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Lecture by Emily Varto (Associate Professor, Department of Classics, Dalhousie University) - 4 December 2024

“Jane Ellen Harrison and the Winnowing Fan: A Foray into Early Ethnographic Classics”

n the early 1900s, Jane Ellen Harrison published a series of papers and gave a public lecture on the mystical fan of Iacchus. Virgil lists this mystical fan (mystica vannus Iacchi) among the various agricultural arts and implements of the rustic farmer(Georgics 1.66). In her memoirs, Reminiscences of a Student’s Life (1925), Harrison tells a charming anecdote about her research on the vannus involving an antique French winnowing fan, the ‘scientific’ Darwins, a skilled old gardener, and a group of agriculturally inept Cambridge scholars. The story highlights the impact of her active interdisciplinary community at Cambridge on her research. But it is just as much a story about the character of Classics at Cambridge (and Britain more generally) at the beginning of the 20th Century and Harrison’s irreverent rejection of the status quo through her embrace of ethnography.

Harrison’s articles on the mystical fan of Iacchus (Mystica Vannus Iacchi) were published in JHS in 1903 and 1904, quickly following her groundbreaking Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903). In the Prolegomena, Harrison highlighted the ‘primitive’ deeper, darker Chthonic layer underlying classical Greek religion which could only be seen by rejecting the tyranny of the text. So, how did Harrison get beyond or beneath the literature to the deeper primitive roots of ancient religion? How did Harrison’s method support her ‘Ritualism’ and vice versa? Reading Harrison’s articles on the esoteric vannus Iacchi alongside the anecdote in her memoirs reveals the interplay of academic community, material evidence, experimentation, and irreverent curiosity underlying the early years of the ‘Ritualist’ engagement with not only anthropological theory, but anthropology’s evolving ethnographic methods.