Religion (1994) 24, 67-72 Review ARTICLE Jane Ellen Hartison’s Contribution to the Study of Religion Carot E. BURNSIDE Sandra J. Peacock, Jane Ellen Harrison: The Mask and the Self, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1988. Sandra Peacock has written an interesting and timely book on the academic study of religion's only great and important female figure, Jane Ellen Harrison. Such pieces are often criticized as ‘ad hominism’, however, they open up not only the life of the individual, but the time in which that person lived.' Harrison is more often read in footnotes than in the books she contributed. She was an influential scholar whose contributions were significant and long-lasting. Peacock dramatizes the problems this scholar had in finding acceptance for her ideas in both the public and private realm, illustrating the forces working in and through her. In this vein, Peacock has chosen a difficult task to begin with because the ore she mines is not abundant, and, unfortu- nately, her tools are blunt. The rarity of the ore, in this case the lack of diartes and of substantial correspondence, is significant. Peacock interpolates more than the data can withstand and does not take advantage of Harrison's own scholarly works—as I shall illustrate below. Peacock’s mix of psychology, sociology, and historical perspective further complicates the issue. Peacock’s continued emphasis of the psychic state she supposes Harrison to have had eventually taxes the reader's patience. ‘The book raises more questions than it answers: Harrison’s life, the publication policies of the scholarly presses, and whether the pressure to publish is not so greac that dissertations that would benefit from the natural maturation process are prematurely rushed to publication. Raising questions is not a bad thing, however, itis a good thing; that is the purpose of scholarship. Whatever criticisms I may make of Peacock’s book should be balanced by my respect for her having given us all the opportunity co have raised them. ‘Though my critique will emphasize the scholarly side of Peacock’s analysis, a look at the psychological side is also in order as Peacock considers herself an orthodox Freudian. | find it curious that Peacock should apply such a pure form on a subject who was so ardently feminist. When feminists laid their hands on Freud, Freudian analysis took an interesting turn. They discovered that the very basis of Freud’s analysis had a fatal flaw—a failure of nerve. Just as Freud was uncovering the damage incest wrecks on female mental health, he, too, discovered that he had sexual feelings towards his daughter. Instead of analyzing himself and discovering that the incest taboo is a social not a natural phenomenon, he buried the feelings and denied not only that he had such feelings, but that any man had such desires. His analysis of women who claimed that the male relations in their lives had acted on these feelings was that they were imagin- ing things, that they were hysterical. Enough evidence is present in Peacock’s data to suggest that Jane's hysteria came from this same source. Peacock’s not having dealt with the issue is evidence of the purity of ber Freudian analysis. (0048-721X/94/010067 + 06 $08.00/0 © 1994 Academic Press Limited68 C. E. Burnside Sandra Peacock’s analysis of a hysterical Jane Harrison—both on the psychological and the intellectual sides—shows a similar blindness. Peacock is certainly hindered by the material she has available to her. Harrison was in the habit of destroying her correspondence. This docs not make up for Peacock’s not using the data available to her. For example, she makes a great deal of Harrison's losing her mther at birth. We can all sympathize with that. Unfortunately, we probably sympzthize too much. Women in the 19th century could realistically expect to dic in childbirth, That is the way the world had always been for women and the children they bore. Harrison's case may have been an exception, but societies fail unless they provide some basic childcare. That basic childcare may be very different from ours. As Erickson pointed out it may produce different neuroses,” but a more thorough analysis than Peacock’s is necessary to finding out whether that childrearing will produce worse neuroses. Peacock does not dea} at all with chae aspect of social life. She simply enlists our misdirected sym- pathy. Another failing is in her treatment of Harrison’s love life, especially her treatment of Harrison's affairs with MacColl and Neil. With MacColl, Peacock azain tries to enlist our sympathy, this time unsuccessfully. She makes much of the fact that Harrison did not marry him and how tragic this is to her. Yet if Harrison was so devastated by MacColl’s criticism of her estheticism,? why was she co-authoring a book with him a few years later.” If Harrison was so devastated by her ambiguous love relationship with MacColl, why was she going to Europe with him and why were they shaking off their chaperones and traveling alone.® Peacock gives Harrison's relationship with Neil only a few lines, yet that is the truly tragic one. Harrison finally becomes engaged at a spinster-like age and the man dies only a short time later.° Are we not to feel sympathy for this woman who loses the only man she would ever be engaged 1:0? As for Harrison’s hysteria, Peacock’s own information suggests Harrison's father was an alcoholic.” We know enough of the effects of that now to make some type of, informed statement about its effects on the children, Bertrand Russell's one-liner about Harrison’s smoking and drinking would suggest that Harrison had a drinking prob- lem.* And what of Peacock’s analysis of Harrison as ‘hysterical’? It begs the Freudian question, was Harrison molested as a child. Harrison would certainly not be an unusual case if she had and this would answer some of the questions Peacock asks and we all ask after reading Peacock’s book: why can Harrison not develop some permanent attach~ ment to an appropriate male, why is Harrison ill so often, why does she drink so much, why docs she need to be the center of attention. Another question that is left unanswered is why, if Harrison is so faint at scenes of violence,? does she write a book, Profegonena, that is about blood, blood rituals, and purification? Eighty percent of the book is an analysis of rituals pu: in ‘evolutionary’ order of blood and blood-shed. The exquisite detail with which she supports her re- envisionment of these rituals and the doggedness with which she must relate every single datum wears down the reader. Despite Harrison's complaints to the contrary, the book is a model of inductive reasoning —the reader is too overwhelmed and weary of the blood-shed to attack. If Peacock’s ‘quarrel with the scholarship on Jane to date lies in its refusal to explore her personality and work in depth’, and if ‘the events of her childhood decisively shaped her unique vision of the past, and to ignore them is to ignore compelling evidence.’ (p. xi) Peacock is equally guilty. ‘Also lacking in Peacock is a scns¢ of scholarly context. Harrison lived ata time when she was able to take advantage of the fabulous discoveries of Greck archeology: the uncovering and dating of the Minoan and Mycenaean cultures, Troy, the Acropolis,Jane Ellen Harrison 69 etc. Harrison, having spent ten years at the British Museum and having spent that time memorizing every detail of every piece in the collection, was in a unique situation to make some major statements about ancient Greek culture. She could do for Greece what William Robertson Smith did for the Semites, give them a context, give them a real religion. Harrison also had to be aware of the great discoveries of the ancient Near East and the extent to which civilization was being discovered to be much older than previously believed. To discuss Harrison’s phase as an ‘estheticist’ is certainly import- ant, but to miss her contribution in other areas is to miss the importance of religious scholarship’s only important female figure. Nevertheless, in such cases any publicity is good publicity Harrison lived at a time when theory building in che academic study of religion was probably at its peak. Tylor, Smith, Marrett, Durkheim, Mauss had recently created or were about to create their masterpieces. She read them all and her theoretical biases are more sophisticated than the simple statement that she was a ‘Ritualist’. ‘ques of modern cS ip to bear on a ‘sacred’ category—the Classics. Nowhere is this more evident than in her Prolegomena. By cmphasizing Themis, Peacock misses the impact of Harri- son on late 19th- and early 20th-century scholarship. Prolegomena is as much a criticism, of Smith’s theory as it is an accolade of Tylor’s Primitive Culture. Harrison's basic model of religion and evolution is modeled on Tylor. Both begin with the individual spiritual being and the individual human and demonstrate how through tim becomes more concret complex. Social Darwinist in which the object of evolution is the individual, not a species. This type of evolution is in sharp contrast to Darwinian and Spencerian evolution in which the species evolves. Harrison’s notion of evolution contrasts with that of William Robertson Smith’s as his is 2 Darwinian notion," Harrison's model is more typical of her time. Harrison challenges both Tylor and Smith by demonstrating that an exhaustive, successful, historical argument can be made from the sources of a single culture, and also tries to promote her own theory of original religion, purification. ‘Where Harrison and Smith agree is on the centrality of ritual, sacrifice, and blood, Yet while Smich is quite clear about why ritual, sacrifice, and blood, Harrison is not. She lauds Smith for his work on the holy,'T yet sides with Maret in her understand- ing of it, citing that religion is ‘awe'"—no small difference in the scholarship of the time. I would attribute this to her emphasis on the individual rather than the social. This bent is probably responsible for the failure of Themis in which she tries, using Bergson as her bridge, to connect her emotionalist and individualist theories of religion with Durkheim's social theory. She is also out of her element in Themis, trying to import arguments from other cultures, and dragging in what were later to be con- sidered functionalist arguments about human needs. Prolegomena begins with a primary contrast between therapeia, service to the deities in a spirit of cheerful mutual confidence, and deisidaimonia, fear of spirits. She points out that by the time of the pocts the good side of deisidaimonia had been at for70 C. E. Bumside not the celebratory side, but the apotropaic side. In Smith’s theory of development there is a time when the only deitics are unfriendly deities one needs te stay away from, this is the ‘nomadic’ phase of culture. He argues that that time does not have religion because it docs not yet have ‘kinship’, This means that these nomadic cultures do not yet have the social cohesiveness to be a community.” Harrison's model, not requiring social cohesiveness only dread, could mold itself on this nomadic time when the only necessity for religion is belief that there be a deity."” Her model of original sacrifice illustrates this difference from both Tylor and Smith: do ut abeas, ‘I give that you may go and keep away’.'* These rituals she calls ‘ceremonies of riddance’ and appear to be like exorcisms, purifications, etc. She strongly distinguishes these from the burnt- offerings with prayers addressed to Olympian sacrifice.” ‘Whatever else Harrison may be, she is most famous for being a part of the Cam- bridge Ritualists, who subscribed to theories about the primacy of rieual over myth in the study of the origins of religion. In Prolegomena, Harrison practices these theories, but gives no explanation for their necessity. Her few sentences are shadows of William Roberts facts of ritual are that it is the I sce nothing here al Pl truth teller for what we really want to know, what people think To demonstrate her theory of the two sides of Greek religion she analyzes three festivals ostensibly aimed at the Olympians. We are to discover that they are only nominally in the name of the well-known Greek deities. Her great knowledge of the archaeology and art of Greece make the argument interesting and solid. She examines in detail three festivals of the Athenian calendar: Thesmophoria, Anthesteria, Tharge- lia. Bue her model is the Diasia, ostensibly aimed at Zeus. She suggests that it was aimed at a snake who was chthonic, avenging of “kindred blood’. given a night-time burnt-offering, and done in gloom. This snake creature becomes the original model for any deity. Why a Freudian like Peacock missed this clue to Hartison’s id is difficult to fathom. This ritual is the ‘sub-stratum’ of the Diasian and suggests to Harrison that, “The keynote of primitive ritual, it will become increasingly clear, is exorcism’.”> ‘The Anthesteria appeases spiritual beings like ghosts. The Thargelia cleanscs from evil The Thesmophoria includes ceremonies of purification. levelopment from ghosts to deities. This development also echoes the development of ritual from aversion to ‘tendance’.* But she does not trace this for us except as asides in her commentary, making no commentary on what she thinks of Smith's jinni. She then examines the myth—a ritual of Dionysus—a precursor of the ‘mystical communion’. Full-fledged deities get communed with, hence Smith's ‘incorrect’ analysis that com- munion is a primary, not a secondary, form. Harrison is long on well-pieced examples and short on theory. Her examples speak strongly of a Tylorean understanding of the development of religion from ghost toJane Ellen Harrison 71 deity. She agrces with him that an original form of sacrifice is do ut des, but docs not agree that it was the original form of ritual—at least in Greece. For Greece she chooses apotropaic purification—a sending away of evil spiritual beings. Her final form, Dio- nysian and Orphic religions, have mystical communion with purification of the im its goal. obertson Smith was also uninterested in the origin of religion, but concerned with original religion. For him, joyous communion was the first phase, first-fruits sacrifice (or do ut des) the second, and ‘mystical communion (this is a different form of ‘mystical communion’ from Harrison, whose ‘mystical communion’ is more like his joyous communion) with the goal of uniting with the deity the third all positive forms of religion. William James indicated that those who find religion positive and those who find religion negative belong in two different psychological camps. That Peacock does not notice this is yet a further indication of her having gutted Harrison's context Where Harrison most strongly agrees with Tylor and disagrees with Smith is in her adoption of a theory of religion that is individualistic. She tries to give it Marett’s cmotional rather than Tylor’s intellectual cast. She also discusses the group at great Iength in Themis, but in her outlines of ritual the model of purification is purification of the individual, What develops is a particular belief in spiritual beings, not the social form of the society. This is probably why she was so attracted to Durkhcim and shunned Smith. Durkheim does not describe the development of religion within society, but in and of itself. When he goes into depth about le sacré he describes it emotionally and almost mystically. Smith is by no means a rationalist about religion, but there is little that could be considered mystical. When he describes the nomads feelings about oases he describes a sense of awe—but not a mystical awe like Marctt suggests. Harrison's work is a complex web of arguments and examples that comment on her surroundings. The two great figures of her time in the field of religion, ‘Tylor and Smith, are hardly mentioned. Are these the father figures she cannot even acknowl- edge? Her discussion of ritual as purification occurring at a time when women's suffrage was at a rage—a subject she was no stranger to, appears to comment on both her present and her sad past. That ‘mystical communion’ is 2 mature, yet empty, ritual—one she seems never to have shared—seems to be a comment on her decision about what she missed out on in never marrying. Notes 1 Ancxcellent example of how this type of analysis can enrich our understanding of theory is Ivan Strenskis, Four Theories of Myth in Twenticth-Century History, Towa City, IA, Univer sity of lowa Press 1987. 2. Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society, New York, NY, W. W. Norton & Co. 1963, 3 Sandra J. Peacock, Jane Elfen Harrison: The Mask and the Self, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press 1988, p. 67. 4 Peacock, Harrison, p. 75. 5. Peacock, Harrison, pp. 83-4 6 Peacock, Harrison, p. 108, 7 Peacock, Harrison, pp. 6-7, ‘unstable’, ‘brooding’, moved often, pp. 8-9. 8 Peacock, Harrison, p. 98, ‘envied her for her power of enduring excess in whiskey and cigarettes" 9 Peacock, Harrison, p. 73.72 C. E. Burnside 10. Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior, Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press 1987. 1 fane Ellen Hacrison, Themis: Study of the Socal Origins of Greek Relig, London, Mertn ress 1963, 12. Harrison, Themis, p. 65. 13 Jane Ellen Harrison, Profegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, London, Merlin Press 1962, p.7. 14 William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of The Semites: The Fundamental Insti- tutions, NC, KTAV Publishing House 1969. Harrison's celebration is easily compared with ‘Smith's kinship and her apotropaiea with his holiness. 15 Harrison, Prolegomena, pp. 10-1 16 Smith, Lectures, pp. 121-2. 17 Harrison makes a distinction in Themis between daimon and god, p. 65—deity is a generic term, 18 Hattison, Prolegomena, p. 7. 19. Harrison, Prolegomena, p. 8. 20 Harrison, Prolegomena, p. 11 21 Harrison, Prolegomena, p. vi. 22 Harrison, Prolegomena, p. 28. 23. Harrison, Prolegomena, p. 23 24° Harrison, Prolegomena, p. 162. 25. Harrison, Prolegomena, p. 363. 26 iam James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study Collier MacMillan 1961. in Human Nature, London, CAROL BURNSIDE received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, Committee on the History of Culture in 1987. Since then she has been doing primary research on culture and religion in the United Seates. 57 Einstein Drive, Princeton, NJ 08540, U.S.A.