Ancient Art and Ritual: Chapter II. Primitive Ritual: Pantomimic Dances

IN books and hymns of bygone days, which dealt with the religion of "the heathen in his blindness," he was pictured as a being of strange perversity, apt to bow down to "gods of wood and stone." The question why he acted thus foolishly was never raised. It was just his "blindness"; the light of the gospel had not yet reached him. Now-a-days the savage has become material not only for conversion and hymn-writing but for scientific observation. We want to understand his psychology, i. e. how he behaves, not merely for his sake, that we may abruptly and despotically convert or reform him, but for our own sakes; partly, of course, for sheer love of knowing, but also,--since we realize that our own behaviour is based on instincts kindred to his,--in order that, by understanding his behaviour, we may understand, and it may be better, our own.

The distinction is one of high importance, but for the moment what concerns us is, to see the common factor in the two sets of acts, what is indeed their source and mainspring. In the case of the girl dancing in the hoop and leaping out of it there is no doubt. The words she says, "Flax, grow," prove the point. She does what she wants done. Her intense desire finds utterance in an act. She obeys the simplest possible impulse. Let anyone watch an exciting game of tennis, or better still perhaps a game of billiards, he

Collectivity and emotional tension, two elements that tend to turn the simple reaction into a rite, are--specially among primitive peoples--closely associated, indeed scarcely separable. The individual among savages

We are accustomed for practical convenience to divide up our human nature into partitions--intellect, will, the emotions, the passions--with further subdivisions, e. g. of the intellect into reason, imagination, and the like. These partitions we are apt to arrange into a sort of order of merit or as it is called a hierarchy, with Reason as head and crown, and under her sway the emotions and passions. The result of establishing this hierarchy is that the impulsive side of our nature comes off badly, the passions and even the emotions lying under a certain ban. This popular psychology is really a convenient and perhaps indispensable mythology. Reason, the emotions, and the will have no more separate existences than Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva.

A more fruitful way of looking at our human constitution is to see it, not as a bundle of separate faculties, but as a sort of

In both these kind of dances, the dance that commemorates by re-presenting and the dance that anticipates by pre-presenting, Plato would have seen the element of imitation,

The celebrants in the very primitive ritual of the Mountain-Mother in Thrace were, we know, called mimes. In the fragment of his lost play, Æschylus, after describing the din made by the "mountain gear" of the Mother,

Here we have undoubtedly some sort of "bull-roaring," thunder- and wind-making ceremony, like those that go on in Australia to-day. The mimes are not mimicking thunder out of curiosity, they are making it and enacting and uttering it for magical purposes. When a sailor wants a wind he makes it, or, as he later says, he whistles for it; when a savage or a Greek wants thunder to bring rain he makes it, becomes it. But it is easy to see that as the belief in magic declines, what was once intense desire, issuing in the making of or the being of a thing, becomes mere copying of it; the mime, the maker, sinks to be in our modern sense the mimic; as faith declines, folly and futility set in; the earnest, zealous act sinks into a frivolous mimicry, a sort of child's-play.

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