Quotes from Jane Ellen Harrison

Some," he says, "are prayers to the gods—these are called hymns; others of an opposite sort might best be called dirges; another sort are pæans, and another—the birth of Dionysos, I suppose—is called Dithyramb.

Dionysos the Tree-God, the Spirit of Vegetation, is but a maypole once perceived, then remembered and conceived.

But it is equally clear and certain that the Dionysos of Greek worship and of the drama was not a babe in the cradle.

By a false etymology they explained the word Dithyrambos as meaning "He of the double door," their word thyra being the same as our door.

They were quite mistaken; Dithyrambos, modern philology tells us, is the Divine Leaper, Dancer, and Lifegiver.

But if the Dithyrambos, the young Dionysos, like the Bull-God, the Tree-God, arises from a dromenon, a rite, what is the rite of second birth from which it arises?

I have had a suspicion all my life that in the current dictionaries and grammars often the real explanation and origin of a word or a grammatical form is to be found in something that comes in just at the end as a 'derived' form or 'exceptional' use. This I believe to be the case with the aorist; the true primitive essential aorist I believe to be the gnomic, the temporal aorist a later derivative, in fact the aorist I believe to be primarily not a tense at all but an aspect.

We have seen (p. 71) that, out of the puppet or the May Queen, actually perceived year after year there arose a remembrance, a mental image, an imagined Tree Spirit, or "Summer," or Death, a thing never actually seen but conceived.

Hebrew is a language which has no tenses at all , it has only aspects.

Thus among the Carrier Indians 33 when a man wants to become a Lulem, or Bear, however cold the season, he tears off his clothes, puts on a bearskin and dashes into the woods, where he will stay for three or four days.

No one knows better than this accomplished scholar [Professor Kennett] and no one could say more plainly that all the supposed futures in 'prophecies' have nothing to do with the future at all. Oh what burning controversies might have been saved had only theologians known a little more grammar!

The word t?l?t? means rite of growing up, becoming complete.

K]nowing how primitive in many aspects, now little abstract, how uncontaminated by logic and logical structure Hebrew is, it would surely have occured to me to ask, is not aspect wherever and whenever it occurs a thing more primitive, more psychologically fundamental than time order, than tense? Was there not a time in the development of language when primitive man focussed his attention not on time order but on something else expressed by aspect, and what is that something?

Paganism is the worship of life itself in its supreme mysteries of ecstasy and love.

Life does not cease when you are old, it only suffers a rich change. You go on loving, only your love, instead of a burning, fiery furnace, is the mellow glow of an autumn sun.

I like to live spaciously, but rather plainly, in large halls with great spaces and quiet libraries. I like to wake in the morning with the sense of a great, silent garden round me.

I mention these ritual dances, this ritual drama, this bridge between art and life, because it is things like these that I was all my life blindly seeking. A thing has little charm for me unless it has on it the patina of age. Great things in literature, Greek plays for example, I most enjoy when behind their bright splendours I see moving darker and older shapes.

At his house I often met Henry James. I liked to watch that ingenious spider weaving his webs, but to me he had no appeal.

A heroic society is almost a contradiction in terms.

To be a heretic to-day is almost a human obligation.

We translate the word "Justice," but Dikè means, not Justice as between man and man, but the order of the world, the way of life.

We seem to have come to a sort of impasse, the spirit of the dromenon is dead or dying, the spectators will not stay long to watch a doing doomed to monotony.

When I first came to London I became a Life Member of the London Library. London life was costly, but I felt that, if the worst came to the worst, with a constant supply of books and a small dole for tobacco, I could cheerfully face the Workhouse.

Then Ruskin came. I showed him our small library. He looked at it with disapproving eyes. " Each book ", he said gravely, " that a young girl touches should be bound in white vellum." I thought with horror of the red moroccos and Spanish leather that had been my choice. A few weeks later the old humbug sent us his own works bound in dark blue calf!