ABSTRACT
Ornament and order, art and ritual have of course oft been conjoined to one another. Famously connected by the classicist scholar Jane Ellen Harrison (a key member of the Cambridge Ritualists group), in particular within her text Ancient Art and Ritual (1913), the two spheres’ intimate connection, their ‘common root’, has oft been seen to be the joint ‘impulse’ towards collective emotion they share, their analogous status in which ‘neither can be understood without the other’ (ibid.: 2). Centring her study on Ancient Greek theatre, Harrison believed that the etymological linkage between the Greek word for rite – dromenon – and for theatrical representation – drama – was as an issue of ‘cardinal importance’, a linkage establishing the fact ‘that art and ritual are near relations’ (ibid.: 35). Translating both terms as ‘a thing done’ (ibid.: 35), both ritual and art were hence seen to ‘give out a strongly felt emotion or desire by representing, by making or doing or enriching the object or act desired’ (ibid.: 26); both aimed to work through ‘a re-presentation or a pre-presentation, a re-doing or pre-doing, a copy or imitation of life’ (ibid.: 135); both were social practices intent on defining a collective morality or spirit (ibid.: 217–18).
