Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion: Introduction

Greek religion, as set forth in popular handbooks and even in more ambitious treatises, is an affair mainly of mythology, and moreover of mythology as seen through the medium of literature. In England, so far as I am aware, no serious attempt has been made to examine Greek ritual. Yet the facts of ritual are more easy definitely to ascertain, more permanent, and at least equally significant. What a people does in relation to its gods must always be one clue, and perhaps the safest, to what it thinks. The first preliminary to any scientific understanding of Greek religion is a minute examination of its ritual.

This habit of viewing Greek religion exclusively through the medium of Greek literature has brought with it an initial and fundamental error in method--an error which in England, where scholarship is mainly literary, is likely to die hard. For literature Homer is the beginning, though every scholar is aware that he is nowise primitive; for theology, or--if we prefer so to call it--mythology, Homer presents, not a starting-point, but a culmination, a complete achievement, an almost mechanical accomplishment, with scarcely a hint of origines, an accomplishment moreover, which is essentially literary rather than religious, sceptical and moribund already in its very perfection. The Olympians of Homer are no more primitive than his hexameters. Beneath this splendid surface lies a stratum of religious conceptions, ideas of evil, of purification, of atonement, ignored or suppressed by Homer, but reappearing in later poets and notably in Aeschylus. It is this substratum of religious conceptions, at once more primitive and more permanent, that I am concerned

NEWNHAM COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE,
September 9, 1903.

IN the second edition, errors to which the kindness of friends and reviewers has drawn my attention have been corrected. The tedious task of proof-revision has been again undertaken for me by Mr Cornford. For the index of Classical Passages I have to thank Mr F. C. Green of Trinity College. In the notes many new references have been added to literature that has appeared since my first edition. I would mention especially Dr Frazer's Early History of the Kingship and the invaluable Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, the issue of which in new form since 1904 marks a fresh departure in the study of religion. In my second edition however new material has been indicated rather than incorporated. Save for obvious corrections and added references the book remains substantially unaltered--not, I would ask my friends to believe, because in the lapse of four years my views remain the same, but because on some matters, especially on magic, mimetic ritual and the mysteries, I hope before long, in a volume of Epilegomena, to develope certain suggestions and to remedy many shortcomings.

JANE ELLEN HARRISON.

NEWNHAM COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.
December, 1907.

NEWNHAM COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.
August 8, 1921.