Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion by Jane Ellen Harrison: An Honest Review

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What This Book Is

Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion was published in 1903 and runs to nearly seven hundred pages, densely printed, with abundant illustration from vase painting and sculpture.

The title is precise. Prolegomena means preliminary matter: this is not an account of Greek religion but an argument about what has to be established before such an account is possible.

What has to be established, on Harrison's view, is that the religion Homer describes is not the earliest, that an older stratum lies beneath it, and that the older stratum is recoverable from ritual survivals, festival calendars, and the material evidence.

The method is to work backward from what was still being done in the classical period to what the doing originally meant, on the principle that ritual is conservative and outlasts the beliefs that explained it.

Who Jane Ellen Harrison Was

Harrison was born in Yorkshire in 1850 and died in 1928, and her career was made in the face of an institutional structure designed to prevent it.

She studied at Newnham College, Cambridge, one of the first two colleges for women, at a time when women could study at Cambridge without being awarded degrees.

She spent years in London lecturing on Greek art at the British Museum, where she was a popular and dramatic speaker, before returning to Newnham as a research fellow in 1898.

She was formidably learned, worked directly with the archaeological material at a time when many classicists worked only from texts, and had a public reputation unusual for a scholar.

Her later life included a turn toward Russian language and literature, a close friendship with Hope Mirrlees with whom she lived and worked, and a memoir that is still read.

What She Was Arguing Against

The picture she attacked was the standard one, and it had held for a century.

Greek religion, on that account, was the religion of Homer: a family of anthropomorphic gods on Olympus, beautiful, quarrelsome, humanised, presiding over a world in which religion was largely a matter of civic ceremony and poetic decoration.

This picture was congenial to the nineteenth century. It made the Greeks rational, sunlit, and the ancestors of European civilisation, and it fitted the aesthetic idealisation of Greece that had dominated since Winckelmann.

Harrison's charge was that this was Homer's religion, that Homer was a poet working for an aristocratic audience, and that a poem is not a survey of what a population believed.

Beneath the epic, she argued, the actual practices of Greek communities pointed to something quite different, and the practices had survived into the classical period where anyone could see them.

The Two Layers

The central structural claim, and it remains her most durable contribution.

The older layer is chthonic: of the earth. Its concerns are the dead, fertility, pollution and its removal, and the powers that live below rather than above.

Its rites are performed at night, at low altars or into pits, with offerings that are poured away or burned entirely rather than shared, and the mood is one of appeasement.

The later layer is Olympian: of the sky. Its gods are personal, named, imagined in human form, worshipped in daylight at raised altars with sacrifices that the community eats.

Harrison's point is that the second did not replace the first. The older rites continued alongside, sometimes attached to the newer gods, sometimes surviving in festivals whose meaning the participants no longer understood.

Aversion and Service

The distinction that organises much of the book, and it is more useful than the layering itself.

Rites of aversion, apotropaic rites, aim at getting rid of something. The dangerous thing is fed or placated or driven out, and the object is to be free of it. Nothing about them implies affection or worship in the ordinary sense.

Rites of service aim at honouring. A god is given what a great person is given: praise, gifts, a share of the feast, and the relation is one of exchange between parties who both benefit.

Harrison argues the first is older and that a great deal of classical Greek religion is aversion in service clothing: rites whose form is placation and whose interpretation has been adjusted to fit the newer theology.

The distinction has held up well and is still used, detached from the evolutionary story she attached to it.

The Festivals of the Dead

Where the argument is most concrete, and where Harrison is at her best.

She works through the Athenian festival calendar in detail, and the case she builds is cumulative.

The Anthesteria, a spring festival nominally of Dionysus and new wine, includes a day on which the dead are held to walk, doors are smeared with pitch, and the ghosts are told at the end to go away. The formula for dismissing them survived.

The Thesmophoria, a women's festival, involves the burial of piglets in pits and the later retrieval of the decayed remains to be mixed with seed corn.

The Diasia, attached to Zeus under an epithet meaning kindly, involves burnt offerings consumed entirely with a mood of gloom that the Olympian framing does not explain.

In each case her method is the same: the ritual details do not fit the god they are attached to, and they fit a chthonic reading precisely.

Reading Ritual Backward

The method deserves examination on its own, because it is what makes the book possible and it is also the source of most of its errors.

Harrison's procedure is to take a practice attested in the classical period, identify features that its stated meaning does not explain, and infer an earlier meaning that would explain them.

The Anthesteria is the model case. Everyone in Athens said it was a festival of Dionysus and new wine. But one of its three days involves the dead, the doors are protected against them, and the closing formula sends them away. New wine explains none of that.

The inference is that the ghost material is older, that the Dionysian framing was applied later, and that the ritual carried its original content forward while its interpretation changed around it.

The principle behind this is that ritual is conservative. People go on doing what was done, and supply new reasons as the old ones stop making sense, so the action outlasts the explanation.

The principle is partly true and the inference from it is where the danger lies. An unexplained detail may be a survival, and it may equally be an innovation, a local peculiarity, a borrowing, or a misunderstanding of recent date. Harrison consistently reads the first possibility as established, and this is the single habit that dates the book most.

Ghosts, Keres and Pollution

The material that most changed how Greek religion is understood.

Harrison assembles the evidence for a Greek world populated by spirits of the dead, by keres, small winged beings associated with death and disease and bad luck, and by pollution as a substance that adheres and must be removed.

Death pollutes. Birth pollutes. Killing pollutes, whether or not it was justified. The pollution is not moral guilt; it is a condition that attaches to a person and to a household and that requires specific procedures to remove.

This is entirely absent from the Homeric picture and it is everywhere in the practical evidence: in the sacred laws inscribed on stone, in the purification rites, in the arrangements for burial.

She was right about this and it is now standard, though the framework has been reworked considerably since.

Eleusis and the Mysteries

The section most readers of this site will come for.

Harrison treats the Eleusinian mysteries as central rather than peripheral, which was itself a departure, and reads them through her chthonic framework.

Her account puts the agricultural and underworld material first: the corn, the descent, the return, and the promise about the condition of the dead.

She is candid about the limits of the evidence. The initiates kept the secret and the sources are late, hostile, or allusive, and Harrison does not pretend to more certainty than the material allows.

What she does claim is that the mysteries preserved older material than the state religion around them, which is consistent with everything else she argues and is generally accepted now.

The Orphic Material

The final substantial section, and the most speculative.

Orphism is a genuinely difficult subject: a body of texts, gold tablets found in graves, ascetic practices and a doctrine of the soul, all attributed to a mythical singer.

Harrison treats it as a reform movement: an attempt to systematise and moralise the older chthonic religion, introducing ideas of purification, of the soul's fate after death, and of a way of life that affects it.

She connects it to Pythagorean material and to the later philosophical tradition, arguing that the concern with the soul entered Greek thought here rather than from philosophy.

The specifics are heavily disputed and the general shape has held: Orphic material does represent something distinct from civic religion, and the tablets found since her time have supported that even as they have complicated her account.

The Cambridge Ritualists

The school she was central to, and its one big idea.

The group around Harrison, including Gilbert Murray and F. M. Cornford, held that myth arises from ritual rather than the reverse: that the story is generated to explain a practice already being performed.

Applied to Greek literature this produced strong claims. Tragedy grows from a ritual of the death and rebirth of a year spirit; comedy from a fertility rite; epic incorporates ritual patterns.

The strong version is no longer held. The relation between myth and ritual is now understood as reciprocal and variable, and the specific derivations were built on evidence that has not supported them.

The weaker version is now assumption rather than thesis: that ritual practice is at least as important as narrative for understanding ancient religion, and that texts alone give a distorted picture.

The Matriarchy Problem

The part of the argument that has failed most completely, and it should be stated plainly.

Harrison held that the chthonic layer centred on a mother goddess, that it reflected a matriarchal or at least matrilineal social order, and that the Olympian religion arrived with patriarchal invaders who subordinated the goddess to a sky god.

The scheme came substantially from Bachofen, a Swiss jurist writing in 1861, whose theory of a universal matriarchal stage was influential and evidentially weak.

The evidence Harrison used, chiefly female figurines and the prominence of goddesses, is now read differently. Female figurines are not evidence of female rule, and the goddesses of the Greek pantheon are not survivals of a single mother deity.

The claim resurfaced in the twentieth century through Gimbutas and through the feminist spirituality movement, and the archaeological consensus has not moved toward it.

None of this makes Harrison's other work worthless. It does mean this strand should be read as a period position rather than as a finding.

Her Position and Its Effects

Something worth naming, since it bears on how the book was received and how it should be read.

Harrison worked without a degree, in an institution that admitted women to study and not to membership, at a moment when a woman doing original work in classics was a matter of public comment rather than of routine.

This had two visible effects on the book. The first is a certain combativeness. She argues with named male scholars directly and without deference, and the tone is that of someone who has decided not to be careful about her manner.

The second is the choice of subject. The established ground of classical scholarship, textual criticism and the canonical authors, was thoroughly occupied. The ritual and archaeological material was less prestigious and correspondingly more open, and Harrison worked where there was room.

That is a familiar pattern in the history of scholarship and it produces a familiar result: the underoccupied territory turns out to matter, and the person who worked it because they had no choice ends up having changed the field.

It is worth resisting the temptation to read her matriarchy thesis as straightforwardly personal. Bachofen, whose theory she took it from, was a conservative Swiss lawyer with no interest in advancing women's position, and the idea was in general circulation. Harrison found it useful and she did not invent it.

What Modern Scholarship Rejects

Three things, beyond the matriarchy.

The evolutionary framework. The idea that religions progress through fixed stages, from magic through ritual to developed theology, was general in her period and has been abandoned. Societies do not move along a single track.

The neat two-layer model. Chthonic and Olympian are useful descriptive terms and do not divide the evidence cleanly. Many gods receive both kinds of rite, and the boundary is far more porous than she allowed.

Survivals as fossils. Harrison treats odd ritual details as unchanged relics of an earlier stage. Ritual actually changes continuously and reinterprets itself, so an ancient-looking practice may be recent and a recent-looking one may be old.

What It Keeps

More than the rejections suggest.

That Homer is a poet and not a source for popular religion. This is now so standard that the effort required to establish it is invisible.

That ritual and material evidence must be read alongside texts, and that a religion is what people did rather than what its literature says.

That pollution, purification and the management of the dead are central to Greek religious practice rather than marginal.

And that the mysteries and the Orphic material belong inside the account of Greek religion rather than in an appendix about oddities.

Walter Burkert's standard modern account shares all four positions while rejecting nearly everything specific to her framework, which is a fair measure of how much she got right at the level that mattered.

The Writing

Worth a section because it is genuinely unusual.

Harrison writes with energy, wit and a strong personal voice. She argues with named opponents, expresses irritation, makes jokes, and describes objects with the eye of someone who has looked at them properly.

The scholarly apparatus is heavy and the Greek is untranslated throughout, which reflects an audience assumed to read it.

A reader without Greek can follow the argument, because Harrison generally paraphrases the substance of a quotation in her own text before or after giving it, but the experience is one of stepping over obstacles.

The illustrations are integral. She reads vase paintings as evidence and the arguments frequently depend on what is visible in an image.

How to Read It Now

Practical advice, since seven hundred pages of 1903 scholarship needs a strategy.

Read it as a primary document in the history of ideas as well as a book about Greece. Half its interest is what a brilliant scholar could see and could not see in 1903.

Read the festival chapters first. They are the most concrete, the most persuasive, and the most independent of the framework.

Skip or skim the evolutionary passages. They are the period's assumptions rather than her observations, and they date the book badly.

Read Burkert alongside for the corrected picture, and Frazer for the comparative project Harrison was working next to.

Who Should Read It

Read it if you want Greek religion as practice rather than as a set of stories.

Read it if you are interested in the mysteries and want a serious treatment from someone who worked directly with the evidence.

Read it if the history of scholarship interests you, since this is one of the clearest cases of a book that was substantially wrong and permanently useful.

Do not read it as current. A century of excavation has happened, including the decipherment of Linear B, which she did not live to see and which changed the picture considerably.

Frequently Asked Questions