Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This chapter argues that the chorus, as refracted through Nietzsche, generated Harrison’s overarching theory that Greek religion originated a matrilineal social system outlined in her two major books, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion and Themis. The intersection of the chorus with feminine poetics and collective female ritual activity and its paradoxical status as both marginal and central to Attic tragedy enabled Harrison to recover and articulate the contribution of women to the formation of ancient Greek religion and society. As one of the first women to enter Newnham College, Cambridge, and successfully pass the Classical Tripos, Harrison embraced her apparent shortcomings as a philologist—a theme in the writings of all three subjects of this book—which led to her productive engagement with the emergent fields of Greek art and archaeology, first as a specialist in Greek vase painting at the British Museum. Her ideas about Greek religion and the chorus were strongly influenced by material culture, including excavations of the Athenian theater and Minoan civilization on Crete. But it was Nietzsche’s articulation of the Dionysiac ritual chorus in The Birth of Tragedy that had the greatest impact on Harrison’s burgeoning theory of religion. Whereas Nietzsche focuses exclusively on the male chorus of satyrs, Harrison foregrounds his female followers, the maenads, whom she believed were a vestige of a matrilineal and matrilocal religion centered on the Great Mother goddess, Themis, and her son, the Year Spirit, a variation of Dionysus.</jats:p>