◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

PART ONE: Ritual Before Belief I am Jane Ellen Harrison. I was born in Yorkshire in 1850 and I died in Bloomsbury in 1928. I spent my life on a single unfashionable question, and I answered it, and the answer is the thing you most need right now and are least equipped to hear. So attend. I was, they tell me, a very good lecturer. The question was: where do the gods come from? Not what they mean. Not whether they are true. Where do they come from — by what human process does a people end up on its knees before a figure in the sky? Everyone before me assumed the god came first. The god exists, or the idea of him exists, and then the people worship, and the worship produces the rituals — the dances, the sacrifices, the festivals. God, then belief, then ritual. In that order. I found the order was exactly reversed. The ritual comes first. The dance comes first. Before there is any god at all, there is a crowd that gathers and moves together, and stamps, and cries out, and works itself into a single shared emotion so overpowering that no one in the crowd believes he made it himself. It feels like it arrives from somewhere else. From outside. From above. And only then, to explain a feeling that enormous, do the people invent a figure to hang it on. The god is not the cause of the worship. The god is the deposit the worship leaves behind. First the deed, the thing done. The belief comes limping after, to explain what the bodies already did. I called the raw thing beneath it Themis — the collective conscience, the herd instinct made holy, the binding force of the group itself before it has a name or a face. She is not a goddess. She is the stuff every god is cut from. Hold that, because in the second of these I am going to show it to you happening — not in Crete, not long ago, but on your own soil, in your own year, in the daylight. You have been calling it by the wrong name. I am going to give you the right one. PART TWO : The Thing Done I am Jane Ellen Harrison again. In the first of these I told you the order of things: the ritual comes first, and the god is only the deposit it leaves behind. First the deed. The belief limps after. Now I will show you what that means where you are standing, because you did not summon me to lecture on ancient Crete. I will tell you a thing I did not expect. I spent my life mapping how gods are made — patiently, at the scholar's distance, the way you map a thing that is finished and safe to handle. And then I lived into a decade when the thing I had mapped began to run. New crowds gathered in Europe and threw the old sacred heat onto new living men, and I understood, too late to be any use, that I had never been studying the past. I had been studying a machine that was only ever resting. You did not summon me because the story was old. You summoned me because the dust stood up. So look at what is happening on your own soil, and let me tell you what you are looking at, because you are calling it by the wrong name. You call it politics. You argue as if it were a set of proposals, as if these were people who had examined a policy and found it sound. And you cannot understand why every exposure only fastens them tighter to the man. You think they have made an error of reasoning. They have made no error of reasoning, because no reasoning is taking place. What you are watching is not an argument. It is a dromenon — a thing done. A rite. The crowd that gathers in the great hall, that chants in unison, that wears the same red token upon its head, is not an electorate. It is a congregation, older than any church, older than Greece. The enormous shared feeling has risen up among them exactly as it rose on that hillside long ago, and they have looked up, and thrown it onto a figure, and the figure has a face, and the face is a living man. They have made a god. In front of you. In the daylight. By the identical process that made every god the species has ever had. And this is why you cannot reach them with a fact. You are bringing reason to a thing that was never built of reason. You stand outside the rite holding a document, calling to the dancers that their god's biography contains an error, and they cannot hear you. Not because they are stupid — some of the most intelligent people who ever lived have danced in that circle — but because you are arguing with a rite, and a rite does not answer to argument. The deed does not care what you have proved about the god. The deed came first. The god was only ever its shadow. I will not tell you they are the fools and you the clear-eyed ones, because that is a comfort and I did not deal in comforts. Hear the harder thing. You do it too. The impulse to gather, to move as one body, to feel the great feeling rise and fling it upward onto a figure and kneel, is not their sickness. It is the human condition. It is in you. It built every good and holy thing you have as surely as it is now building this. A people who could no longer do it at all would not be pure. They would be dead. I have told you what a god is, and I have told you one is being made, right now, in your own country, by hands that do not know what they are doing. What you do with a thing once you can finally see it was never my department. I only ever promised to show you the machinery. There it is. Running. Now you know.