Ancient art and ritual / by Jane Ellen Harrison.

Jane Ellen Harrison

Date:: [1913]

Credit: Ancient art and ritual / by Jane Ellen Harrison. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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$\ in fact, as we shall presently see, the primitive [ incarnation of the god. It is, again, as though :in our modern theatre there stood, “ sanetifj— I ing all things to our use and us to His serviee,”” I the human figure of the Saviour, and beside ihim the Pasehal Lamb. But now we eome to a strange thing. A fgod presides over the theatre, to go to the Theatre is an act of worship to the god Dio- [nysos, and yet, when the play begins, three ! times out of four of Dionysos we hear nothing. IWe see, it may be, Agamemnon returning :from Troy, Clytemnestra waiting to slay him^ I the vengeanee of Orestes, the love of Phaedra for Hippolytos, the hate of Medea and the slaying of her children: stories beautiful, tragic, morally instructive it may be, but scareely, we feel, religious. The orthodox Greeks themselves sometimes complained that in the plays enacted before them there was- “ nothing to do with Dionysos.” If drama be at the outset divine, with its roots in ritual, why does it issue in an art profoundly solemn, tragie, yet purely human ? The aetors wear ritual vestments like those of the celebrants at the Eleusinian mysteries.-$

Ancient art and ritual / by Jane Ellen Harrison.

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