Leaping for Goodly Themis

...Myths originate, Miss Harrison insists, as "the spoken correlative of the acted rite...

...The mysteries of Dionysus, "utterly inhuman" to Clement of Alexandria, are "very human indeed, social and civilizing through and through" to Miss Harrison...

...Miss Harrison was aided in this intention by a Utile band of the most remarkable minds working together since Darwin and his circle: Gilbert Murray at Oxford, and Francis Macdonald Cornford and Arthur Bernard Cook at Cambridge...

...the Greek boukranion, the sacred bull's skull, equates with the horns of the altar in Exodus...

...Miss Harrison simply notes that the lies told the women and children about the men's rites are "theology...

...She called herself a "free-thinker" and was a lifelong member of the Rationalist Association and a lecturer for it, but she has given a truer and deeper picture of the nature of the religious experience than even her master William James...

...and as a paperback, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (Meridian, 608 pp., $2.45...

...her Greek year-god, the eniautos-daimon, "died for the people" like Jesus...

...From the first appearance of The Golden Bough in 1890, the work of her Cambridge contemporary James G. Frazer, her great determination was to turn the new light of anthropology on the ancient texts...

...This derivation I had known and from cowardice rejected," she will write, or "my blindness seems to me now almost incredible...

...One is not entirely convinced when she writes in the introduction: "Savages, save for their reverent, totemistic attitude towards animals, weary and disgust me, though perforce I spend long hours in reading of their tedious doings.' Her psychology is equally old-fashioned...

...Although she was a gifted linguist (before her death she knew 14 languages, and read cuneiform for relaxation), Miss Harrison was always a maverick Classics scholar...

...The field of comparative religion, really the area in which Miss Harrison worked, will never be the same again...

...Or she writes "of the world as a living animal, a thing not to be coerced and restrained, but reverently wooed...

...She will tell us that one tears up painful letters on receipt, or that the social silences of men are "more spacious and monumental" than those of women, or that the husband's role is "to come back with his beak full of worms.' Her frankness is absolute...

...A charming, deliberately comic consequence of this in the book is Miss Harrison's partiality toward the old dark chthonic Greek religion rather than the later sunny Olympian gods...

...It is Themis, by Jane Ellen Harrison, and after being out of print for many years it is now happily available in two reprintings of the 1927 revised edition: together with a later pamphlet, as Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion and Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (University Books, Ivi and 600 pp., $10.00...

...In Miss Harrison's phrasing, "the god is the reflection, the projection of man's emotions socially reinforced...

...or talking of ancient Greek initiation "in the bush...

...he does more, he dies for them.' The Olympian god, in a "degradation," "substitutes privilege for function," and Miss Harrison shakes a Pauline socialist finger at him: "If any will not work neither let him eat...

...The year that Themis appeared, 1912, can now be seen to have been a watershed year, a high point of rationality and optimism which we have never since regained...

...Her prose, like her spirit, is beautiful...

...This theory was of conrse not new with Miss Harrison...

...As they evolve, Miss Harrison shows, myths break away from their ritual bases, shift into the past tense and the third person (from "Now we do this" to "Once they did this"), and as they survive after the rite has died out, they increasingly represent misunderstandings and rationalizations of their events...

...The real true god, the eniautos-daimon, lives and works for his people...

...Because Eros is human," she writes, "there is excess and ugliness waiting to shadow and distort nature's lovely temperance...

...Before Themis, Miss Harrison had published a few scholarly books on ancient art, and one bold work of theory, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, in 1903...

...Thus "we must get back behind these intrusive, grasping Olympians," Olympians "only too ready to lay greedy hands on a magical rite, pervert its meaning and turn it into a 'gift-sacrifice' for themselves...

...Cook made available the materials of his forthcoming vast compendium Zeus...

...Miss Harrison's field of classical studies was overwhelmingly converted to her views, as she notes joyously in the 1927 preface (there has since been a swing back, "reactionary" in the most literal sense, as evidenced by the Oxford Classical Dictionary in 1949 and Joseph Fontenrose's Python in 1959...

...Miss Harrison begins the book with what Kenneth Burke calls a "representative anecdote,' a ritual hymn newly discovered on Crete...

...I recall that my immediate reaction to Themis, when I read it in my '20s, was to accept for the first time the existence, and thus the possibility, of an absolutely first-rate analytic mind in a woman...

...Annual death and rebirth is true immortality, as against "heaven's brazen and sterile immutability...

...As early as her '20s she had been recognized as "the cleverest woman in England...

...He was deceived by appearances...

...It is secret," she adds of a mystery rite, "not because it is indecent, but because it is intensely social, decent and entirely sacred...

...But Miss Harrison had the one big idea, and she had a power of imaginative understanding that went beyond any of them...

...All three fed Miss Harrison ideas and information and cheered her on...

...Miss Harrison gets much of her evidence from ancient writers, mostly quoted in the original (her audience is assumed to read Greek and Latin), and from archaeology (152 text figures reproduce relevant ancient works of art...

...Themis, while it is uniquely Miss Harrison's book, is at the same time a perfect collaboration...

...Cornford wrote a brilliant chapter, "The Origin of the Olympic Games...

...The revolution effected by Themis has not yet ended...

...Murray, to whom the book is dedicated, contributed to it a remarkable technical "Excursus on the Ritual Forms Preserved in Greek Tragedy...

...We can now see how remarkable it is for Jane Harrison to stand out in this band of geniuses...

...Miss Harrison was 62, a fellow and lecturer in classical subjects at Newnham College, Cambridge...

...WRITERS & WRITING Leaping for Goodly Themis By Stanley Edgar Hyman A book that changed my life-there are times when I think it is the most revolutionary book of the 20th century-has just been reissued, marking the 50th anniversary of its publication...

...Jane Harrison is truly what Edith Hamilton is popularly taken to be, the great lady who found Greece marble and left it living flesh...

...Bertrand Russell once mocked Miss Harrison's gentle spinster manner, so incompatible with her bloody theories, by offering to pay for a wild bull if she would rend it limb from limb...

...Her style is intensely personal...

...Themis is a better, and perhaps ultimately a more important, book than The Golden Bough because it fearlessly accepts its own consequences, where Frazer drew back from his...

...Themis has always seemed to me a transparently clear work...

...Murray was a far better Greek scholar, Cornford had a much more rigorous and logical mind, Cook was always more fertile of ideas...

...We must "think ourselves back into the primaeval fusion of things," she says, or, as she wrote in the Prolegomena: "It is only by a severe effort of the imagination that we can think ourselves back into an adequate mental confusion to realize all the connotations...

...Murray turned the ritual theory on Shakespeare in 1914, Bertha Philipotts on edda and saga and Jessie Weston on romance in 1920, and since then no area of literary scholarship or criticism has been unaffected...

...Jahveh was a wonderworking ark before he was a god...

...From that hymn, with its beautiful "leap for full jars, and leap for fleecy flocks,' "leap for our young citizens and for goodly Themis," to its final implications in Olympus phosphorescent with decay, and our Bible as a liturgical romance, she never falters or retreats...

...the Greeks knew all about it, and in 1910 Arnold van Gennep had proposed just such a terminological rigor...

...The extension of this to our gods and sacred heroes, from Abraham to Jesus, is inevitable, and Miss Harrison does not neglect it...

...She has toppled stouter temples than Russell himself has, or Sampson either...

...What was new was her utterly convincing detailed demonstration that this was the fashion in which the Greek gods actually evolved, "straight out of a social custom," as the projection and concretization of their worshippers' behavior and collective feelings of awe and terror...

...in a Greek definition, they are "the things said over a ritual act...

...If mythology is eventually the misunderstanding of ritual, so theology is the organized misunderstanding of mythology...

...Nevertheless, Miss Harrison's powerful imagination plunges far deeper than her sources...

...It is essentially an account of how myths arise...

...As their senior, a geyser of energy, and a woman, Miss Harrison inspired them, collaborated with them, and set them tasks in the intellectual revolution that produced a dozen major books between 1903 and 1941...

...Something like the Greek rite of omophagia, tearing the sacrifice apart and eating the raw flesh with the divine life still quivering in it, lies buried in the Eucharist...

...or crying out, "Let us look at facts-savage facts first...

...In addition she draws heavily on the field anthropology of her time: typically explaining a Cretan ritual by rites of the Wiradthuri tribe of New South Wales...

...it is that of William James, with an infusion of Freud in the 1927 revision (not strong enough, however, to replace James' "subconscious" with Freud's "unconscious...

...This is the process of mythic origins, it is the only process, and since 1912 it has been impossible to talk seriously about mythology in any other terms, or to use the word "myth" for anything but a narrative of known or presumed ritual origins...