ANCIENT
ART AND RITUAL
CHAPTER
I
ART
AND RITUAL
THE title of this book may strike the reader as
strange and even dissonant. What have art and ritual to do together? The
ritualist is, to the modern mind, a man concerned perhaps unduly with fixed
forms and ceremonies, with carrying out the rigidly pre-scribed ordinances of a
church or sect. The artist, on the other hand, we think of as free in thought
and untrammelled by convention in practice; his tendency is towards licence.
Art and ritual, it is quite true, have diverged to-day; but the title of this book
is chosen advisedly. Its object is to show that these two divergent
developments have a common root, and that neither can be understood without the
other. It is at the outset one
and the same impulse that sends a man to church and
to the theatre.
Such a statement may sound to-day paradoxical, even
irreverent. But to the Greek of the sixth, fifth, and even fourth century B.C.,
it would have been a simple truism. We shall see this best by following an
Athenian to his theatre, on the day of the great Spring Festival of Dionysos.
Passing through the entrance-gate to the theatre on
the south side of the Acropolis, our Athenian citizen will find himself at once
on holy ground. He is within a temenos or precinct, a place "cut
off" from the common land and dedicated to a god. He will pass to the left
(Fig. 2, p.
144) two temples standing near to each other, one of earlier, the other of
later date, for a temple, once built, was so sacred that it would only be
reluctantly destroyed. As he enters the actual theatre he will pay nothing for
his seat; his attendance is an act of worship, and from the social point of
view obligatory; the entrance fee is there-fore paid for him by. the State.
The theatre is open to all Athenian citizens, but
the ordinary man will not venture to
seat himself in the front row. In the front row, and
that only, the seats have backs, and the central seat of this row is an
arm-chair; the whole of the front row is permanently reserved, not for
individual rich men who can afford to hire "boxes," but for certain
State officials, and these officials are all priests. On each seat the name of
the owner is inscribed; the central seat is "of the priest of Dionysos Eleuthereus,"
the god of the precinct. Near him is the seat "of the priest of Apollo the
Laurel-Bearer," and again "of the priest of Asklepios," and
"of the priest of Olympian Zeus," and so on round the whole front
semicircle. It is as though at His Majesty's the front row of stalls was
occupied by the whole bench of bishops, with the Archbishop of Canterbury
enthroned in the central stall.
The theatre at Athens is not open night by night,
nor even day by day. Dramatic performances take place only at certain high
festivals of Dionysos in winter and spring. It is, again, as though the modern
theatre was open only at the festivals of the Epiphany and of Easter. Our
modern, at least our Protestant, custom is in direct contrast. We
tend on great religious festivals rather to close
than to open our theatres. Another point of contrast is in the time allotted to
the performance. We give to the theatre our after-dinner hours, when work is
done, or at best a couple of hours in the afternoon. The theatre is for us a
recreation. The Greek theatre opened at sunrise, and the whole day was
consecrated to high and strenuous religious attention. During the five or six
days of the great Dionysia, the whole city was in a state of unwonted
sanctity, under a taboo. To distrain a debtor was illegal; any personal
assault, however trifling, was sacrilege.
Most impressive and convincing of all is the
ceremony that took place on the eve of the performance. By torchlight,
accompanied by a great procession, the image of the god Dionysos himself was
brought to the theatre and placed in the orchestra. Moreover, he came not only
in human but in animal form. Chosen young men of the Athenians in the flower of
their youth--epheboi--escorted to the precinct a splendid bull. It was
expressly ordained that the bull should be "worthy of the god "; he
was,
in fact, as we shall presently see, the primitive
incarnation of the god. It is, again, as though in our modern theatre there
stood, "sanctifying all things to our use and us to His service," the
human figure of the Saviour, and beside him the Paschal Lamb.
But now we come to a strange thing. A god presides
over the theatre, to go to the theatre is an act of worship to the god
Dionysos, and yet, when the play begins, three i times out of four of Dionysos
we hear nothing. We see, it may be, Agamemnon returning from Troy, Clytemnestra
waiting to slay him, the vengeance of Orestes, the love of Phædra for
Hippolytos, the hate of Medea and the slaying of her children: stories
beautiful, tragic, morally instructive it may be, but scarcely, 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, tragic, yet purely
human? The actors wear ritual vestments like those of the celebrants at the
Eleusinian mysteries.
[paragraph continues] Why, then, do we find
them, not executing a religious service or even a drama of gods and goddesses,
but rather impersonating mere Homeric heroes and heroines? Greek drama, which
seemed at first to give us our clue, to show us a real link between ritual and
art, breaks down, betrays us, it would seem, just at the crucial moment, and
leaves us with our problem on our hands.
Had we only Greek ritual and art we might well
despair. The Greeks are a people of such swift constructive imagination that
they almost always obscure any problem of origins. So fair and magical are
their cloud-capp’d towers that they distract our minds from the task of digging
for foundations. There is scarcely a problem in the origins of Greek mythology
and religion that has been solved within the domain of Greek thinking only.
Ritual with them was, in the case of drama, so swiftly and completely
transmuted into art that, had we had Greek material only to hand, we might
never have marked the transition. Happily, however, we are not confined within
the Greek paradise. Wider fields are open to us; our subject is not only Greek,
but ancient art and ritual. We can turn at
once to the Egyptians, a people slower-witted than
the Greeks, and watch their sluggish but more instructive operations. To one
who is studying the development of the human mind the average or even stupid
child is often more illuminating than the abnormally brilliant. Greece is often
too near to us, too advanced, too modern, to be for comparative purposes
instructive.
Of all Egyptian, perhaps of all ancient deities, no
god has lived so long or had so wide and deep an influence as Osiris. He stands
as the prototype of the great class of resurrection-gods who die that they may
live again. His sufferings, his death, and his resurrection were enacted year
by year in a great mystery-play at Abydos. In that mystery-play was set forth,
first, what the Greeks call his agon, his contest with his enemy Set; then
his pathos, his suffering, or downfall and defeat, his wounding, his
death, and his burial; finally, his resurrection and "recognition,"
his anagnorisis either as himself or as his only begotten son Horus.
Now the meaning of this thrice-told tale we shall consider later; for the
moment we are concerned
only with the fact that it is set forth both in art
and ritual.
At the festival of Osiris small images of the god
were made of sand and vegetable earth, his cheek bones were painted green and
his face yellow. The images were cast in a mould of pure gold, representing the
god as a mummy. After sunset on the 24th day of the month Choiak, the effigy of
Osiris was laid in a grave and the image of the previous year was removed. The
intent of all this was made transparently clear by other rites. At the
beginning of the festival there was a ceremony of ploughing and sowing. One end
of the field was sown with barley, the other with spelt; another part with
flax. While this was going on the chief priest recited the ritual of the
"sowing of the fields." Into the "garden" of the god, which
seems to have been a large pot, were put sand and barley, then fresh living
water from the inundation of the Nile was poured out of a golden vase over the
"garden" and the barley was allowed to grow up. It was the symbol of
the resurrection of the god after his burial, "for the growth of the garden
is the growth of the divine substance."
The death and resurrection of the gods, and pari
passu of the life and fruits of the earth, was thus set forth in ritual,
but--and this is our immediate point--it was also set forth in definite,
unmistakable art. In the great temple of Isis at Philæ there is a chamber
dedicated to Osiris. Here is represented the dead Osiris. Out of his body
spring ears of corn, and a priest waters the growing stalk from a pitcher. The
inscription to the picture reads: This is the form of him whom one may not
name, Osiris of the mysteries, who springs from the returning waters. It is but
another presentation of the ritual of the month Choiak, in which effigies of
the god made of earth and corn were buried. When these effigies were taken up
it would be found that the corn had sprouted actually from the body of the god,
and this sprouting of the grain would, as Dr. Frazer says, be "hailed as
an omen, or rather as the cause of the growth of the crops." 1
Even more vividly is the resurrection set forth in
the bas-reliefs that accompany the great Osiris inscription at Denderah. Here
the god is represented at first as a mummy
swathed and lying flat on his bier. Bit by bit he is
seen raising himself up in a series of gymnastically impossible positions, till
at last he rises from a bowl--perhaps his "garden"--all but erect,
between the out-spread wings of Isis, while before him a male figure holds the crux
ansata, the "cross with a handle," the Egyptian symbol of life. In
ritual, the thing desired, i. e. the resurrection, is acted, in art
it is represented.
No one will refuse to these bas-reliefs the title of
art. In Egypt, then, we have clearly an instance--only one out of many--where
art and ritual go hand in hand. Countless bas-reliefs that decorate Egyptian
tombs and temples are but ritual practices translated into stone. This, as we
shall later see, is an important step in our argument. Ancient art and ritual are
not only closely connected, not only do they mutually explain and illustrate
each other, but, as we shall presently find, they actually arise out of a
common human impulse.
The god who died and rose again is not of course
confined to Egypt; he is world-wide. When Ezekiel (viii. 14) "came to the
gate of
the Lord's house which was toward the north" he
beheld there the "women weeping for Tammuz." This
"abomination" the house of Judah had brought with them from Babylon.
Tammuz is Dumuzi, "the true son," or more fully, Dumuzi-absu,
"true son of the waters." He too, like Osiris, is a god of the life
that springs from inundation and that dies down in the heat of the summer. In
Milton's procession of false gods,
"Thammuz
came next behind,
Whose annual wound in Lebanon allured
The Syrian damsels to lament his fate
In amorous ditties all a summer's day."
Whose annual wound in Lebanon allured
The Syrian damsels to lament his fate
In amorous ditties all a summer's day."
Tammuz in Babylon was the young love of Ishtar. Each
year he died and passed below the earth to the place of dust and death,
"the land from which there is no returning, the house of darkness, where
dust lies on door and bolt." And the goddess went after him, and while she
was below, life ceased in the earth, no flower blossomed and no child of animal
or man was born.
We know Tammuz, "the true son," best by
one of his titles, Adonis, the Lord or King.
[paragraph continues] The Rites of Adonis were
celebrated at mid-summer. That is certain and memorable; for, just as the
Athenian fleet was setting sail on its ill-omened voyage to Syracuse, the
streets of Athens were thronged with funeral processions, everywhere was seen
the image of the dead god, and the air was full of the lamentations of weeping
women. Thucydides does not so much as mention the coincidence, but
Plutarch 1 tells us
those who took account of omens were full of concern for the fate of their
countrymen. To start an expedition on the day of the funeral rites of Adonis,
the Canaanitish "Lord," was no luckier than to set sail on a Friday,
the death-day of the "Lord" of Christendom.
The rites of Tammuz and of Adonis, celebrated in the
summer, were rites of death rather than of resurrection. The emphasis is on the
fading and dying down of vegetation rather than on its upspringing. The reason
of this is simple and will soon become manifest. For the moment we have only to
note that while in Egypt the rites of Osiris are represented as much by art as
by ritual, in Babylon and Palestine in the feasts of Tammuz
and Adonis it is ritual rather than art that
obtains.
We have now to pass to another enquiry. We have seen
that art and ritual, not only in Greece but in Egypt and Palestine, are closely
linked. So closely, indeed, are they linked that we even begin to suspect they
may have a common origin. We have now to ask, what is it that links art and
ritual so closely together, what have they in common? Do they start from the
same impulse, and if so why do they, as they develop, fall so widely asunder?
It will clear the air if we consider for a moment
what we mean by art, and also in somewhat greater detail what we mean by
ritual.
Art, Plato 1 tells us
in a famous passage of the Republic, is imitation; the artist imitates natural
objects, which are themselves in his philosophy but copies of higher realities.
All the artist can do is to make a copy of a copy, to hold up a mirror to
Nature in which, as he turns it whither he will, "are reflected sun and
heavens and earth and man," anything
and everything. Never did a statement so false, so
wrong-headed, contain so much suggestion of truth--truth which, by the help of
analysing ritual, we may perhaps be able to disentangle. But first its falsehood
must be grasped, and this is the more important as Plato's misconception in
modified form lives on to-day. A painter not long ago thus defined his own art:
"The art of painting is the art of imitating solid objects upon a flat
surface by means of pigments." A sorry life-work! Few people to-day,
perhaps, regard art as the close and realistic copy of Nature; photography has
at least scotched, if not slain, that error; but many people still regard art
as a sort of improvement on or an "idealization" of Nature. It is the
part of the artist, they think, to take suggestions and materials from Nature,
and from these to build up, as it were, a revised version. It is, perhaps, only
by studying those rudimentary forms of art that are closely akin to ritual that
we come to see how utterly wrong-headed is this conception.
Take the representations of Osiris that we have just
described--the mummy rising bit by bit from his bier. Can any one maintain
that art is here a copy or imitation of reality?
However "realistic" the painting, it represents a thing imagined not
actual. There never was any such person as Osiris, and if there had been, he
would certainly never, once mummified, have risen from his tomb. There is no
question of fact, and the copy of fact, in the matter. Moreover, had there
been, why should anyone desire to make a copy of natural fact? The whole
"imitation" theory, to which, and to the element of truth it
contains, we shall later have occasion to return, errs, in fact, through
supplying no adequate motive for a wide-spread human energy. It is probably
this lack of motive that has led other theorizers to adopt the view that art is
idealization. Man with pardonable optimism desires, it is thought, to improve
on Nature.
Modern science, confronted with a problem like that
of the rise of art, no longer casts about to conjecture how art might have
arisen, she examines how it actually did arise. Abundant material has
now been collected from among savage peoples of an art so primitive that we
hesitate to call it art at
all, and it is in these inchoate efforts that we are
able to track the secret motive springs that move the artist now as then.
Among the Huichol Indians, 1 if the
people fear a drought from the extreme heat of the sun, they take a clay disk,
and on one side of it they paint the "face" of Father Sun, a circular
space surrounded by rays of red and blue and yellow which are called his
"arrows," for the Huichol sun, like Phœbus Apollo, has arrows for
rays. On the reverse side they will paint the progress of the sun through the
four quarters of the sky. The journey is symbolized by a large cross-like
figure with a central circle for midday. Round the edge are beehive-shaped
mounds; these represent the hills of earth. The red and yellow dots that
surround the hills are cornfields. The crosses on the hills are signs of wealth
and money. On some of the disks birds and scorpions are painted, and on one are
curving lines which mean rain. These disks are deposited on the altar of the
god-house and left, and then all is well. The intention might
be to us obscure, but a Huichol Indian would read it
thus: "Father Sun with his broad shield (or 'face') and his arrows rises
in the east, bringing money and wealth to the Huichols. His heat and the light
from his rays make the corn to grow, but he is asked not to interfere with the
clouds that are gathering on the hills."
Now is this art or ritual? It is both and neither. We distinguish
between a form of prayer and a work of art and count them in no danger of
confusion; but the Huichol goes back to that earlier thing, apresentation. He
utters, expresses his thought about the sun and his emotion about the sun and
his relation to the sun, and if "prayer is the soul's sincere desire"
he has painted a prayer. It is not a little curious that the same notion comes
out in the old Greek word for "prayer," euchè. The Greek, when
he wanted help in trouble from the "Saviours," the Dioscuri, carved a
picture of them, and, if he was a sailor, added a ship. Underneath he inscribed
the word euchè. It was not to begin with a "vow" paid, it was a
presentation of his strong inner desire, it was a sculptured prayer.
Ritual then involves imitation; but does
not arise out of it. It desires to recreate an
emotion, not to reproduce an object. A rite is, indeed, we shall later see (p. 42), a sort
of stereotyped action, not really practical, but yet not wholly cut loose from
practice, a reminiscence or an anticipation of actual practical doing; it is
fitly, though not quite correctly, called by the Greeks a dromenon,
"a thing done."
At the bottom of art, as its motive power and its
mainspring, lies, not the wish to copy Nature or even improve on her--the
Huichol Indian does not vainly expend his energies on an effort so
fruitless--but rather an impulse shared by art with ritual, the desire, that
is, to utter, to give out a strongly felt emotion or desire by representing, by
making or doing or enriching the object or act desired. The common source of
the art and ritual of Osiris is the intense, world-wide desire that the life of
Nature which seemed dead should live again. This common emotional factor
it is that makes art and ritual in their beginnings well-nigh
indistinguishable. Both, to begin with, copy an act, but not at first for the
sake of the copy. Only when the emotion dies down and is
forgotten does the copy become an end in itself, a
mere mimicry.
It is this downward path, this sinking of making to
mimicry, that makes us now-a-days think of ritual as a dull and formal thing.
Because a rite has ceased to be believed in, it does not in the least follow
that it will cease to be done. We have to reckon with all the huge forces
of habit. The motor nerves, once set in one direction, given the slightest
impulse tend always to repeat the same reaction. We mimic not only others but
ourselves mechanically, even after all emotion proper to the act is dead; and
then because mimicry has a certain ingenious charm, it becomes an end in itself
for ritual, even for art.
It is not easy, as we saw, to classify the Huichol
prayer-disks. As prayers they are ritual, as surfaces decorated they are specimens
of primitive art. In the next chapter we shall have to consider a kind of
ceremony very instructive for our point, but again not very easy to
classify--the pantomimic dances which are, almost all over the world, so
striking a feature in savage social and religious life, Are they to be classed
as ritual or art?
These pantomime dances lie, indeed, at the very
heart and root of our whole subject, and it is of the first importance that
before going further in our analysis of art and ritual, we should have some
familiarity with their general character and gist, the more so as they are a
class of ceremonies now practically extinct. We shall find in these dances the
meeting-point between art and ritual, or rather we shall find in them the rude,
inchoate material out of which both ritual and art, at least in one of its
forms, developed. Moreover, we shall find in pantomimic dancing a ritual
bridge, as it were, between actual life and those representations of life which
we call art.
In our next chapter, therefore, we shall study the
ritual dance in general, and try to understand its psychological origin; in the
following chapter (III) we shall take a particular dance of special importance,
the Spring Dance as practised among various primitive peoples. We shall then be
prepared to approach the study of the Spring Dance among the Greeks, which
developed into their drama, and thereby to, we hope, throw light on the
relation between ritual and art.
Ancient Art and Ritual
by Jane Harrison (1913.)
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