Introduction

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J ust over a century ago Jane Ellen Harrison radically transformed the study of Greek religion. Until then, classics had been dominated by textual analysis and philology, but by incorporating findings from the then-new scholarly disciplines of archeology and ancient art, psychology, anthropology and sociology, the theories of evolution advanced by Darwin, and the ideas about primordial matriarchal religion advanced by Bachofen she forced a re-evaluation of our understanding of Greek religion. Today it is difficult to imagine the study of classics limited to literary studies, important as they are, without the amplifying findings of archeology, art, anthropology, sociology, and so many other perspectives. Yet in her time, the relevance of art and archeology was strenuously resisted by many established classicists. Harrison transformed the study of Greek religion by making it interdisciplinary and by presenting radically new ways of seeing Greek religion, particularly by attending to its often obscure and brutal rituals. For many years, Harrison’s ideas exercised a strong influence on the classicists and students of Greek religion who followed her.

Mary Beard has described Harrison as “the first woman in England to become an academic, in the fully professional sense – an ambitious, full-time, salaried, university researcher and lecturer” (2010). While Harrison remains a feminist icon and role model, and the subject of many recent biographical studies, her works have recently almost disappeared from the reading lists in classics departments and from the awareness of the general reading public. I find this dismaying and a great injustice. To my mind, her work remains important in part because her hypotheses provided the groundwork for later generations of students of Greek religion—but also because in her writings, she constructed a new vision of Greek religion, new understandings of its goddesses and gods, and its rituals and myths that remains radical. Her work was that of a brave intellectual explorer who, in the face of heavy academic resistance, forged new and larger ways of investigation in classics. Her books still deserve to be read.

In this volume, we will explore Harrison’s radically new vision of Greek religion. We will see how Harrison the “ritualist” revised the dominant view of the role of ritual in Greek religion and ritual’s relation to myth, and how her own views shifted over time. We will examine the ways she transformed the study of classics by incorporating the methods and ideas derived from archeology, art, psychology, anthropology and sociology, and the science of evolution. Finally, I will show how Harrison’s deeply felt sense of the presence of the numinous in Greek religion, especially in the mystery cults of late antiquity, contributed not only to a renewed appreciation of the experiential aspect of Greek religion for its practitioners in antiquity, but also to a revival of a recognition of the existential pertinence of Greek religion in various forms to our own deepest experiences (as articulated by Walter Otto,1 Karl Kerényi,2 and James Hillman,3 among others).

Harrison is remembered today, somewhat erroneously, as the founding member of the so-called “Cambridge Ritualists.” The term “ritualist” is somewhat misleading because she did not originate the idea of ritualism, a concept usually attributed to William Robertson Smith4 and James George Frazer,5 nor were her attitudes toward the relationship between myth and ritual consistent. While Harrison always considered myth to be related to ritual in some essential manner, how she visualized this relation was somewhat inconsistent even in her early work. She came to summarize this relation in her famous aphorism: “ myth is ritual misunderstood.” By this, like William Robertson Smith, she meant that myths were invented to explain rituals, (hence the term “ etiological myths”). She emphasized that the rituals still practiced in the classical period were often incalculably old and their purposes and functions had frequently been forgotten, but their continued observance was due to religion’s innate conservatism. She pointed to the detailed artistic descriptions of rituals (such as on vase paintings) to show that a given ritual and its associated myth often did not align. She concluded that the myth was newer and had been invented to provide an explanation for an otherwise now inexplicable ritual. Harrison surrounded herself with a circle of younger, like-minded men who came later to be referred to as the “ Cambridge Ritualists” (a name they never used themselves). This group, including Gilbert Murray, Francis Cornford, and A.B. Cook, saw ritual as arising with and associated with myth, and opposed themselves to the old (and still widely accepted) view that ritual is merely myth enacted.

Today the argument over the primacy of ritual versus myth has largely passed. A rough consensus has evolved that the question of primacy of one or the other may not be answerable and may vary from case to case. Students of myth and ritual have come to agree that, by and large, the two go together. Before Harrison, classicists had generally focused on myth, particularly in its readily available literary renditions. I suspect that Harrison’s early attention to rituals grew out of her innate love of Greek art. Very early on in her work, she discerned discrepancies between the descriptions of rituals as they appeared in texts and in how they were portrayed in art. These discrepancies opened up a radically new approach to understanding Greek religion. She discovered strata of Greek religion that seemed to have been glossed over by later literary tradition. By identifying ways in which later texts differed from and “betrayed” older traditions depicted in painting and sculpture, Harrison may be said to have anticipated the post-modern “hermeneutics of suspicion” of the later twentieth century.

Harrison’ s innovative perspective had at least three sources: the intellectual world of her time and place, the particularities of her biographical background and education (which will be discussed in the next chapter), and her unique genius.

Harrison’s identification of the mostly submerged stratum of Greek religion, dominated by chthonic, dark, often ill-defined deities, transformed the study of Greek religion in her own time and is now widely accepted. Later scholarship has had to take this chthonic stratum into any substantive account of the history of Greek religion. In his Homo Necans (1972), Walter Burkert, perhaps the most highly regarded contemporary interpreter of Greek religion, locates a violent, murderous strain running through early human culture and purports to find evidence for this in the initial stages of Greek religion. His hypothesis is a clear reflection of Harrison’s idea about the chthonic; Homo Necans would be impossible without the groundwork laid by Harrison.6

The intellectual climate of the late nineteenth century—what we might call Harrison’s world—was dominated by a number of “great ideas.” These include advances in the new fields of anthropology, comparative religions, and linguistics prompted by engagement with hitherto unknown peoples in the wake of the European colonial project. They also include Darwin’ s theory of evolution, which made such an enormous impact on the thinking in all fields of study. To these we may add the “Woman Question” and Johann Jakob Bachofen’s suggestion that a Primordial Goddess religion preceded the patriarchal religion of the archaic and classical periods, and the philosophy of Nietzsche with its valorization of the irrational. Finally, the decline of organized religion in Europe and new discoveries about so-called “primitive” religions gave rise to questions regarding the origins and evolution of religions, the function of religions, the relation of ritual and mythology, and the future of religions.

By the “Woman Question,” I mean the generalized sense of unease about established views of gender raised by the rapid appearance in Europe’ s bigger cities of large numbers of single, unattached women who lived alone or with other women, worked outside the home, made their own money and their own decisions independently from men. Harrison was one such independent woman and her identification as such by herself and others colored her intellectual endeavors and their reception.

Johann Jakob Bachofen brought together questions about the taken-for-granted inferiority of the feminine and religious evolution in his theories about a Primordial Goddess religion. His ideas re-appear in Harrison’s work in her theories about the historical primacy of the great Goddess and in the ongoing centrality of goddesses in women’s cults in later periods and in many of the mystery cults.7 As later on Harrison became aware of the work of Freud, she found this perspective corroborated by the prominence Freud gives to the mother in the psychic life of us all, as is reflected in the Oedipus complex. In the beginning, both psychologically and historically, she is there.

Harrison, like many others of her time, not only accepted Bachofen’s ideas but greatly expanded upon them. Matriarchy and goddess religion appealed to Harrison at a deep level, perhaps reflecting her upbringing, perhaps as a reaction to her own experience of the deep-seated sexism of her time, likely both. Harrison brought needed attention to the primacy, centrality, and potency of the goddesses. She insisted that goddesses had been present from the very beginning of Greek religiosity, although initially they were nameless, formless, inchoate.

The philosophical ideas of Nietzsche were “in the air” of the late nineteenth century and Harrison seems to have found them irresistible.8 She was especially drawn to his recognition of the importance of the unconscious and of repression and the “return of the repressed.”9 Nietzsche’s ideas may have helped her to expand on Bachofen’s idea of the repression and occlusion of the earlier goddess religion, and to understand how elements from this earlier goddess religion would later reappear in the emergence of the mystery cults.

In Harrison’s earliest studies of Greek religion, which she initially approached through the study of art before later incorporating the then-new discoveries arriving from anthropology and archeology, she found herself unexpectedly and profoundly moved by certain, specific aspects of Greek religion: the goddesses, the submerged, chthonic aspects of early Greek religion, and the mysticism of the much later mystery cults. That is, without ever stating so explicitly, Harrison describes the experienced reality of these aspects of Greek religion for the Greeks in a way that suggests that she found herself drawn into an experiencing of the reality of the numinous which she had never found in Christianity.

Harrison’s description of the keres, the chthonic deities and their rites (especially the women’s secret rites), the partially obscured and submerged goddesses, and the mystery rites strongly suggests a direct, felt familiarity with these aspects of Greek religion that is not explained by mere intellectual understanding. Harrison’s descriptions of the awe and dread attendant upon rites such as the Anthesteria, the Thesmophoria, and the nocturnal sacrifices to the chthonic deities betray, if unintentionally, her own profoundly experienced awe and dread in the presence of the inchoate realities present in and underlying these rites.

Until well into the nineteenth century, Greek religion was often idealized as representing the perfection of beauty, rationality, and balance. Today, thanks in large measure to Harrison’s innovative proposals, students of Greek religion recognize that the religion of ancient Greece, like all religions past and present, had its dark, chthonic, terrifying aspects.

Harrison described early Greek religion as very different from the worship of the Olympian gods described in Homer and so often idealized in later centuries. She revealed the existence of a dark, chthonic stratum of Greek religion, devoted to Underworld goddesses and gods especially, and worshipped in night-time rituals of purgation and placation. She brought to light a pantheon of spiritual entities representing various modes of the embodiment of death and disease (the keres). These precursors to the anthropomorphic gods of the Greeks might be entirely disembodied and aniconic, partially embodied, theriomorphic, or anthropomorphic.

Our minds are imbued with current classical mythology, our imagination peopled with the vivid personalities, the clear-cut outlines of the Olympian gods; it is only by a somewhat severe mental effort that we realize the fact essential to our study that there were no gods at all … (Harrison 1991: 163–64)

In the nineteenth century archeology was not respected by contemporary classicists.10 Harrison faced great opposition at Cambridge University to her incorporation of the findings of archeologists in her work. At that time classics was dominated by philology, with its heavy emphasis on texts and text-based hermeneutics. Thus, for Harrison to bring non-textual findings from art and archeology into her work in the field was seen as a radical innovation. She was, by nature, a visually oriented person. It took great courage to follow her gift for visual aesthetics, not only in re-evaluating long-familiar works of art but also in emphasizing the immense value of the artifacts newly unearthed by archeologists. In doing so, she vastly expanded our understanding of Greek religion. Yet in 1903 when Harrison published Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, it was well-received at Cambridge University and immediately became a textbook (Ackerman 1991b: xiii).

Harrison’s incorporation of the perspectives of cultural anthropology was both a brilliant innovation and a principal reason for the erosion of her standing as a scholar. The then-dominant tenet of evolutionary anthropology, holding that all cultures originate in similar circumstances and evolve through similar stages, allowed her to suggest an outline of how Greek religion might have evolved as parallel to developments elsewhere. When the theory of a universal pattern of cultural evolution came under severe criticism in the mid-twentieth century, the positive view of Harrison’s theories declined with them.

Prolegomena was written at a time when Harrison was going through a serious personal upheaval and suffering from depression, which may have driven her toward a reckoning with her own unconscious and laid the groundwork for her encounter with the numinous. Her later writings (especially Themis [1912]) are more cogently written but they lack the urgency of an actually felt, overwhelming experience.

Harrison’s Prolegomena was subjective, idiosyncratic, and highly controversial at the time of its publication and remains so today. The ongoing controversy arises from her speculations about the nature of early Greek religion, some of which have not been corroborated by later research. It helps to begin by recognizing that our knowledge of Greek culture in general and of Greek religion in particular is inescapably deficient and likely to remain so. Consciously or not, scholars fill in the lacunae of our knowledge with what they suspect or believe to be fact, but which is to a large degree conjecture. Even as more ancient manuscripts and other artifacts come to light and serve to add incrementally to our partial understanding of Greek religion, its rituals and myths, our knowledge will always remain to a large degree incomplete. We can never truly understand the Greek mind of the archaic and classical periods because we cannot know what given symbols, rituals, words, gods, and myths meant to the original worshippers.

Harrison discovered an earlier Greek religion based on the placation of malignant, Underworld daemones, ancestor spirits, keres, and chthonic deities that remained active beneath and behind the more familiar gods of Olympian religion. She uncovered a stratum of dark, chthonic, and daemonic Greek religion, myth, ritual, and art that was “hidden in plain sight.” This stratum was much older and deeper than the later, Olympian layer celebrated by poets of the archaic age, such as Homer, Hesiod, and the author(s) of the Homeric Hymns.

… festivals which are nominally connected with, or as the handbooks say, ‘celebrated in honor of’ various Olympians; the Diasia in honour of Zeus, the Thargelia of Apollo and Artemis, the Anthesteria of Dionysos. The service of these Olympians we should expect to be of the nature of joyous ‘tendance.’ To our surprise, when the actual rites are examined, we shall find that they have little or nothing to do with the particular Olympian to whom they are supposed to be addressed; that they are not in the main rites of burnt-sacrifice, of joy and feasting and agonistic contests, but rites of a gloomy underworld character, connected mainly with purification and the worship of ghosts. The conclusion is almost forced upon us that we have here a theological stratification, that the rites of the Olympians have been superimposed on another order of worship. The contrast between the two classes of rites is so marked, so sharp, that the unbroken development from one to the other is felt to be almost impossible. (Harrison 1991: 10–11)

She believed that after the occlusion of the goddess religion by the arrival of the Aryans’ male sky-gods, the goddesses and their cults persisted in the form of a cultural “unconscious,” an underlying religious stratum of women’s cults, partially out of view, that later—as the hold of the male-god dominated Olympian religion weakened in later antiquity—re-emerged in the mystery cults.11

Harrison’s account of the keres is hair-raising. She makes us feel them as still alive, regardless of the names we apply to them or to how we imagine them physically or artistically. Who has not felt the almost physically real, almost embodied presence of disease, fear, or death?

Harrison’ s account of the Greek goddesses, in marked contrast to her account of the gods, clearly reveals her love for the submerged mother goddesses and her keenly-felt sense of their reality and power—a love we can see re-emerging in recent years in the goddess worship of many second-wave feminists, neopagans, and Wiccans. Some have suggested that this hunger for the mother goddess, for the divine female, was channeled by the Church into Marian devotion, where at times, it threatened to eclipse Mary’ s divine Son in popular devotion. Harrison can be seen as tapping into a universal longing for reconnection to the source of our being.

Many Jungian and post-Jungian scholars, perhaps pre-eminently James Hillman, have testified to their experience of the gods and goddesses of the Olympian pantheon as psychological realities who act mythically in and through our lives. But Harrison, (and also Karl Kerényi, to his great credit), do not limit themselves to the divinities of the classical period, but acknowledge the never-dimmed potency of all aspects of Greek religion: rituals, mysteries, processions, symbols, verbal formulae, and superstitions.

Moving into the second half of Prolegomena feels like entering a different world. Following her exploration of the power of the chthonic, the keres, the goddesses, and their associated rituals in early Greek religion, Harrison turned her attention to the much later cult of Dionysos and Orphism. The text devoted to these two subjects grew in size to double the length of an already lengthy volume. This turn occurred because in 1900, while she was writing Prolegomena, she met Gilbert Murray, who was working on Bacchae, Euripides’ play on Dionysos and his followers, and its connection to Dionysian rites. Harrison wrote to Murray:

It’s rather dreadful, the whole centre of gravity of the book has shifted. It began as a treatise on Keres with a supplementary notice on Dionysus. It is ending as a screed on Dionysus with an introductory talk about Keres. Whose fault is that? Never, never again will I ask you to lecture when I am writing a book, a nice sound one too, it was, till last autumn. (qtd. in Ackerman 1991b: xxvi–xxvii)

Not only was Harrison enthusiastic about collaborating on a project of mutual interest with her friend and colleague, but more importantly, she was discovering the still-vital power of a religion thought to be long-dead. Just as in her study of the chthonic elements of early Greek religion and the pre-Olympian goddesses she had begun to experience for herself their numinous power, so now in her study of Dionysos and the Mystery religions she experienced their still-living power. Harrison’s writing leaves us with a strong sense that for her Dionysos, too, exerted the pull of “of gravity” and that she felt his numinous power.

In this way, Harrison made yet another radical discovery about how religions are born. At a time when the dominant intellectual climate viewed religion as a primitive relic of the past, a superstition destined to be overcome by logic, science, and positivism, Harrison saw that new religions may arise by the re-emergence of an older religion. The Eleusinian cult preceded worship of the Olympian gods but gained its greatest prominence after the polis-centered Olympian religion began to wane. The Greeks of the classical period viewed Dionysos as an “outsider” and he was never fully accepted as an Olympian god, but in the Orphism of later antiquity he was the most important deity.

Harrison’s discovery that not only do religions die, but that they are also born and re-born, has ongoing relevance. When a religion begins to die, the hunger for profound experience of the numinous and transcendence persists and may find expression not only in the creation of a new religion or by taking on the religion of another culture, but in the revitalization of elements from ancient, long-neglected traditions. Harrison’s account of the cult of Dionysos anticipates the modern-day search for ecstasy and altered states of consciousness through psychedelic drugs and other non-traditional spiritual practices.

Thus, the second half of Prolegomena is devoted to exploring the ways in which a religion can re-invent itself after a lengthy period of decline and exhaustion; by reviving, recycling, and reinterpreting older deities, symbols, myths, and rituals, to arrive at an apparently new religion that addresses unaddressed spiritual and cultural needs.

Curiously, in Prolegomena Harrison discusses one of the most important elements in all of Greek religion, the Eleusinian Mysteries; not as part of her early discussion of the two goddesses, but in a chapter called “Orphic and Dionysiac Mysteries.” She makes the very original and rather startling claim that: “all in [the Eleusinian Mysteries] that was not a primitive harvest festival, all or nearly all their spiritual significance, was due to elements borrowed from the cult of Dionysos” (Harrison 1991: 539). This is startling because the Mysteries had long been thought to be centered entirely on the two goddesses Demeter and Persephone and their myths. Citing both literary and artistic evidence, she claims that Dionysos was not a late addition to the Eleusinian Mysteries but rather, an essential figure from its beginning. She believes that at Eleusis, Dionysos was the divine consort of the Mother goddess as well as her divine son, Brimos. Harrison identifies the ecstatic experiences that occurred in the Eleusinian Mysteries as Dionysian in origin. She saw the death-conquering aspects of the Mysteries as arising not only from the ancient vegetation and fertility cult of Demeter and Persephone, but also from the cult of Dionysos, the dying and reappearing god.

In Harrison’s Themis (1912), published nine years after Prolegomena (1903), she radically revised her theories about the origins about the goddesses and the gods by taking into account the sociological theories of Durkheim, Bergson’s philosophical ideas, and Freud’s psychology. It is arguably her ideas about the social origin of ritual put forward in Themis for which Harrison is best remembered. Yet, despite the greater clarity and organization in how her ideas are expressed in Themis and the greater enthusiasm with which this book was received, her earlier, less well-organized Prolegomena remains, at least in my eyes, more intriguing. In Prolegomena, Harrison was still struggling with her ideas and was not yet entirely certain of what she thought. This uncertainty, perhaps inadvertently, led to an infusion of her own psychological struggles to a greater degree than in her later works.

To help us understand this personal aspect of Harrison’s enthusiasm for early Greek religion it may be helpful to turn to the thought of her near contemporary, Sigmund Freud. Harrison was born in 1850, five and a half years before Freud. His Interpretation of Dreams, published in November 1899, sold only 351 copies in six years. Freud’s public fame came not from Interpretation of Dreams, but rather in 1901 with the publication of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Harrison claims to have been greatly affected by his works and to have incorporated his ideas into her later works, most especially in Themis. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion was written before Freud was widely known. Although at the time Harrison was writing Prolegomena she was unaware of Freud’s work, parallels between the perspectives of these near contemporaries are intriguing. Many of the intellectual currents prevalent in the late nineteenth century so visible in Harrison’s works are addressed as well in those of Freud and other early depth psychologists. These include ideas about the origins and evolution of religion, the roles of taboo and ambivalence, the revalorization of the “feminine” and the lifelong importance of the Mother, the powerful effects of repression, resistance, and projection. But the most important common theme is that of the excavation of the “chthonic.” Freud often spoke of his discovery of the unconscious as an entry into the Underworld of Greek mythology, into the chthonic realm that so fascinated Harrison, the buried, the unearthed, the partially forgotten, occluded Underworld.

Her excavation of the Underworld of Greek religion coincided with the beginnings of depth psychology, with Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, which he so often visualized as an Underworld. The historical tendency to divert attention from the submerged, chthonic level of Greek religion is uncannily similar to how our psyches do their utmost to avoid the contents of the unconscious. Both realms, mythological and psychological, are perceived as underground, feared, unseen. Freud taught us that when the unconscious is allowed to speak, it will yield an unexpected wealth of healing. Likewise, Harrison showed that the partially submerged world of chthonic deities, rituals, mysteries, and myths re-emerged in the Greek world during the sixth and fifth centuries in response to needs that were insufficiently addressed by the dominant Olympian religion; creating a late flourishing in Greek religion with the rise of Orphism and the mystery cults—forms that led by various paths into early Christianity. Given that Harrison and Freud did not know of one another at the time Prolegomena was written (Freud seems never to have known of Harrison’s work), the parallels in their writing, the emphases on the unearthing of the chthonic, are as unmistakable as they are unexpected.

There are also important connections between Harrison’s work and that of C. G. Jung. Both recognized that religion was more than “things done,” “things shown,” and “things said.” Harrison’s attraction to the study of Greek religion may have reflected an unacknowledged desire to understand what lay at the root of her own spiritual inclinations, something she had ignored after rejecting the religion of her upbringing. Jung, and less explicitly Harrison, invite us to explore the possibility that at a deep but unacknowledged level we mourn the loss of a necessary connection with the spiritual or religious aspects of life and that we seek an experiential connection to the sacred.12

Harrison’s experience of certain aspects of Greek religion is an instance of what Rudolph Otto describes in The Idea of the Holy (1917): it is experiential, not belief, not dogma.13 Harrison detected the smoldering embers of numinosity in a locus long thought to be dead. She showed us a pathway through the deeply buried ruins in the underworld of our Western culture, showed us the life still present there beneath the ashes, and she provided us, Ariadne-like, with the blood-red thread of inner life to follow from antiquity to the present; the thread of spirit, ritual, myth, symbol, and mystery.

By pursuing her passion for visual aesthetics, Harrison the skeptical academic surprised herself by discovering a living core of genuine spiritual experience lying at the heart of Greek religion, whose Olympian aspects she had considered to be effete, exhausted of religious passion, and largely functional. Harrison may have felt the need to suppress her own, unrecognized spiritual nature by her early exposure to the exaggerated emotional expressions of evangelical Christianity of her childhood—a religion whose emotional excesses were a source of embarrassment to her in later life. It may be that her passion for visual aesthetic experience, her love for the visual arts and for Greek religion, provided a way for her to experience spiritual life on her own terms. Orphism may have appealed to her more reserved, restrained personality in ways that evangelical Christianity could not. Alternatively, the goddesses and the mystery religions may have appealed to precisely those aspects of her personality that she had suppressed early in life out of necessity: her love for the missing mother, her ardently loving nature that was thwarted repeatedly, a passionate nature that might have reveled on the mountainsides with the raving Maenads had she been born in ancient Greece rather than Victorian England.

Harrison appears to have stumbled across elements of genuine spiritual life in the pursuit of what I believe to have been, at the conscious level, purely academic study. In the process of examining the religion of another people she began to sense the presence of something missing in her culture and in her own life. It has long been noted that our Western culture has become very one-sided, favoring the material, the rational, the scientific and neglecting the world of the spiritual, the unconscious, the emotional and non-rational. Yet a culture’s greatest treasure is its experience of the sacred. However, since this experience is ineffable, it is transmitted in the guise of religion, encrusted with rituals, practices, symbols, myth, and allegory. Many of the rituals have lost their original meanings and functions, and many of the symbols and myths are obscure, yielding up their significance only after extended contemplation and the expenditure of great effort. These difficulties evoke a certain degree of skepticism. Religious skepticism is not unique to the modern era. The Greeks, too, were skeptical of their polis-centered, Zeus-dominated religion as is shown by some of the tragedians, particularly Euripides, by the Sophists, and even by Plato and Aristotle, and, of course by the Orphics and the adherents of the mystery cults.

Harrison rejected Christianity very early in life, as did so many other intellectuals of the late nineteenth century. The internal one-sidedness created by this rejection of her childhood religion and the empirical, scientific, materialistic attitude of the academy with its neglect of the spiritual and emotional, the spontaneous and unconscious, may have led to a process of enantiodromia, [the psychological process first described by C. G. Jung, in which an excessive emphasis on one aspect of the conscious life elicits the emergence of its opposite in the unconscious]. By eliciting such enantiodromia she was able to rediscover in her work those spiritual aspects she had earlier left behind. She seems to have stumbled across true spiritual and emotional connection with aspects of Greek religion: goddesses, the chthonic, and especially the mysteries and Orphism.

Harrison and Freud, pioneers in their respective fields, proceeded necessarily by intuition and feeling, guesswork and imagination. They occasionally stumbled but they were not abashed by their mistakes. Instead of fearing to address their errors, they eagerly revised their theories, always acknowledging that theirs were works in progress. Neither was afraid of employing their subjective experience as a hermeneutic. Freud famously did so by analyzing himself after his father’s death and so coming to terms with his own Oedipus complex. Harrison was more discreet in acknowledging the biographical and emotional sources of her insights and intuitions, never openly recognizing them. However, aspects from her personal and emotional life are reflected in the idiosyncratic nature of the insights that resulted from her investigations into Greek religion: in her focus on the submerged, the erased, the invisible, and nearly invisible yet still powerful Feminine. Indeed, the “submerged, erased, yet powerful Feminine” could, in fact, serve as a metaphor for a brilliant, academically ambitious woman of Harrison’s time—that is for Harrison herself.

Harrison was motivated by what moved her deeply, by what she loved, by her aesthetic appreciation of the exquisite beauty of Greek art. Consciously, she was relying on her gift for rational thought to pursue what was at bottom a non-rational, sensual love of the beautiful. Harrison’s writings about goddesses, the chthonic, and especially, the mysteries betray a surprising degree of feeling: it offended her that the ancient goddesses had been supplanted and submerged. In her account of the occlusion and replacement of the goddesses and the chthonic deities we can feel that she is describing herself—ignored, belittled, and sidelined by the sexist, male-dominated academic establishment that had little or no interest in her thoughts. Harrison was the supplanted goddess. She was the occluded chthonic religion.

Harrison’s experience of exclusion and devaluation allowed, even forced her, to see a similar process as having occurred in the history of Greek religion.

A woman of her brilliance and ability, struggling against the strong gender prejudice of her time (of which she complained very little), was necessarily faced with the obvious fact of the repression or radical devaluation of all things feminine. While she built to an extent on Bachofen’s theories, Harrison’s own theory that the early primacy of goddess-religion in Greece was supplanted and suppressed by a later patriarchal religion, sounds remarkably like her experience of being a woman in Victorian England. That is, she was aware of the power and value of women and their relationships with one another, beginning with herself, her love for her mother whom she lost so early, the love she had for her women friends and for her female colleagues—and aware that all of this was so often dismissed. In her own life and her work, she demonstrated feminine power and how it resisted its overshadowing, repression, and dismissal by masculine culture.

It is perhaps still insufficiently recognized that our intellectual endeavors reflect, to at least some degree, our social milieu: family and upbringing, social class, ethnicity, and gender. Much of the criticism of Harrison’s work has to do with her incorporation of ideas that were current during her lifetime but are now disparaged. However, even if we no longer accept the nineteenth-century image of a universal pattern of cultural evolution (with its positing of “primitive” origins and an inevitable progression from “lower” to “higher”), can we not recognize the significant changes that occurred over time in Greek religion? Even if we have come to doubt the evidence supporting the theory that in Europe worship of goddesses wholly predated worship of gods, can we not recognize the ways in which goddess cults and women’s cults were, indeed, cast in the shadow of the cults of male gods, suppressed, and denigrated?

The attitude of skepticism toward religion, a process of disenchantment that began in the Renaissance, gained strength in the Enlightenment, and crested in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, continues today to dominate in academic and intellectual circles. Harrison began her work with this mental framework of religious skepticism, but she was later captivated by certain elements of Greek religion, especially the mystery cults and women’s cults, feeling their real, living power. Although the process of “re-enchantment” of religion began before Harrison with German Romantics such as Friedrich von Schlegel and the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, she was one of the most prominent scholars of Greek religion to bring sustained attention to this process and to introduce it into the greater academic world. This re-enchantment of Greek religion was continued after her by scholars such as Walter Otto, Karl Kerényi, James Hillman, and Christine Downing.14

Harrison, like Freud and the other early depth psychologists, was a pioneer in her field and very aware of the unknown terrain she faced. The fact that she revised her theories later in life and was open to criticism of them demonstrates that she knew she was speculating rather than stating hard fact. Yet despite her early errors, too often trumpeted by later critics, she opened up new territory for investigation. If the timeline of Harrison’s theory of the evolution of Greek religion has come under criticism, we must nonetheless recognize that individual elements of her work still hold up: the goddesses may not have preceded the gods, but the goddesses and many other elements of earlier Greek religion were indeed driven underground.

In the chapters that follow, we will explore the ways in which Harrison employed a variety of “outside” disciplines in her transformation of the study of Greek religion: art and archeology, sociology and anthropology, ritualism, and mystical religion.

Notes

While later investigation has failed to support the theory of primordial matriarchy, it retains importance because it brought needed attention to feminine aspects of antiquity including goddesses and their cults, the cults of women, harvest and fertility, and to all aspects of the lives of women in antiquity.