Ancient Art and Ritual Quotes

“A heroic society is almost a contradiction in terms.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“We translate the word “Justice,” but Dikè means, not Justice as between man and man, but the order of the world, the way of life.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“The word tělětē means rite of growing up, becoming complete.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“It is impiety to alter the myth of your local hero, it is impossible to recast the myth of your local dæmon—that is fixed forever—his conflict, his agon, his death, his pathos, his Resurrection and its heralding, his Epiphany.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“We seem to have come to a sort of impasse, the spirit of the dromenon is dead or dying, the spectators will not stay long to watch a doing doomed to monotony.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“An agon, or contest, or wrangling, there will probably be, because Summer contends with Winter, Life with Death, the New Year with the Old. A tragedy must be tragic, must have its pathos, because the Winter, the Old Year, must die.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“We know from tradition that in Athens ritual became art, a dromenon became the drama, and we have seen that the shift is symbolized and expressed by the addition of the theatre, or spectator-place, to the orchestra, or dancing-place.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“When we say art is unpractical, we mean that art is cut loose from immediate action.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“The dramas of Æschylus certainly, and perhaps also those of Sophocles and Euripides, were played not upon the stage, and not in the theatre, but, strange though it sounds to us, in the orchestra.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“Thus among the Carrier Indians 33 when a man wants to become a Lulem, or Bear, however cold the season, he tears off his clothes, puts on a bearskin and dashes into the woods, where he will stay for three or four days.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“But it was not to give him up to the gods that they killed him, not to “sacrifice” him in our sense, but to have him, keep him, eat him, live by him and through him, by his grace.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“But sacrifice does not mean “death” at all.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“The epic poet is all taken up with what he called klea andron, “glorious deeds of men,” of individual heroes; and what these heroes themselves ardently long and pray for is just this glory, this personal distinction, this deathless fame for their great deeds.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“The upper classes worshipped then, as now, not the Spirit of Spring but their own ancestors.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“The ritual dance was a dromenon, a thing to be done, not a thing to be looked at.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“In the orchestra all is life and dancing; the marble seats are the very symbol of rest, aloofness from action, contemplation.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“We can see in part why, though the dromena of Adonis and Osiris, emotional as they were and intensely picturesque, remained mere ritual; the dromenon of Dionysos, his Dithyramb, blossomed into drama.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“The magical dromenon, the Carrying out of Winter, the Bringing in of Spring, is doomed to an inherent and deadly monotony.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“Religion moves away from drama towards theology, but the ritual mould of the dromenon is left ready for a new content.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“So the dromenon, the thing done, wanes, the prayer, the praise, the sacrifice waxes.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“In a word, in place of dromena, things done, we get gods worshipped; in place of sacraments, holy bulls killed and eaten in common, we get sacrifices in the modern sense, holy bulls offered to yet holier gods.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“But if the Dithyrambos, the young Dionysos, like the Bull-God, the Tree-God, arises from a dromenon, a rite, what is the rite of second birth from which it arises?”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“They were quite mistaken; Dithyrambos, modern philology tells us, is the Divine Leaper, Dancer, and Lifegiver.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“By a false etymology they explained the word Dithyrambos as meaning “He of the double door,” their word thyra being the same as our door.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“But it is equally clear and certain that the Dionysos of Greek worship and of the drama was not a babe in the cradle.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“If, then, we have a song and dance of the birth of Dionysos, shall we not, as in the Christian religion, have a child-god, a holy babe, a Saviour in the manger; at first in original form as a calf, then as a human child?”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“Dionysos the Tree-God, the Spirit of Vegetation, is but a maypole once perceived, then remembered and conceived.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“When a poet is going to describe the birth of Dionysos he calls the god by the title Dithyrambos.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“Some,” he says, “are prayers to the gods—these are called hymns; others of an opposite sort might best be called dirges; another sort are pæans, and another—the birth of Dionysos, I suppose—is called Dithyramb.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“The Dithyramb was the Song and Dance of the New Birth.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual