Ancient Art and Ritual

ghting, later ploughing and sowing, provided it be of sufficient interest and importance, is material for a dromenon or rite. We have also seen that, weak as he is in individua

have now to consider when and why. The element of fixity and regular repetition in rites cannot be too strongly empha

in the future so long as the world lasts." Other things may be added to enrich and beautify human life, but, unless these wants are first satisfied, humanity itself must cease to exist. These two things, therefore, food and children, were what men chiefly sought to procure by the performance of magical rites for the regulation of the seasons. They

ints, the focuses of his interest, and the dates of his religious festivals. These dates will vary, of course, in different countries and in different climates. It is, therefore, idle to attempt a study of the ritual of a people without knowing the facts of their climate and surroundings. In Egypt the food supply will depend on the rise and fall of the Nile, and on this rise and fall will depend the ritual and calendar of Osiris. And yet treatises on Egyptian religion are s

early recurrence of the seasons; the phases of the moon are recurrent, and though artificial light has made these phases pass almost unnoticed to-day, in climates where the skies are clear, human life was largely influenced by moonlight. Even our own bodil

st-days, a patchwork of days of different quality and character recurring; pattern at least is based on periodicity. But there is another and perhaps more important way in which periodicity affects and in a sense causes ritual. We have seen already that out of the space between an impulse and a reaction there aris

what we call an idea, which is in reality but the projected shadow of an unaccomplished action. More beautiful it may be, but comparatively bloodless, yet capable in its turn of acting as an initial motor impuls

n plants or animals. If he is nomadic he will note the recurrent births of other animals and of human children, and will connect them with the lunar year. But it is at once evident that, at least in Mediterranean lands, and probably everywher

e "gardens" of Adonis the women took baskets or pots filled with earth, and in them, as children sow cress now-a-days, they planted wheat, fennel, lettuce, and various kinds of flowers, which they watered and tended for eight days. In hot countries the seeds sprang up rapidly

he women who make little gardens, not less pleasant than the gardens of Adonis in earthen pots and pans; so would our souls blossom and flo

provoke expression, and we remember (p. 19) that the Sumerian Tammuz was originally Dumuzi-absu, "True Son of the Waters." Water is the first need for vegetation. Gardens of Adonis are still in use in the Madras Presidency.10 At the marriage of a Brahman "seeds of five or nine sorts

Martinmas, for the blessing and purification of flocks and herds when they come in from their summer pasture. In midwinter there will be a Christmas festival to promote and protect the sun's heat at the winter solstice. But in Southern Europe, to which we mainly owe our drama and our art, the festival most widely celebrated, and tha

a flower or two. That is all that is left in most parts of England of the Queen of the May and Jack-in-the-Green, though here and there a maypole survives and is resuscitated by enth

es from the top to the bottome, and sometyme painted with variable colours, with two or three hundred men, women, and children, following it with great devotion. And thus beyng reared up, with handkerchiefes and flagges streaming on the toppe, they strewe the ground about, bi

" He would have exterminated it root and branch, but other and perhaps wiser divines took the maypole into the servic

May we have

ur door i

t that is wel

f our Lord

, idleness or economy would prompt the villagers to use the same tree or branch year after year. In the villages of Upper Bavaria Dr. Frazer13 tells us the maypole is renewed once every three, four, or five years. It is a fir-tree fetched from the forest

s soon as the trees begin to be green in spring, the children assemble on a Sunday and go out into the woods, where they choose one of their playmates to be Little Leaf Man. They break branches from the trees and twine them about the child, till only his shoes are left peeping out. Two of the other children lead him for fear he should stumble. They take him sin

is fiercer and more complex; it takes the form of a struggle or contest, what the Greeks called an agon. Thus on May Day in the Isle of Man a Queen of the May was chosen, and with her twenty maids of honour, together with a troop of young men for escort. But there was not only a Queen of

quimaux divide themselves into two parties called the Ptarmigans and the Ducks. The ptarmigans are the people born in winter, the ducks those born in summer. They stretch out a long rope of sealskin. The ducks take hold of one end, the ptarmigans of the other, then comes a tug-of-war. If the ducks win ther

getables. But our main supplies come to us from other lands and other weathers, and we find it hard to think ourselves back into the state when a bad harvest meant starvation. The intensely practical attitude of man towards the seasons,

all is hot and desolate, the ground has only patches of wiry scrub, with an occasional parched acacia tree, all is stones and sand; there is no sign of animal life save for the thousand ant-hills. Then suddenly the rainy season sets in. Torrents fill the rivers, and the sandy plain is a sheet of water. Almost as suddenly t

e puts on emu feathers and gazes about him vacantly in stupid fashion like an emu bird; he makes a structure of boughs like the chrysalis of a Witchetty grub-his favourite food, and drags his body through it in pantomime, gliding and shuffling to promote its birth. Here, difficult and intricate though the ceremonies are, and uncertain in meaning as many of the details must probably always remain, the main emotional gist is clear.

, and yet among primitive peoples but little ritual centres round day and night. The reason is simple. The cycle of day and night is so short, it recurs so frequently, that man naturally counted upon it and had no cause to be anxious. The emotional tension necessary to ritual was absent. A few peoples, e.g. the Egyptians, have practised daily incantations to bring back the sun. P

ertile in its light and contains moisture, it is kindly to the young of animals and to the new shoots of plants. Even Bacon17 held that observations of the moon with a view to planting and sowing and the grafting of trees were "not altogether frivolous." It cannot too often be remembered that primitive man has but little, if any, interest in sun and moon and heav

ent round in a ring; and because that annual ring was long in revolving, great was man's hope and fear in the winter, great his relief and joy in the spring. I

called "Driving out the Death." The young people make up a figure of straw, dress it in old clothes, carry it out and throw it into the river. Then they come back, tell

Death out of

mmer into

, dear

little

e song varies; it is not Sum

carried a

ught ba

t though Death is dramatically carried out, the c

seat of a sort of magical potency which can be and is transferred to the figure of Summer or Life, thus causing, as it were, a sort of Resurrection. In Lusatia the women only carry out the Death. They are dressed in black themselves as mourners, but the puppet

t the Death at an open window that all the people when they go to vespers may see it. Vespers over, two girls take the Death by the arms and walk in front; the rest follow. They sing an ordinary church hymn. Having wound through the village they go to another house, shut out the boys, strip the Death of its clothes, and throw the straw body out of the window to the boys, who f

se "impersonations," we are getting away from the merely emotional dance, from the domain of simple psychological motor discharge to something that is very like ru

rsonifies the Spirit of Vegetation," or it "embodies the Spirit of Summer." The Spirit of Vegetation is "incarnate in the puppet." We are led, by this way of speaking, to suppose that the savage or

nothing mysterious about the process; the leader does not "embody" a previously conceived idea, rather he begets it. From his personality springs the personification. The abstract idea arises from the only thing it possibly can arise from, the concrete fact. Without perception there is no conception. We noted in speaking of dances (p. 43)

ader the emotion centres. When there is an act of Carrying-out or Bringing-in he either is himself the puppet or he carries it. Emotion is of the whole band; drama-doing-tends to focus on the leader.

ption. The different actual recurrent May Kings and "Deaths," because they recur, get a sort of permanent life of their own and become beings apart. In this way a conce

ghts in picture-images, eikons. But at her great spring festival of Easter she makes, in the remote villages, concession to a strong, perhaps imperative, popular need; she allows an image, an actual idol, of the dead Christ to be laid in the tomb that it may rise again. A traveller in Eub?a18 dur

ar for the failure of food. The Christ again is not the historical Christ of Jud?a, still less the incarnation of the Godhead proceeding from t

he coming of the annual rains, or the regular rising of a river. Among Mediterranean peoples, both in ancient days and at the present time, the Spring Festival arrests attention. Having learnt the general characteristics of this Spring Fest

: "Periodicit

Ib

er. Nu

is, Attis, and

Frazer, The Golde

s, The Medi?val

lden Boug

lden Boug

. Frazer, Golden B

. et Os.

. Scient.

Greek Folk-lore and An