My friends claim that I am irreverent to the Olympian gods. My interests I am told are unduly focused on ghosts, bogies and pillar cults. I prefer savage disorders, Dionysian origins, the tearing of wild bulls to the ordered and stately ceremonial of Panathenaic processions….The gods who once mirrored human unity with nature came to mirror human individuality. The Olympians, in their triumph of humanity kicked down the ladder from earth to heaven by which they arose….The Olympias seemed like a bouquet of cut flowers whose bloom is brief because they have been severed from their roots.
— Jane Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual
Orientation
The diversity or unity of animism, drama and sports
In the modern world we think of the world of art, whether it be drama, tragedy or comedy, sports and religion as all different endeavors. After all, the arts and sports are secular while religion is sacred. Therefore, all must seem to have different roots. Some historians might say that they come after each other in linear time: first religion, then arts and then sports. But where does ritual come in? A ritualist seems to be, for the secularist of today someone who might be obsessed with fixed forms and ceremonies, rigidity and mindlessness. Furthermore, rituals are seen as most prominent in the sacred world. At the other extreme, the artist – whether in drama or sculpture – is someone who would seem to be free in thought and less inhibited in convention and practice. Lastly, it would seem that art and ritual have diverged today and have little to do with each other. The same seems to be true of sports.
My argument chain
My argument chain in this article is that:
- religion (specifically animism), drama, and sports closely follow each other in history,
- it doesn’t matter whether these activities have come down to us as secular or sacred,
- they all have a common root in ritual,
- ritual is rooted in Sir James Frazer’s agricultural cycle of an ever present goddess and finite dying god,
- the theorists who supported ritual origins of animism, drama and sports were called the Cambridge rituals led by Jane Harrison with the support of Gilbert Murray and Francis Cornford. Harrison was the center of the group because she always seemed to have a broader conception of their common subject matter than any of the others and
- the polytheism of the skygod Olympians which were the darlings of the Greek classists were a rather superficial interpretation of a deeper Greek animism and which had chthonic roots.
What Does the Ritual School Advocate?
Ritual precedes myth
When discussing sacred experience we must consider the rituals that are performed, the myths that are the foundation of sacred worlds and the sacred beings that inhabit that world.
Theorists of comparative religion have argued historically which of these three came first. Some theorists argue that storytelling (myth) came first and then primitive societies acted out the myths in ritual. Sounds pretty rational. First you think of a story and then you act it out. The Cambridge ritualists were materialists. For them as for Goethe, in the beginning was the deed, or the ritual dance. The stories followed from the dance. But what were they dancing about? The Cambridge ritualists argued that initially their first activities were hunting and gathering or some kind of planting. The rituals that followed, were stylized re-enactments of their labor, the successful hunts or harvests. Only later did they make up story myths of how their collective actions were meant to be about.
Sacred roots are chthonic, not sky bound
When we speak of sacred presences the Greek classists begin and end with the polytheism of the Olympians. The Cambridge ritualists challenged the serenity of the almost playful depiction of the gods as ignoring the thunder and lightning of what occurred in the sacred realm in the Archaic iron Age. Jane Harrison dismissed theology and emphasized the prerational, socioemotional dimensions of the sacred. Her sense of the superficiality of Homer’s gods had been so deep that she no longer felt them to have any religious content at all. Instead, she was drawn to the mystery cults of Dionysus and Orpheus which seemed genuinely and deeply serious. By that time her partner in crime, Gilbert Murray had come out with The Rise of the Greek Epic which had shown that Homer represented a smoothing out of the old, rough sacred presences into a more civilized Olympian from.
Sacred world is animistic before it was polytheist
Harrison argued that Zeus is a later projection of the group of dancing participants ritual frozen into a being. The sacred spirits are really dancers embodying movement more than they are beings with stable characteristics. It is safe to say that the Cambridge ritualists saw sacred presences as verbs rather than nouns, animists rather than polytheists. In her book Themis basing themselves on the work of Sir James Frazer, the Cambridge ritualists argued all rituals were enactment of the cycles of the year with the female goddesses giving birth to gods, mating and then the males dying in the Autumn.
On the other hand, Homer’s poems were the summing up of a later heroic age in which outstanding individualsdistinguished themselves as being opposed to the collectives of earlier times before the invaders descended on Mycenean Greece. The first primitive gods are personifications of the rite as in Dionysius. Harrison says the Olympian gods are cut clean from earth and from local bits of earth out of which they grew like sacred trees, the holy stones, rivers and still holier beasts. The Olympian skygods stand back far enough to see the picture of the earth from a distance. They are not lost in the earth ritual as it was earlier in the Dionysius ritual. Metaphorically, the dancing ritual is like a verb which later becomes a noun in the static image of the Olympians.
Rituals have roots not only in animism but also in theater and sports
Lastly, the Cambridge ritualists were ambitious. They believed the ritual origin of human activities was deeper than just their sacred practices. They applied ritual origins to the arts and even sports. The Cambridge ritualists started around the turn of the 20th century. Their work permanently transformed and revitalized the field of the classics.
Why should Socialists Care?
Primitive communism is the foundation of material social evolution
If you can remember a high school or college class in world history you might recall that it usually begins with the civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. These agricultural states are considered “civilizations” which is synonymous with the growth of cities. But anthropologists have pointed out that the history of civilizations is not the origin of human societies. Long before agricultural states there were hunter-gatherers and physical anthropologists who told us that they go back from100,000 to 200,000 years ago. As it turns out, Marx was right that these “primitives” practiced primitive communism where resources were shared and there was no private property or social classes. We have been robbed of the knowledge of this history. For Marxists, the discovery of primitive communism nicely fits with our dialectical view of history In the beginning as a primitive whole – communist society. Then there are 5000 years of alienation moving from the emergence of social classes, slavery, feudalism and capitalism. What is happening today is the emergence of a seeds of a communist society most exemplified in China. Chinese socialism is a return of primitive communism but on a higher level. Advanced communism is a synthesis because it is based on the wealth, technological, economic and political that has been inherited from the long antithetical alienation of class societies.
Animism is the foundation for sacred social evolution
Just as we have been robbed of our material history we have been robbed of our real sacred evolution. Textbooks on the history of religion used to begin with Judaism and a short nod to the Egyptians and Mesopotamians. The long magical practices of tribal societies were never taken seriously. While modern historians of religion insist for politically correct reasons that tribal religion be included, they present these traditions as existing next to the “People” of the book. They are less willing to examine the sacred evolution from animism to polytheism to monotheism and why they might have evolved in the direction they did. The Cambridge Ritualists not only defend the existence of animism but they defend it as a sacred life which was filled with life, movement, participation and self-confidence. Animism like primitive communism involves no class of priests, no private property in the use of sacred objects. If Marxian socialists want to see material history as a dialectical spiral we owe it to ourselves to see our sacred history as also a dialectical process. The Cambridge ritualists help us to understand and appreciate animism, not just as a worthy in interesting way of life. We Marxists need to appreciate the relationship between animism and primitive communism.
Precursor of Cambridge Ritualists in Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy
On the European continent the earliest and most important theorist of the sacred roots of tragedy was Nietzsche. Thirty years before the Cambridge ritualists formed as a school Nietzsche grasped the sacred origins of drama. The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music was written in 1872. Nietzsche sensed that the famous serenity of the Greeks gods was only superficial. For him, tragedy is the product of the Dionysian spirit that is collective in origin. Tragedy did not begin with spectators, stages and playwrights. Tragedy starts with of the chorus. Dionysian dancers were attempting to break through encapsulating egos and merge with the power than animates the world. The chorus in which the tragedy interlaced constitute a matrix of a future dialogue, the entire stage world of the actual drama. In the first stage tragedy was acted out the in chorus before drama even existed. There was no audience but only participating dancers. Only when there was a separation between the active celebrant of Dionysius and those who looked on as necessary to demonstrate the reality of a god to those who were not possessed by the god. Nietzsche anticipated the direction which the Cambridge rationalists were going to move. It began a trend in classical studies toward searching for and emphasizing nonrational factors in determining human behavior. We will begin by discussing drama and then proceed backwards to talk about sacred animism.
Ancient vs Modern Theatre
Probably people tend to imagine that modern theatre and ancient theatre are more or less the same. But in her book Ancient Art and Ritual Jane Harrison points out how different they are. To begin with, the entrance gate of the theatre was sacred ground dedicated to various gods such as Dionysus, Apollo and Zeus. Modern theatres are housed in secular buildings. When you enter the building, you pay for your ticket – right? However, in ancient theatre there was no payment. In ancient theatre the whole purpose of entering was to participate in an act of reverence. Making a monetary payment would undermine the altered state of consciousness that is being cultivated. Money and ritual don’t mix. In modern theatre what are you paying for? Entertainment at worst, inspired contemplation at best.
In modern theatre the seating arrangements are dictated by social class, but where people sit is not controlled by the sacred and state officials as in ancient theatre. In modern theatre if you want to attend, you can go at least on Friday, Saturday and Sunday throughout the year. Ancient theatre was only open during festivals which were tied to the agricultural seasons of the year. Even before entering the theatre in the ancient world, you participated in a great procession by torchlight which was the necessary preliminary to the sacredness of the play. Modern theater has no preliminary ceremonies. Spectators enter on their own and the play begins only when the lights are dimmed. In ancient theatre everyone participates because the theatre itself is sacred activity. In modern theatre people come in and leave as spectators. They have no responsibility to anyone else. Who are the participants in the theatre?
In modern theatre there are playwrights, actors and actresses, along with lighting and stage direction all of which are perceived as secular jobs. In ancient theatre, the gods are evoked by those magicians who have prepared the ritual. The clothes of the participants of the ancient ritual were vestments like those who celebrated the Eleusinian mysteries. In modern theatre the clothes worn by the actors have nothing sacred about them. They are the clothes which are consistent with the time period of the play, together with the roles they are in. Here is a summary of the differences between ancient and modern theatre.
Table 1 Ancient vs Modern Theatre
| Ancient Theatre | Category of comparison | Modern Theatre |
| Holy ground dedicated to a god – Dionysus, Apollo or Zeus | Entrance gate | Secular building |
| No payment | Cost of entry | Pay for a ticket to get in |
| Act of reverence | Purpose | Entertainment |
| Seating controlled by sacred and state officials | Seating arrangements | Based on social class |
| Only at certain festivals of the year | When is it open? | Year-round mostly at night |
| Torchlight, great procession | Preliminaries activities | None – individuals enter theatre on their own without fanfare |
| Gods, young men from Athens | Practitioners | Playwrights, actors, actresses |
| Use of ritual vestments like those of the celebrates of the Eleusinian mysteries | Vestments | The clothes are rooted in the script and the role being played |
| No spectators, all are participants | Participation | Spectators |
I hope it is clear that ancient theatre was much more sacred and special but why could it be? Jane Harrison and Gilbert Murray argued this theatre was once part of a magical ritual
From Human Laboring to Rituals
Jane Harrison points out that the two great interests in primitive humanity are food and children. The tribesperson must eat so that they and their tribe must grow and multiply. The seasons are related to this food supply. Forest people depend on the fruit trees and berries. They will construct a maypole and imagine a tree spirit is responsible for life. Agriculturalists will look to the earth for its returning life and food. At certain times of the year the animals and the plants which form their food base are appearing and disappearing. It makes little sense to study a ritual of a people without knowing facts about their climate and their surroundings. Seasons vary from place to place. In some places there is no sign of animate life but thousands of ants. Later in the year suddenly the rainy season kicks in. These hunting and planting procedures are re-enacted in stylized ritual and then retold as myths. Tribespeople perform rites to the sun and moon when they notice their relationship to the seasons
When humans go out to hunt some hunts are successful and some aren’t. Naturally, the band or tribe wants to remember the successful hunts. The way you increase the collective memory of the act is to capture a simulation of it in a ritual. So, they will hunt and catch their game in pantomime. For primitive humanity, beast, bird and plant and humans were not sharply divided. The men acting as kangaroos danced and leaped. They did not imitate, they were kangaroos. The mimes are not mimicking thunder out of curiosity, they are making thunder and enacting it. The dancers of the dance got generalized and many were a re-combination of actual hunts and battles which arose during a hunt dance and war dance. Many men dressed up as trees facing men dancing as tree spirits. The rite is performed by a band or chorus who dance together with a common leader (the protagonist.) From a being perceived by the senses year by year, they are eventually conceived more abstractly as an image or being.
Ancient Traditions of Spell-Casting and Movement
Jane Harrison writes that the tribespeople are people of action who do not ask a monothetic deity to do what they want done. They do it or try to do it themselves. When a tribesperson wants sun or wind or rain, they do not go to a church and prostate themself before God. They don’t even go to the Oracle of Delphi and ask Apollo about the future. Instead they summon their tribe and dance a sun or a rain dance. In the monotheist religions dancing is either frowned upon or kept in the background. On the contrary, tribespeople are dancing fools. A tribesperson passes from childhood to youth to mature manhood, so the number of their dances increase. For example, when dancing within the hoop, each girl has to waver her arms vigorously and crow “flax grow”. When she is done, she leaps out of the hoop or is lifted out of it by her partner.
Dromenon as a Sacred Animistic Rite
The Greek word for a rite is Dromenon, but Dromenon is also the physical site in which the ritual takes place. Dromenon, Harrison tells us is called the “thing done”. But what is it? A magical enactment for altering consciousness. It is the rite that can be done collectively by a number of people feeling the common emotions about a successful hunt or harvest. Unless these movements are made by the tribe together they will not become rhythmical intense for a successful ritual. All things done are not rites. You may shrink back over and over again in reaction to a fire – that is an expression of emotion and a reaction to a stimulus, but that is not a rite. You might digest your dinner every night but is not a rite. It is a routine.
Dromenon, Dithyramb and the Dancing Dionysus
The tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were all performed in Athens at a festival known as the Great Dionysus. Aristotle in his treatise on the Art of Poetry raised the question of the origins of drama. He declared that a structure so complex and a Greek tragedy must have arisen from a simpler from of ritual. So what is the relationship between Dionysius and drama? Dionysius dances in what is called the dithyramb. The dithyramb was the song and dance of the new birth of Dionysius in the Spring. In the beginning there were the dancing ritualists. Over the course of history this dancing “cools” and assumes a concentrated form of maypole. A more abstract concentration of the maypole leads the god Dionysius. On the whole The evolution moves from:
- the laboring of hunting or planting perception;
- dancing ritualists – perception;
- maypole – concentrated conception and
- god Dionysius – more abstract conception.
Dionysius, the tree god, the spirit of vegetation, was once but a maypole perceived and then conceived as a god. The dithyramb is also the song of the second or new birth. The dithyramb is twice born. In the first birth he comes into the world; by the second birth he is born into his tribe.
Jane Harrison tells us at first birth the initiate belongs to his mother and the women folk. There is then a second birth where he becomes a full-fledged man and passes into the society of the warriors of his tribe. In preparation for his second birth the boy is to put away childish things in order to prepare to become a grown and competent tribesman. The mother stands up with the boy crouching at her feet. She pretends to go through all the labor pains and the boy metaphorically being reborn cries like a baby and is washed. In totemistic societies and secret societies that seems to grow out of them the novice is born again as the sacred animal.
The rites of birth, marriage and death, which to us seem so different from each other are to tribal humanity all similar. For the most part they were family rituals needing little or no social emphasis. But the rite that concerned the whole tribe was the rite of initiation at puberty or the hunting, planting and war rituals. Harrison informs us in her book Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion that the magical dance of the Kouretas is a primitive form of dromenon. It is from these that both drama and sports arose. Gilbert Murray’s Excursus explains the relation between Homer, who supplied the tragedians with their plots and the spring dromenon which determines the form of tragedy. Francis Cornford in his book The Origin of Attic Comedy explains the ritual origins of comedy.
From Dromenon to Drama
The centrality of the chorus and the orchestra
So how does Jane Harrison answer the question about how drama arose out of ritual? After all, art in most people’s mind is a sort of luxury, not a necessity. Drawing, music and dancing are no part of training for ordinary life. When we say art is impractical, we mean the art is cut loose from immediate necessary action. This wasn’t always the case. For example, how do we make sense of the chorus? In modern theatre there is no chorus. If there is a chorus as in opera in the ballet, the chorus dances are to amuse and excite in the intervals of operatic action. But what’s left are prologues and messengers’ speeches, which were once rituals, still surviving at a time when drama has not fully developed out of the dromenon. Central to this is the chorus and the orchestra. There was once a rude platform from which the prologue was spoken. There was no need to look at a distance as in drama. They were too busy dancing together to contemplate from a distance.
Believe it or not it was not the stage on which the chorus danced. They danced in the orchestra. What is the relationship of that space to the rest of the theatre, to the stage and place where the spectators sat? Originally the dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were not played on a stage and not in the theatre but in the orchestra. The stage and the theatre were to the Greek a place of seeing—where the spectators sat – the scene, the tent. But the kernel and center of the whole was the orchestra, the circle and dancing place of the chorus. The orchestra was the kernel and center of the theatre. There were no divisions at first between the actors and spectators. All were actors, dancing the dance danced. The drama, like ritual, is a thing done but abstracted (represented) from hunting, planting or warring.
The rise of the theatre and the stage
In drama the theatre or spectator place is added to the orchestra. Not only was there a place for the orchestra and spectators, but there was also a stage. Originally the word for stage was “scene”. It was a tent in which players could put on their ritual dresses. At first, a stage is not necessarily a raised stage, but a place apart from the dancers when you have new material for your players, something you need to look at, attend to. There new plots were introduced, not of spirits but of individual heroes. This was the death of dromenon and ritual. The new wine that was poured into the old bottes of the dromenon at the Spring festival and was the heroic saga. The history of the Greek stage is a long story of the encroachment of the stage on the orchestra. The stage first stands outside the orchestra. Then bit by bit the scene encroaches till the sacred circle of the dancing place is cut clean across the orchestra. As the theater and stage expand the orchestra and the chorus wane.
The drama is based on a decay in the belief of certain magical rites. Yet in a tragedy there must be pathos. However, it is still rooted in the cycle of the year because in the Winter, the Old year must die. There must be a swift transition from sorrow to joy. All these old ritual forms haunt and shadow the play, whatever its plot like the ancient traditions of ghosts.
The Emergence of the Heroic Saga
Aeschylus was born in 456 BCE. His first play was a plot from the heroic saga, Seven Against Thebes. The word “hero” calls up such figures as Achilles and Hector, figures of passion and adventure. They occur in every heroic age. What are the conditions that produce a heroic age? In Heroic poems almost no one is safely and quietly at home. The heroes are fighting in far-off lands or voyaging by sea. We hear little of tribal or family ties. The real center is not the hearth but the leader’s tent or ship. The epic poet is all taken up with what heroes’ authors called glorious deeds of men. The hero acquired deathless fame for their great deeds. The hero must win his followers by bravery and keep them by generosity. The heroic spirit, as seen in heroic poetry is the outcome of a society cut loose from its earthly roots. It is about migrations of the shifting of populations as seen in Chadwick’s Heroic Age. The amazing development of the 5th century drama is the old vessel of the ritual of dithyramb filled with the new wine of heroic saga. Such were the attitudes of the Athenians towards the doings and sufferings of Homeric heroes. The right distance for them would be remote, but not too remote. Heroes should be in between humanity and the gods. In the old ritual dance of tribal society the individual was insignificant. The chorus, the group, was everything. In the heroic saga the individual is everything. The group is but a shadowy background.
From Drama to Sculpture
Hopefully you have come to be convinced that drama was once rooted in sacred ritual. After all, drama is also a social art. But painting and sculpture are the private acts of individuals. Surely, they have no roots in ritual. It might seem that here at last we have nothing primitive; we have art pure and simple, the ideal art cut loose from ritual. Finally we have secular art. After all, we pass from the living thing, the thing done in ritual or in the play, acted by real people, whether it be dromenon or drama to a thing made a painting or sculpture. How can a sculpture or painting be part of a ritual? We must at last differentiate the artist, the work of art and the spectator.
However Jane Harrison tells us that the Greek sculpture of Apollo, like Dionysus arose as part of a rite. The ancient Apollo wore wreaths and carried boughs, not because the sculptor wanted to be artistic or poetic but because the sculpture was part of a ritual. For the place of sculpture was inside the shrine, dwelling with the gods and goddesses themselves. For the frieze is nothing but a great ritual procession transferred into stone. The Panathenaic procession or the procession of all the Athenians was rituals turned into stone. This was the purpose of the Panathenaic procession. Drawing is at bottom like all the arts, a kind of gesture, a method of dancing on paper either preparing for a ritual but ever separate from it.
Table 2 Transition from Ritual to Art: From The Dromenon to the Drama
| Dromenon | Category of Comparison | Drama |
| Mimesis embodiment of person or thing that is an identity | Mimesis vs Masquerade | Masquerade A copy of something that is separate |
| Presentational | Making sense of repeated actions | Representations |
| Dithyramb—spring ritual inspiring dance | Type of festival | Panathenaic procession in the summer |
| Chorus dances in orchestra | Relationship between orchestra, stage and theatre | Spectators in theatre, actors on stage, Chorus gets smaller |
| No division between actors and participants | Relationship between actors and spectators | Actors separated out from spectators |
| Group is everything, individual is nothing | Relationship between the group and the individual | Heroic sage individual
Group a shadowy background. Epic poet |
| Magical circle | Where might it be done/? | Hero’s tent |
| Magical is important | Place of magic | Confidence in it wanes |
The Ritual Origins of Sports
Besides the ritual aspects of animism and drama the third area that has its roots in ritual is sports. Again, as in drama, sports seem like a completely autonomous and secular endeavor. But Allen Guttman in From Ritual to Record points out that primitive cultures rarely have a word for sports in our sense. He references Carl Diem in his world history of sports said that all physical exercises were originally cultic. Running, jumping, throwing, wrestling and ball playing were organized so as to please the gods with the object of securing fertility, causing rain, giving and prolonging life, expelling demons or curing sickness. The Apache of the American Southwest used sports in conjunction with solar-lunar symbolism as part of a yearly fertility rite. Apache myth dramatizes the delicate balance between the two main sources of food: animal sources that were associated with the sun and male while vegetable sources are connected with the moon and female.
There is an enactment of a kind of relay race in which all males participated at least once between puberty and marriage. One side represented the sun the other side the moon. Abstinence from meat and sex was required prior to the race. The track was called the Milky Way after the heavenly path over which the sun and moon had originally raced. The Milky way connected two circles around whose circumference small holes were dug clockwise. Trees were then planted in the holes. This was accompanied by drums representing the sun and the moon, by flags, dances, songs and feasts. The race was on the third day of the festival at which time a fire was ignited in the center of each circle. The boys were painted and adorned with feathers and led to their circles by two young girls carrying an ear of corn in one hand and an eagle feather in another. The ceremony was clearly more important than the question of winning or losing
Among the Zulus there is a preseason and post season sacrifice of a goat. Pregame ritual requires that coaches and dedicated supporters of the team spend the night before the game together in a special place sleeping in a huge group around the campfire, all naked but there are no sexual relations. Among the Aztecs there are ball courts in Guatemala and Honduras which were considered symbols of the heavens. In Aztec times the game itself was under the protection of the goddess Xochiquetzal. Archeological evidence indicated that the game was literally for life or death. Each of the six reliefs at the great ball court of Chichén Itzá shows the decapitation of a player. Every tennis court was a temple.
When we turn to the Greeks, Guttmann claims the physical contests of Olympia and Delphi were culturally closer to those of primitive peoples than to our own Olympics. The Olympic games were sacred games, stages in a sacred place and at a sacred festival. They were a religious act in honor of a deity. Those who took part did so in order of reverence to the god or goddess and the prizes which they won were thought to come from a god. Olympic games had their roots in Greek polytheism and the games at Olympia were a homage to them.
The fertility myth is the common thread of every version of the founding of the games. The athletic events were held to persuade the god to return from the dead to reappear in the form of a new shoot emerging from the dark womb of the earth into the light of day. The time of the games was as sacred to the Greeks as the place in which the games occurred at the time of the second or third full moon, after the summer solstice. The athletes gathered at the nearby town of Elis and spent thirty days in the final preparation for their exertion.
Richard Mandell, author of Sport: A Cultural History agrees with Guttmann. He points out that the first sport was spear throwing, obviously connected to practicing for a successful hunt. But this practice was all in the service of a magical ritual. Formal games were like theatre and dance and ritual. Native American board games with victors and losers were treated as signs of the players’ status with the gods. Early ball games were preceded by processions of priest and accompanied by musicians and dancers. The subjection of an actor or dancer in theatre to director or choreographer with costumes and masks is paralleled in sports today. The adaptation by players to coaches and managers whose baseball uniforms and team names parallels theatrical role. The participants in early sports games and theatre might be in trances induced by rhythmic dance, breath control, drugs or hypnotic suggestion of animistic sacred dancers. For the Aztecs winners of the games were celebrated as the favorites of the gods while were losers punished or even sacrificed.
When we look at professional sports today its connection with theatre and the animistic rituals of Harrison are not hard to find just a little way below the surface. The baseball or football field is a large-scale magical dancing ground or the orchestral set. The crowd agrees to suspend judgment and make believe what is going on in the field is more real than their lives. They identify with certain players who easily qualify as gods and goddesses. Each team has a history or mythology of having had a “dynasty” if they have a history of winning and a reputation for losing. In both baseball and football there is a Hall of Fame which fans reverently attend. The degree of loyalty of fans to their team today goes way beyond loyalty to religion or politics. Fans memorize statistics in baseball and football and can be strategically very sharp at analyzing what went right or wrong in a game. Attending a game is full of theatrics with food, music, chanting and singing that helps to alter the state of consciousness of the spectators. The players in turn are impacted by the joy or loathing of a crowd.
Conclusion
I began this article by asking about how diverse religion, theatre and sports were from each other. I claimed that surprisingly that if we go back far enough animism, drama and sports are all rooted in ritual that follows Sir James Frazer’s goddess and dying god. The major theorists of the ritualistic school are called the Cambridge Ritualists who included Jane Harrison, Gilbert Murray and Frances Cornford. I claim that the polytheism of the Greek Olympians was a late development of the animism that was part of Greek culture before and during the Archaic Iron Age.
Before proceeding I make a case briefly about why socialists should care about these ritualistic origins of animism, drama and sports. Just as the full story of material world history was suppressed by capitalist historians, so the full story of sacred world history is suppressed by monotheist theologians and Greek classical scholars who sing the praises of the Olympians.
Marxist historians claim that knowing about primitive communism gives us ground for claiming there is a dialectic in history moving from primitive to advanced communism. So too, I argue that knowing that animism preceded polytheism and monotheism in sacred evolution shows that very early sacred practices were lively, interactive and confident. The sacred world of animism has the same lack of hierarchy, obedience, private property or reification of polytheism and monotheism. Animism provided real meaning and that less emotional, patriarchal later religions did not.
I begin with Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and show how his insistence on the sacred origins of tragedy was the chorus and with Dionysius, not with the Olympians. I then contrast nine different ways of how different ancient theatre is from today’s secular form. I then begin at the beginning by arguing that ritual itself is a reenactment of successful hunting or planting rituals in the hopes of adding predictably to human life. I discuss the animistic dancing ground which is called Dromenon. I discuss how gradually the dancing rituals of the participants becomes congealed over time, first in their form of the Maypole and later into the form of the god Dionysius.
I then turn to the question of how the drama came out of the animistic ritual. I discuss how the roots of drama lay not in theatre of spectators nor the stage, but in the orchestra. It was only as drama evolved out of animism that the stage and the theatre became primary and the orchestra became mere background. The heroic sagas that emerged with the Olympian gods were a late development and by no means the beginning of Greek sacred life. I also point out that it was not just drama that emerged from ritual but also even the seemingly individual arts such as sculpture and drawing which were also once in the service of animistic ritual even as a method of “dancing” on stone or paper.
I close my article by arguing that just as Greek sacred practices and art are ultimately connected to ritual, so is sports. I use the work of Allen Guttmann and Richard Mandell to back me up.
This movement of from ritual to sports happens in this sequence:
- the laboring of hunting or planting perception,
- dancing ritualists – perception,
- the emergence of Maypoles – conception,
- the emergence of the god Dionysius – further conceptions and
- the emergence of drama—conception,
- sculpture – conception and
- sports – conception.
Below is a summary of the areas in which the Cambridge ritualists did their work. Though theoreticians of sports were not part of the Cambridge ritualists, these sports historians confirmed the Cambridge ritualists arguments.
| Origins of Drama/ Tragedy |
Origin of Comedy | Origin of Religion | Origin of Art | Origin of Philosophy | Origin of Sports |
| Gilbert Murray | Frances Cornford | Gilbert Murray | Jane Harrison | Francis Cornford | Allen Guttman |
| Rise of the Greek Epic | Origin of Attic Comedy | Five stages of Greek Religion | Ancient Art and Ritual | From Religion to Philosophy | From Ritual to Record
|
| Harrison | Richard Mandell | ||||
| Prolegomena | Sport, a Cultural History | ||||
| Themis |
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.