Themis. A Study of the Sociat Origins of Greek Religion. 

 By Jane Ellen Harrison, Hon. LL.D. [Aberdeen). Hon. 

 D.Litt. (^Durhani), ivitli an Excursus on the Ritual 

 Forms preserved in Greek Tragedy by Professor Gilbert 

 Murray, and a chapter on the Origin of the Olympic 

 Gaines by Mr F. M. Cornford. 



Demy 8vo. pp. xxxii + 560. With 152 illustrations. Price I'^s. net. 



Extract from the Introdtiction 



The title of this book and it.s relation to my Prolcgojnena 

 may call for a word of explanation. 



In the Prolegoinena I was chiefly concerned to show that 

 the religion of Homer was no more primitive than his 

 language. The Olympian gods — that is, the anthropomorphic 

 gods of Homer and Pheidias and the mythographers — seemed 

 to me like a bouquet of cut-flowers whose bloom is brief, 

 because they have been severed from their roots. To find 

 those roots we must burrow deep into a lower stratum of 

 thought, into those chthonic cults which underlay their life 

 and from which sprang all their brilliant blossoming. 



When in 1907 a second edition of my book was called for, 

 its theories seemed to me already belated. My sense of the 

 superficiality of Homer's gods had deepened to a conviction 

 that these Olympians were not only non-primitive, but 

 positively in a sense non-religious. If they were not, for 

 religion, starting-points, they were certainly not satisfactory 

 goals. On the other hand, the cultus of Dionysos and 

 Orpheus seemed to me, whatever its errors and licenses, 

 essentially religious. I was therefore compelled reluctantly 

 to face the question, what meaning did I attach to the word 

 religion ? 



The problem might have continued ineffectively to haunt 

 me, and probably to paralyse my investigations, had not 

 light come rather suddenly from unexpected quarters, from 

 philosophy and social psychology. To France I owe a 

 double debt, indirect but profound, and first and foremost to 



Professor Henri Bergson When I read his LEvolution 



Crdati^ice, I saw how deep was the gulf between Dionysos 



I 2 



