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_Ancient Art and Ritual_
JANE ELLEN HARRISON
_Geoffrey Cumberlege_
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
_First published in 1913, and reprinted in 1918 (revised), 1919, 1927,
1935 and 1948_
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
PREFATORY NOTE
It may be well at the outset to say clearly what is the aim of the
present volume. The title is _Ancient Art and Ritual_, but the reader
will find in it no general summary or even outline of the facts of
either ancient art or ancient ritual. These facts are easily accessible
in handbooks. The point of my title and the real gist of my argument lie
perhaps in the word "_and_"--that is, in the intimate connection which I
have tried to show exists between ritual and art. This connection has, I
believe, an important bearing on questions vital to-day, as, for
example, the question of the place of art in our modern civilization,
its relation to and its difference from religion and morality; in a
word, on the whole enquiry as to what the nature of art is and how it
can help or hinder spiritual life.
* * * * *
I have taken Greek drama as a typical instance, because in it we have
the clear historical case of a great art, which arose out of a very
primitive and almost world-wide ritual. The rise of the Indian drama, or
the mediæval and from it the modern stage, would have told us the same
tale and served the like purpose. But Greece is nearer to us to-day than
either India or the Middle Ages.
* * * * *
Greece and the Greek drama remind me that I should like to offer my
thanks to Professor Gilbert Murray, for help and criticism which has far
outrun the limits of editorial duty.
J.E.H.
_Newnham College,
Cambridge, June 1913._
* * * * *
NOTE TO THE FIFTH IMPRESSION
The original text has been reprinted without change except for the
correction of misprints. A few additions (enclosed in square brackets)
have been made to the Bibliography.
1947
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I ART AND RITUAL 9
II PRIMITIVE RITUAL: PANTOMIMIC DANCES 29
III PERIODIC CEREMONIES: THE SPRING FESTIVAL 49
IV THE PRIMITIVE SPRING DANCE OR DITHYRAMB,
IN GREECE 75
V THE TRANSITION FROM RITUAL TO ART: THE
_DROMENON_ AND THE DRAMA 119
VI GREEK SCULPTURE: THE PANATHENAIC FRIEZE
AND THE APOLLO BELVEDERE 170
VII RITUAL, ART AND LIFE 204
BIBLIOGRAPHY 253
INDEX 255
ANCIENT ART AND RITUAL
CHAPTER I
ART AND RITUAL
The title of this book may strike the reader as strange and even
dissonant. What have art and ritual to do together? The ritualist is, to
the modern mind, a man concerned perhaps unduly with fixed forms and
ceremonies, with carrying out the rigidly prescribed ordinances of a
church or sect. The artist, on the other hand, we think of as free in
thought and untrammelled by convention in practice; his tendency is
towards licence. Art and ritual, it is quite true, have diverged to-day;
but the title of this book is chosen advisedly. Its object is to show
that these two divergent developments have a common root, and that
neither can be understood without the other. It is at the outset one
and the same impulse that sends a man to church and to the theatre.
* * * * *
Such a statement may sound to-day paradoxical, even irreverent. But to
the Greek of the sixth, fifth, and even fourth century B.C., it would
have been a simple truism. We shall see this best by following an
Athenian to his theatre, on the day of the great Spring Festival of
Dionysos.
Passing through the entrance-gate to the theatre on the south side of
the Acropolis, our Athenian citizen will find himself at once on holy
ground. He is within a _temenos_ or precinct, a place "cut off" from the
common land and dedicated to a god. He will pass to the left (Fig. 2, p.
144) two temples standing near to each other, one of earlier, the other
of later date, for a temple, once built, was so sacred that it would
only be reluctantly destroyed. As he enters the actual theatre he will
pay nothing for his seat; his attendance is an act of worship, and from
the social point of view obligatory; the entrance fee is therefore paid
for him by the State.
The theatre is open to all Athenian citizens, but the ordinary man will
not venture to seat himself in the front row. In the front row, and
that only, the seats have backs, and the central seat of this row is an
armchair; the whole of the front row is permanently reserved, not for
individual rich men who can afford to hire "boxes," but for certain
State officials, and these officials are all priests. On each seat the
name of the owner is inscribed; the central seat is "of the priest of
Dionysos Eleuthereus," the god of the precinct. Near him is the seat "of
the priest of Apollo the Laurel-Bearer," and again "of the priest of
Asklepios," and "of the priest of Olympian Zeus," and so on round the
whole front semicircle. It is as though at His Majesty's the front row
of stalls was occupied by the whole bench of bishops, with the
Archbishop of Canterbury enthroned in the central stall.
The theatre at Athens is not open night by night, nor even day by day.
Dramatic performances take place only at certain high festivals of
Dionysos in winter and spring. It is, again, as though the modern
theatre was open only at the festivals of the Epiphany and of Easter.
Our modern, at least our Protestant, custom is in direct contrast. We
tend on great religious festivals rather to close than to open our
theatres. Another point of contrast is in the time allotted to the
performance. We give to the theatre our after-dinner hours, when work is
done, or at best a couple of hours in the afternoon. The theatre is for
us a recreation. The Greek theatre opened at sunrise, and the whole day
was consecrated to high and strenuous religious attention. During the
five or six days of the great _Dionysia_, the whole city was in a state
of unwonted sanctity, under a _taboo_. To distrain a debtor was illegal;
any personal assault, however trifling, was sacrilege.
Most impressive and convincing of all is the ceremony that took place on
the eve of the performance. By torchlight, accompanied by a great
procession, the image of the god Dionysos himself was brought to the
theatre and placed in the orchestra. Moreover, he came not only in human
but in animal form. Chosen young men of the Athenians in the flower of
their youth--_epheboi_--escorted to the precinct a splendid bull. It was
expressly ordained that the bull should be "worthy of the god"; he was,
in fact, as we shall presently see, the primitive incarnation of the
god. It is, again, as though in our modern theatre there stood,
"sanctifying all things to our use and us to His service," the human
figure of the Saviour, and beside him the Paschal Lamb.
* * * * *
But now we come to a strange thing. A god presides over the theatre, to
go to the theatre is an act of worship to the god Dionysos, and yet,
when the play begins, three times out of four of Dionysos we hear
nothing. We see, it may be, Agamemnon returning from Troy, Clytemnestra
waiting to slay him, the vengeance of Orestes, the love of Phædra for
Hippolytos, the hate of Medea and the slaying of her children: stories
beautiful, tragic, morally instructive it may be, but scarcely, we feel,
religious. The orthodox Greeks themselves sometimes complained that in
the plays enacted before them there was "nothing to do with Dionysos."
If drama be at the outset divine, with its roots in ritual, why does it
issue in an art profoundly solemn, tragic, yet purely human? The actors
wear ritual vestments like those of the celebrants at the Eleusinian
mysteries. Why, then, do we find them, not executing a religious
service or even a drama of gods and goddesses, but rather impersonating
mere Homeric heroes and heroines? Greek drama, which seemed at first to
give us our clue, to show us a real link between ritual and art, breaks
down, betrays us, it would seem, just at the crucial moment, and leaves
us with our problem on our hands.
Had we only Greek ritual and art we might well despair. The Greeks are a
people of such swift constructive imagination that they almost always
obscure any problem of origins. So fair and magical are their
cloud-capp'd towers that they distract our minds from the task of
digging for foundations. There is scarcely a problem in the origins of
Greek mythology and religion that has been solved within the domain of
Greek thinking only. Ritual with them was, in the case of drama, so
swiftly and completely transmuted into art that, had we had Greek
material only to hand, we might never have marked the transition.
Happily, however, we are not confined within the Greek paradise. Wider
fields are open to us; our subject is not only Greek, but ancient art
and ritual. We can turn at once to the Egyptians, a people
slower-witted than the Greeks, and watch their sluggish but more
instructive operations. To one who is studying the development of the
human mind the average or even stupid child is often more illuminating
than the abnormally brilliant. Greece is often too near to us, too
advanced, too modern, to be for comparative purposes instructive.
* * * * *
Of all Egyptian, perhaps of all ancient deities, no god has lived so
long or had so wide and deep an influence as Osiris. He stands as the
prototype of the great class of resurrection-gods who die that they may
live again. His sufferings, his death, and his resurrection were enacted
year by year in a great mystery-play at Abydos. In that mystery-play was
set forth, first, what the Greeks call his _agon_, his contest with his
enemy Set; then his _pathos_, his suffering, or downfall and defeat, his
wounding, his death, and his burial; finally, his resurrection and
"recognition," his _anagnorisis_ either as himself or as his only
begotten son Horus. Now the meaning of this thrice-told tale we shall
consider later: for the moment we are concerned only with the fact that
it is set forth both in art and ritual.
At the festival of Osiris small images of the god were made of sand and
vegetable earth, his cheek bones were painted green and his face yellow.
The images were cast in a mould of pure gold, representing the god as a
mummy. After sunset on the 24th day of the month Choiak, the effigy of
Osiris was laid in a grave and the image of the previous year was
removed. The intent of all this was made transparently clear by other
rites. At the beginning of the festival there was a ceremony of
ploughing and sowing. One end of the field was sown with barley, the
other with spelt; another part with flax. While this was going on the
chief priest recited the ritual of the "sowing of the fields." Into the
"garden" of the god, which seems to have been a large pot, were put sand
and barley, then fresh living water from the inundation of the Nile was
poured out of a golden vase over the "garden" and the barley was allowed
to grow up. It was the symbol of the resurrection of the god after his
burial, "for the growth of the garden is the growth of the divine
substance."
The death and resurrection of the gods, and _pari passu_ of the life and
fruits of the earth, was thus set forth in ritual, but--and this is our
immediate point--it was also set forth in definite, unmistakable art. In
the great temple of Isis at Philæ there is a chamber dedicated to
Osiris. Here is represented the dead Osiris. Out of his body spring ears
of corn, and a priest waters the growing stalk from a pitcher. The
inscription to the picture reads: _This is the form of him whom one may
not name, Osiris of the mysteries, who springs from the returning
waters._ It is but another presentation of the ritual of the month
Choiak, in which effigies of the god made of earth and corn were buried.
When these effigies were taken up it would be found that the corn had
sprouted actually from the body of the god, and this sprouting of the
grain would, as Dr. Frazer says, be "hailed as an omen, or rather as the
cause of the growth of the crops."[1]
Even more vividly is the resurrection set forth in the bas-reliefs that
accompany the great Osiris inscription at Denderah. Here the god is
represented at first as a mummy swathed and lying flat on his bier. Bit
by bit he is seen raising himself up in a series of gymnastically
impossible positions, till at last he rises from a bowl--perhaps his
"garden"--all but erect, between the outspread wings of Isis, while
before him a male figure holds the _crux ansata_, the "cross with a
handle," the Egyptian symbol of life. In ritual, the thing desired,
_i.e._ the resurrection, is acted, in art it is represented.
No one will refuse to these bas-reliefs the title of art. In Egypt,
then, we have clearly an instance--only one out of many--where art and
ritual go hand in hand. Countless bas-reliefs that decorate Egyptian
tombs and temples are but ritual practices translated into stone. This,
as we shall later see, is an important step in our argument. Ancient art
and ritual are not only closely connected, not only do they mutually
explain and illustrate each other, but, as we shall presently find, they
actually arise out of a common human impulse.
* * * * *
The god who died and rose again is not of course confined to Egypt; he
is world-wide. When Ezekiel (viii. 14) "came to the gate of the Lord's
house which was toward the north" he beheld there the "women weeping for
Tammuz." This "abomination" the house of Judah had brought with them
from Babylon. Tammuz is _Dumuzi_, "the true son," or more fully,
_Dumuzi-absu_, "true son of the waters." He too, like Osiris, is a god
of the life that springs from inundation and that dies down in the heat
of the summer. In Milton's procession of false gods,
"Thammuz came next behind,
Whose annual wound in Lebanon allured
The Syrian damsels to lament his fate
In amorous ditties all a summer's day."
Tammuz in Babylon was the young love of Ishtar. Each year he died and
passed below the earth to the place of dust and death, "the land from
which there is no returning, the house of darkness, where dust lies on
door and bolt." And the goddess went after him, and while she was below,
life ceased in the earth, no flower blossomed and no child of animal or
man was born.
We know Tammuz, "the true son," best by one of his titles, Adonis, the
Lord or King. The Rites of Adonis were celebrated at midsummer. That is
certain and memorable; for, just as the Athenian fleet was setting sail
on its ill-omened voyage to Syracuse, the streets of Athens were
thronged with funeral processions, everywhere was seen the image of the
dead god, and the air was full of the lamentations of weeping women.
Thucydides does not so much as mention the coincidence, but Plutarch[2]
tells us those who took account of omens were full of concern for the
fate of their countrymen. To start an expedition on the day of the
funeral rites of Adonis, the Canaanitish "Lord," was no luckier than to
set sail on a Friday, the death-day of the "Lord" of Christendom.
The rites of Tammuz and of Adonis, celebrated in the summer, were rites
of death rather than of resurrection. The emphasis is on the fading and
dying down of vegetation rather than on its upspringing. The reason of
this is simple and will soon become manifest. For the moment we have
only to note that while in Egypt the rites of Osiris are represented as
much by art as by ritual, in Babylon and Palestine in the feasts of
Tammuz and Adonis it is ritual rather than art that obtains.
* * * * *
We have now to pass to another enquiry. We have seen that art and
ritual, not only in Greece but in Egypt and Palestine, are closely
linked. So closely, indeed, are they linked that we even begin to
suspect they may have a common origin. We have now to ask, what is it
that links art and ritual so closely together, what have they in common?
Do they start from the same impulse, and if so why do they, as they
develop, fall so widely asunder?
It will clear the air if we consider for a moment what we mean by art,
and also in somewhat greater detail what we mean by ritual.
* * * * *
Art, Plato[3] tells us in a famous passage of the _Republic_, is
imitation; the artist imitates natural objects, which are themselves in
his philosophy but copies of higher realities. All the artist can do is
to make a copy of a copy, to hold up a mirror to Nature in which, as he
turns it whither he will, "are reflected sun and heavens and earth and
man," anything and everything. Never did a statement so false, so
wrong-headed, contain so much suggestion of truth--truth which, by the
help of analysing ritual, we may perhaps be able to disentangle. But
first its falsehood must be grasped, and this is the more important as
Plato's misconception in modified form lives on to-day. A painter not
long ago thus defined his own art: "The art of painting is the art of
imitating solid objects upon a flat surface by means of pigments." A
sorry life-work! Few people to-day, perhaps, regard art as the close and
realistic copy of Nature; photography has at least scotched, if not
slain, that error; but many people still regard art as a sort of
improvement on or an "idealization" of Nature. It is the part of the
artist, they think, to take suggestions and materials from Nature, and
from these to build up, as it were, a revised version. It is, perhaps,
only by studying those rudimentary forms of art that are closely akin to
ritual that we come to see how utterly wrong-headed is this conception.
Take the representations of Osiris that we have just described--the
mummy rising bit by bit from his bier. Can any one maintain that art is
here a copy or imitation of reality? However "realistic" the painting,
it represents a thing imagined not actual. There never was any such
person as Osiris, and if there had been, he would certainly never, once
mummified, have risen from his tomb. There is no question of fact, and
the copy of fact, in the matter. Moreover, had there been, why should
anyone desire to make a copy of natural fact? The whole "imitation"
theory, to which, and to the element of truth it contains, we shall
later have occasion to return, errs, in fact, through supplying no
adequate motive for a widespread human energy. It is probably this lack
of motive that has led other theorizers to adopt the view that art is
idealization. Man with pardonable optimism desires, it is thought, to
improve on Nature.
* * * * *
Modern science, confronted with a problem like that of the rise of art,
no longer casts about to conjecture how art _might_ have arisen, she
examines how it actually _did_ arise. Abundant material has now been
collected from among savage peoples of an art so primitive that we
hesitate to call it art at all, and it is in these inchoate efforts
that we are able to track the secret motive springs that move the artist
now as then.
Among the Huichol Indians,[4] if the people fear a drought from the
extreme heat of the sun, they take a clay disk, and on one side of it
they paint the "face" of Father Sun, a circular space surrounded by rays
of red and blue and yellow which are called his "arrows," for the
Huichol sun, like Phœbus Apollo, has arrows for rays. On the reverse
side they will paint the progress of the sun through the four quarters
of the sky. The journey is symbolized by a large cross-like figure with
a central circle for midday. Round the edge are beehive-shaped mounds;
these represent the hills of earth. The red and yellow dots that
surround the hills are cornfields. The crosses on the hills are signs of
wealth and money. On some of the disks birds and scorpions are painted,
and on one are curving lines which mean rain. These disks are deposited
on the altar of the god-house and left, and then all is well. The
intention might be to us obscure, but a Huichol Indian would read it
thus: "Father Sun with his broad shield (or 'face') and his arrows rises
in the east, bringing money and wealth to the Huichols. His heat and the
light from his rays make the corn to grow, but he is asked not to
interfere with the clouds that are gathering on the hills."
Now is this art or ritual? It is both and neither. _We_ distinguish
between a form of prayer and a work of art and count them in no danger
of confusion; but the Huichol goes back to that earlier thing, a
_presentation_. He utters, expresses his thought about the sun and his
emotion about the sun and his relation to the sun, and if "prayer is the
soul's sincere desire" he has painted a prayer. It is not a little
curious that the same notion comes out in the old Greek word for
"prayer," _euchè_. The Greek, when he wanted help in trouble from the
"Saviours," the Dioscuri, carved a picture of them, and, if he was a
sailor, added a ship. Underneath he inscribed the word _euchè_. It was
not to begin with a "vow" paid, it was a presentation of his strong
inner desire, it was a sculptured prayer.
Ritual then involves _imitation_; but does not arise out of it. It
desires to recreate an emotion, not to reproduce an object. A rite is,
indeed, we shall later see (p. 42), a sort of stereotyped action, not
really practical, but yet not wholly cut loose from practice, a
reminiscence or an anticipation of actual practical doing; it is fitly,
though not quite correctly, called by the Greeks a _dromenon_, "a thing
done."
At the bottom of art, as its motive power and its mainspring, lies, not
the wish to copy Nature or even improve on her--the Huichol Indian does
not vainly expend his energies on an effort so fruitless--but rather an
impulse shared by art with ritual, the desire, that is, to utter, to
give out a strongly felt emotion or desire by representing, by making or
doing or enriching the object or act desired. The common source of the
art and ritual of Osiris is the intense, world-wide desire that the life
of Nature which seemed dead should live again. This common _emotional_
factor it is that makes art and ritual in their beginnings well-nigh
indistinguishable. Both, to begin with, copy an act, but not at first
for the sake of the copy. Only when the emotion dies down and is
forgotten does the copy become an end in itself, a mere mimicry.
It is this downward path, this sinking of making to mimicry, that makes
us now-a-days think of ritual as a dull and formal thing. Because a rite
has ceased to be believed in, it does not in the least follow that it
will cease to be _done_. We have to reckon with all the huge forces of
habit. The motor nerves, once set in one direction, given the slightest
impulse tend always to repeat the same reaction. We mimic not only
others but ourselves mechanically, even after all emotion proper to the
act is dead; and then because mimicry has a certain ingenious charm, it
becomes an end in itself for ritual, even for art.
* * * * *
It is not easy, as we saw, to classify the Huichol prayer-disks. As
prayers they are ritual, as surfaces decorated they are specimens of
primitive art. In the next chapter we shall have to consider a kind of
ceremony very instructive for our point, but again not very easy to
classify--the pantomimic dances which are, almost all over the world, so
striking a feature in savage social and religious life. Are they to be
classed as ritual or art?
These pantomime dances lie, indeed, at the very heart and root of our
whole subject, and it is of the first importance that before going
further in our analysis of art and ritual, we should have some
familiarity with their general character and gist, the more so as they
are a class of ceremonies now practically extinct. We shall find in
these dances the meeting-point between art and ritual, or rather we
shall find in them the rude, inchoate material out of which both ritual
and art, at least in one of its forms, developed. Moreover, we shall
find in pantomimic dancing a ritual bridge, as it were, between actual
life and those representations of life which we call art.
In our next chapter, therefore, we shall study the ritual dance in
general, and try to understand its psychological origin; in the
following chapter (III) we shall take a particular dance of special
importance, the Spring Dance as practised among various primitive
peoples. We shall then be prepared to approach the study of the Spring
Dance among the Greeks, which developed into their drama, and thereby
to, we hope, throw light on the relation between ritual and art.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Adonis, Attis, Osiris_,^2 p. 324.
[2] _Vit. Nik._, 13.
[3] _Rep._ X, 596-9.
[4] C.H. Lumholtz, _Symbolism of the Huichol Indians_, in _Mem. of the
Am. Mus. of Nat. Hist._, Vol. III, "Anthropology." (1900.)