Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928)

The "student's life" in the title of this memoir by the eminent English Hellenist Jane Ellen Harrison is in fact her whole life: she evidently considered herself a perpetual student, and the short book ranges from her childhood to her eighth decade. She was a pioneering professional intellectual in British academia, and her writings on ancient Greek religion are still worth reading today, more than a century after their first publication. Her immediate academic influence extended through the show more scholarly crew of the Cambridge Ritualists, and her ideas also bore fruit when taken up in later literary work by Eliot, Woolf, H.D., and others.

Harrison's reflections are structured in broad, periodic outlines, ornamented with vivid anecdotes that are often out of chronological sequence. She uses elite diction but a familiar tone tone throughout, and she is both witty and confessional. The whole text is a mere 84 pages, with several given over to black and white photograph portraits.

Her childhood is contained in a section on "Yorkshire Days," recounting among other things that she was subjected to demanding religious training in Victorian Christian evangelicalism. I was gratified to learn that her comfort toy had been a donkey (10), surely an omen connected more with Apuleius' Metamorphoses than Balaam's ass. She shook her head in retrospect at the domestic labors she had been taught to perform (16).

The "student's life" that a casual reader might expect is mostly in the "Cambridge and London" section. Here we learn about some of her interactions with the Bloomsbury set. She was also personally familiar with and impressed by the founding circle of the Society for Psychical Research (48). This part of the book additionally contains a few tales of her encounters with the titled aristocracy of her day.

Throughout the book, Harrison admits her passion for languages as a subject of study. She grew into her focus on ancient religion and ritual through her interest in classical languages. "Greece and Russia" covers the period during which she matured from a lecturer into an author, with attention to her travels in those years. The final chapter resumes some themes of her intellectual career and discusses her retirement.

The 2023 McNally edition features a foreword by Daniel Mendelsohn, which often quotes from the memoir itself, and supplies a more objective thumbnail biography with a focus on Harrison's legacy and influence. He is quick to point out her influence on Virginia Woolf (vii-viii), while Harrison mentions her admiration for Woolf's work (19). Thanks to the legacy library catalog in LibraryThing, we can take some satisfaction in knowing that the first edition of this book was on Woolf's own shelves. show less

In Harrison's first major work on ancient Greek religion (Prolegomena), she innovated by applying archaeological data to support her conviction that Homer and the great tragedians gave only a very partial view of the religious life that they purported to reference. She explored a chthonian, matrifocal, and magical stratum prior to, shadowing, and outlasting the Olympian cults. In the later Themis, she is concerned more precisely with questions of genealogy and development. She has embraced show more Emile Durkheim's ideas about the primacy of the social, to good effect. She traces several developmental arcs by which the reified forms of magical power (mana in the anthropological argot of her day) become individualized from ambient sanctities of natural forces and generic daimons of generative power into the persons of heroes and "high" Olympian gods. Her contempt for the latter is unconcealed; she finds them sterile, too removed from the vital numen which originates in communal feeling and pre-individual social impulses.

There is some curious irony in her judgment that the "first and foremost among the services Olympianism rendered to Greece" was to "purge ... [the] exclusively phallic" components from religion, claiming that such features are "an obvious source of danger and disease" in civilized settings where human culture centers on human activity rather than the rhythms of non-human nature (460). This passage late in the book is the one in which she most clearly calls out the phallic elements that have been implicit in the daimon concept throughout her account of it. Hers is not a simply phallic theory of religious origins, however. With the reverence for the generative powers in her daimon concept, she mixes a gradually maturing sense of the cosmos, in a sequence that invariably progresses from plants and soil, to storms and weather, to the moon, and then to the sun (390). (Qabalists will note a symbolic progression up the middle pillar, from Malkuth, through Yesod, to Tiphareth.)

The framing conceit of Themis is that it is simply an effort to explicate a ritual hymn in honor of the birth of Zeus. In the course of the book, however, the hymn is often far over the horizon, while the author expounds one or another feature of ancient Greek religion. At the book's end, she returns to the hymn, which itself ends with the imperative to "leap ... for goodly Themis." According to Harrison, Themis is a representation of human culture, "collective conscience, social sanction," and thus "the substratum of each and every god" (485).

The volume includes contributions from two of Harrison's peers among the Cambridge Ritualists, an early 20th century circle of classical scholars of whom Harrison--on the evidence of this volume at least--is certainly the most engaging. Gilbert Murray provides a very interesting analysis of the ritual infrastructure of Greek tragedy, illustrated a little too exhaustively with examples that presume the reader's familiarity with the works being related to the pattern. F.M. Cornford's chapter on the ritual genealogy of the ancient Olympic games depends on the reader to appreciate a rather generous amount of untranslated Greek. This is a tendency that Harrison herself tends to keep to her footnotes, although she does feel the need to finish the entire book with an untranslated Greek sentence. It should be remarked that this book is clearly the product of a scholarly culture, barely even addressed to the intelligent layman, despite the general interest of its topic. Harrison freely quotes Nietzsche in German and Durkheim in French, without feeling any obligation to assist the reader. (I could manage the former but not the latter.)

Harrison is refreshingly honest about her own religious perspective, in a field where a pretense of clinical detachment was par for the course. "[P]rofoundly as I also feel the value of the religious impulse, so keenly do I feel the danger and almost necessary disaster of each and every creed and dogma," she writes in her introduction. "As for religious ritual, we may by degrees find forms that are free from intellectual error" (xxiii). I certainly concur on both counts. As far as her theories of religious evolution are concerned, she sees magic as a necessary prerequisite for religion (215-216), and theology as a non-essential "phase" of religious articulation (488). The first was a sentiment common to those who, like Harrison, saw themselves in sympathy to the work of J.G. Frazer. But the second was an uncommonly insightful and provocative position for a book published in 1912. show less

Interesting if brief look at the history of ancient Greek religion. This book was originally published in the early 20th century, and while it's archeological and linguistic data hasn't aged particularly well, it's overall coverage and discussion is excellent.

"The Lithuanians in the Middle Ages are said to have made their beer over-night and drunk it next morning. Beer of this primitive kind was best sucked up through a pipe."
I bet!
"the characteristic essence of the worship of Dionysos...was intoxication...a divine madness." cf William James discussion of similar ideas in his Varieties of Religious Experience.
I skim read large sections but this one on intoxication in Harrison's book, along with most of the sections on Orpheus and Aristophanes show more were probably my favourite. show less