By appointing Jean-Pierre Vernant (1914-2007) to a chair entitled " Comparative study of ancient religions ", the Collège de France is contributing to the institutional recognition of the important current of interpretation of Greek antiquity that he helped found in the 1960s, but which at the time remained marginal among Hellenists. Influenced by the historical psychology of Ignace Meyerson and the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Vernant was, like his teacher Louis Gernet, one of the very first Hellenists to use the achievements of the human and social sciences to analyze documents from Greek antiquity.
Elected to the Collège de France in 1975, he joined the Philosophical and Sociological Sciences section, alongside M. Foucault and C. Lévi-Strauss, rather than the Historical, Philological and Archaeological Sciences section, where Jacqueline de Romilly had recently been appointed. This was an initial indication of the orientation of his lectures, which was explicitly expressed in his opening lecture on December 5 1975, under the evocative title " Greek religion, ancient religions ". To understand Greek religion, we must avoid " projecting onto its documents psychological categories from another time and place ", Vernant professes(Œuvres, t. 2, p. 1680). This requires a comparative method that compares Greek religion with other polytheistic religions, the better to identify their specific features. This approach is particularly evident in the seminars associated with the lecture, in which specialists from Vedic India (Charles Malamoud), Mesopotamia (Jean Bottéro) and Rome (Florence Dupont, Philippe Moreau, John Scheid), as well as anthropologists (Marc Augé, Maurice Godelier) and sociologists (Pierre Bourdieu), frequently take part alongside numerous Hellenists.
In his lectures at the Collège de France, he was particularly interested in the figuration of divine powers, especially through ritual. After several lessons devoted to the problem of the figuration of the dead body, in which he shows that the ancient Greeks did not seek to reproduce the image of a deceased person but to display a substitute for its value, Vernant turns to the figuration of the divine through masks and ritual masquerades. The investigation begins with the figure of the Gorgon, a grotesque motif so often represented by the ancient Greeks. Vernant describes this deformed face as a mask of monstrous frontality, forcing the spectator to exchange a death-bringing gaze. But the mask of the Gorgon is also a way of understanding the different values (erotic, magical, ritual, etc.) that the Greeks associated with different objects, such as theaulos or the mirror. From 1980 onwards, Vernant's lectures were devoted to the figure of Artemis, a divinity whose cults frequently involved masquerades. Questioning the received wisdom that Artemis is a divinity of the savage world, Vernant shows that she is more a power of the confines, the transitional spaces between civilization and savagery, or between childhood and adulthood. We are thinking in particular of the Arkteia of Brauron, where young Athenian women dressed up as bears, or the Orthia of Sparta, which involved dances and songs by young boys in masks. These lectures are marked by Vernant's innovative anthropological approach, which focuses not on a particular work but on Greek culture as a whole. This perspective led him to study all available documentation, from narrative traditions and what they reveal about the " structures of the pantheon " to descriptions of rituals, combined with contributions from archaeology and iconography, in a sustained collaboration with Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux and François Lissarrague. These lectures have given rise to a number of important publications, including Figures, idoles, masques (Julliard, 1990), which brings together extensive summaries of the lectures he delivered at the Collège.
