the ‘hero-gods’ of the old order are, in their simple, non-mystic humanity, very near to the Olympians.
At this point comes the great significant moment for Greece, the intrusion of a new and missionary faith, the religion of an immigrant god, Dionysos.
In Chapter VIII. the Thracian origin of Dionysos is established. In his religion two elements are seen to coexist, the worship of an old god of vegetation on which was grafted the worship of a spirit of intoxication. The new impulse that he brought to Greece was the belief in enthusiasm, the belief that a man through physical intoxication at first, later through spiritual ecstasy, could pass from the human to the divine.
This faith might have remained in its primitive savagery, and therefore for Greece ineffective, but for another religious impulse, that known to us under the name of Orpheus. To the discussion of Orphism the last four chapters IX.-XII. are devoted.
In Chapter IX. I have attempted to show that the name Orpheus stands for a real personality. I have hazarded the conjecture that Orpheus came from Crete bringing with him, perhaps ultimately from Egypt, a religion of spiritual asceticism which yet included the ecstasy of the religion of Dionysos. Chapter X. is devoted to the elucidation of the Orphic and Dionysiac mysteries. It has been shown that before the coming of the Orphic and Dionysiac religion the mysteries consisted simply in the handling of certain sacra after elaborate purification. By handling these sacra man came into contact with some divine potency. To this rudimentary mysticism Orphism added the doctrine of the possibility of complete union with the divine. This union was effected in the primitive Cretan rite of the Omophagia by the physical eating of the god; union with the divine was further symbolically effected by the rite of the Sacred Marriage, and union by adoption by the rite of the Sacred Birth. The mission of Orphism was to take these primitive rites, originally of the crudest sympathetic magic, and inform them with a deep spiritual mysticism. The rite of the Omophagia found no place at Eleusis, but the other two sacramental rites of union, the Sacred Marriage and the Sacred Birth, formed ultimately its central mysteries.
With the doctrine and ritual of union with the divine there came as a necessary corollary the doctrine that man could attain the divine attribute of immortality. Orphic eschatology is the subject of Chapter XI. Its highest spiritual form, the belief that perfect purity issued in divinity and hence in immortality, is found expressed in the Orphic tablets. Its lower expression, the belief in a Hades of eternal punishment as contrasted with the shadowy after-world of Homer, is seen in the vases of Lower Italy and the eschatology denounced by Plato.
Finally in Chapter XII. it is shown how, as a concomitant to their Eschatology, the Orphics, unlike Homer, evolved a Cosmogony, and with this Cosmogony was ultimately bound up a peculiar and philosophic theology. In the fifth century B.C. the puppet-show of the Olympians was well-nigh played out, but the two gods of the Orphics remained potent. In ritual they worshipped Dionysos, but their theoretical theology recognized Eros as source of all things. The Eros of the Orphics was a mystery-being, a daimon rather than a theos, a potency wholly alien to the clear-cut humanities of Olympus.
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