Ancient Art and Ritual

by Jane Ellen Harrison

All this is not mere late poetry and art. It is the primitive art and poetry that come straight out of ritual, out of actual “things done,” dromena. In the village of Megara, near Athens, the very place where to-day on Easter Tuesday the hills are covered with throngs of dancing men, and specially women, Pausanias[21] saw near the City Hearth a rock called “Anaklethra, ‘Place of Calling-up,’ because, if any one will believe it, when she was wandering in search of her daughter, Demeter called her up there”; and he adds: “The women to this day perform rites analogous to the story told.”

These rites of “Calling up” must have been spring rites, in which, in some pantomimic dance, the uprising of the Earth Spirit was enacted.

Another festival of Uprising is perhaps more primitive and instructive, because it is near akin to the “Carrying out of Winter,” and also because it shows clearly the close connection of these rites with the food-supply. Plutarch[22] tells us of a festival held every nine years at Delphi. It was called from the name of the puppet used Charila, a word which originally meant Spring-Maiden, and is connected with the Russian word yaro, “Spring,” and is also akin to the Greek Charis, “grace,” in the sense of increase, “Give us all grace.” The rites of Charila, the Gracious One, the Spring-Maiden, were as follows:

“The king presided and made a distribution in public of grain and pulse to all, both citizens and strangers. And the child-image of Charila is brought in. When they had all received their share, the king struck the image with his sandal, the leader of the Thyiades lifted the image and took it away to a precipitous place, and there tied a rope round the neck of the image and buried it.”

Mr. Calderon has shown that very similar rites go on to-day in Bulgaria in honour of Yarilo, the Spring God.

The image is beaten, insulted, let down into some cleft or cave. It is clearly a “Carrying out the Death,” though we do not know the exact date at which it was celebrated. It had its sequel in another festival at Delphi called Herois, or the “Heroine.” Plutarch[23] says it was too mystical and secret to describe, but he lets us know the main gist.

“Most of the ceremonies of the Herois have a mystical reason which is known to the Thyiades, but from the rites that are done in public, one may conjecture it to be a ‘Bringing up of Semele.’”

Some one or something, a real woman, or more likely the buried puppet Charila, the Spring-Maiden, was brought up from the ground to enact and magically induce the coming of Spring.

These ceremonies of beating, driving out, burying, have all, with the Greeks, as with the savage and the modern peasant, but one real object: to get rid of the season that is bad for food, to bring in and revive the new supply. This comes out very clearly in a ceremony that went on down to Plutarch’s time, and he tells us[24] it was “ancestral.” It was called “the Driving out of Ox-hunger.” By Ox-hunger was meant any great ravenous hunger, and the very intensity and monstrosity of the word takes us back to days when famine was a grim reality. When Plutarch was archon he had, as chief official, to perform the ceremony at the Prytaneion, or Common Hearth. A slave was taken, beaten with rods of a magical plant, and driven out of doors to the words: “Out with Ox-hunger! In with Wealth and Health!” Here we see the actual sensation, or emotion, of ravenous hunger gets a name, and thereby a personality, though a less completely abstracted one than Death or Summer. We do not know that the ceremony of Driving out Ox-hunger was performed in the spring, it is only instanced here because, more plainly even than the Charila, when the king distributes pulse and peas, it shows the relation of ancient mimic ritual to food-supply.

If we keep clearly in mind the object rather than the exact date of the Spring Song we shall avoid many difficulties. A Dithyramb was sung at Delphi through the winter months, which at first seems odd. But we must remember that among agricultural peoples the performance of magical ceremonies to promote fertility and the food supply may begin at any moment after the earth is ploughed and the seed sown. The sowing of the seed is its death and burial; “that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die.” When the death and burial are once accomplished the hope of resurrection and new birth begins, and with the hope the magical ceremonies that may help to fulfil that hope. The Sun is new-born in midwinter, at the solstice, and our “New” year follows, yet it is in the spring that, to this day, we keep our great resurrection festival.