Ancient Art and Ritual

by Jane Ellen Harrison

We are inclined to think of the Greeks as a people apt to indulge in the singular practice of wearing wreaths in public, a practice among us confined to children on their birthdays and a few eccentric people on their wedding days. We forget the intensely practical purport of the custom. The ancient Greeks wore wreaths and carried boughs, not because they were artistic or poetical, but because they were ritualists, that they might bring back the spring and carry in the summer. The Greek bridegroom to-day, as well as the Greek bride, wears a wreath, that his marriage may be the beginning of new life, that his “wife may be as the fruitful vine, and his children as the olive branches round about his table.” And our children to-day, though they do not know it, wear wreaths on their birthdays because with each new year their life is re-born.

Apollo then, was, like Dionysos, King of the May and—saving his presence—Jack-in-the-Green. The god manifestly arose out of the rite. For a moment let us see how he arose. It will be remembered that in a previous chapter (p. [70]) we spoke of “personification.” We think of the god Apollo as an abstraction, an unreal thing, perhaps as a “false god.” The god Apollo does not, and never did, exist. He is an idea—a thing made by the imagination. But primitive man does not deal with abstractions, does not worship them. What happens is, as we saw (p. [71]), something like this: Year by year a boy is chosen to carry the laurel, to bring in the May, and later year by year a puppet is made. It is a different boy each year, carrying a different laurel branch. And yet in a sense it is the same boy; he is always the Laurel-Bearer—“Daphnephoros,” always the “Luck” of the village or city. This Laurel-Bearer, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, is the stuff of which the god is made. The god arises from the rite, he is gradually detached from the rite, and as soon as he gets a life and being of his own, apart from the rite, he is a first stage in art, a work of art existing in the mind, gradually detached from even the faded action of ritual, and later to be the model of the actual work of art, the copy in stone.

The stages, it would seem, are: actual life with its motor reactions, the ritual copy of life with its faded reactions, the image of the god projected by the rite, and, last, the copy of that image, the work of art.

We see now why in the history of all ages and every place art is what is called the “handmaid of religion.” She is not really the “handmaid” at all. She springs straight out of the rite, and her first outward leap is the image of the god. Primitive art in Greece, in Egypt, in Assyria,[47] represents either rites, processions, sacrifices, magical ceremonies, embodied prayers; or else it represents the images of the gods who spring from those rites. Track any god right home, and you will find him lurking in a ritual sheath, from which he slowly emerges, first as a dæmon, or spirit, of the year, then as a full-blown divinity.

In Chapter [II] we saw how the dromenon gave birth to the drama, how, bit by bit, out of the chorus of dancers some dancers withdrew and became spectators sitting apart, and on the other hand others of the dancers drew apart on to the stage and presented to the spectators a spectacle, a thing to be looked at, not joined in. And we saw how in this spectacular mood, this being cut loose from immediate action, lay the very essence of the artist and the art-lover. Now in the drama of Thespis there was at first, we are told, but one actor; later Æschylus added a second. It is clear who this actor, this protagonist or “first contender” was, the one actor with the double part, who was Death to be carried out and Summer to be carried in. He was the Bough-Bearer, the only possible actor in the one-part play of the renewal of life and the return of the year.

The May-King, the leader of the choral dance gave birth not only to the first actor of the drama, but also, as we have just seen, to the god, be he Dionysos or be he Apollo; and this figure of the god thus imagined out of the year-spirit was perhaps more fertile for art than even the protagonist of the drama. It may seem strange to us that a god should rise up out of a dance or a procession, because dances and processions are not an integral part of our national life, and do not call up any very strong and instant emotion. The old instinct lingers, it is true, and emerges at critical moments; when a king dies we form a great procession to carry him to the grave, but we do not dance. We have court balls, and these with their stately ordered ceremonials are perhaps the last survival of the genuinely civic dance, but a court ball is not given at a king’s funeral nor in honour of a god.

But to the Greek the god and the dance were never quite sundered. It almost seems as if in the minds of Greek poets and philosophers there lingered some dim half-conscious remembrance that some of these gods at least actually came out of the ritual dance. Thus, Plato,[48] in treating of the importance of rhythm in education says: “The gods, pitying the toilsome race of men, have appointed the sequence of religious festivals to give them times of rest, and have given them the Muses and Apollo, the Muse-Leader, as fellow-revellers.”

“The young of all animals,” he goes on to say, “cannot keep quiet, either in body or voice. They must leap and skip and overflow with gamesomeness and sheer joy, and they must utter all sorts of cries. But whereas animals have no perception of order or disorder in their motions, the gods who have been appointed to men as our fellow-dancers have given to us a sense of pleasure in rhythm and harmony. And so they move us and lead our bands, knitting us together with songs and in dances, and these we call choruses.” Nor was it only Apollo and Dionysos who led the dance. Athena herself danced the Pyrrhic dance. “Our virgin lady,” says Plato, “delighting in the sports of the dance, thought it not meet to dance with empty hands; she must be clothed in full armour, and in this attire go through the dance. And youths and maidens should in every respect imitate her example, honouring the goddess, both with a view to the actual necessities of war and to the festivals.”

Plato is unconsciously inverting the order of things, natural happenings. Take the armed dance. There is, first, the “actual necessity of war.” Men go to war armed, to face actual dangers, and at their head is a leader in full armour. That is real life. There is then the festal re-enactment of war, when the fight is not actually fought, but there is an imitation of war. That is the ritual stage, the dromenon. Here, too, there is a leader. More and more this dance becomes a spectacle, less and less an action. Then from the periodic dromenon, the ritual enacted year by year, emerges an imagined permanent leader; a dæmon, or god—a Dionysos, an Apollo, an Athena. Finally the account of what actually happens is thrown into the past, into a remote distance, and we have an “ætiological” myth—a story told to give a cause or reason. The whole natural process is inverted.

And last, as already seen, the god, the first work of art, the thing unseen, imagined out of the ritual of the dance, is cast back into the visible world and fixed in space. Can we wonder that a classical writer[49] should say “the statues of the craftsmen of old times are the relics of ancient dancing.” That is just what they are, rites caught and fixed and frozen. “Drawing,” says a modern critic,[50] “is at bottom, like all the arts, a kind of gesture, a method of dancing on paper.” Sculpture, drawing, all the arts save music are imitative; so was the dance from which they sprang. But imitation is not all, or even first. “The dance may be mimetic; but the beauty and verve of the performance, not closeness of the imitation impresses; and tame additions of truth will encumber and not convince. The dance must control the pantomime.” Art, that is, gradually dominates mere ritual.