This chapter is concerned with the British classical scholar Jane Harrison. Harrison is most commonly invoked in contemporary classical scholarship for her part in the controversial ‘Cambridge Ritualists’ movement of the early twentieth century. Harrison was a central part of the intellectual genealogy of modernism, and a central reason that so many modernist authors made use of parallels with antiquity. This chapter suggests that by studying the changing valence of Nietzschean antiquity across her intellectual project it is possible to discern her altering attitude towards the value of the past in the present. After discussing the connection between anthropology, primitivism and Classics that yokes together the understandings of ancient irrationalism in both Nietzsche and Harrison, the chapter proceeds to consider the connections with James Frazer’s The Golden Bough as well as Wittgenstein’s critique of that work. The final sections focus on two of Harrison’s main works, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903) and Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912), and the confluence of Dionysus, satyrs and religious belief in these works.