ll
later have occasion to return, errs, in fact, through supplying no
adequate motive for a widespread human energy. It is probably this lack
of motive that has led other theorizers to adopt the view that art is
idealization. Man with pardonable optimism desires, it is thought, to
improve on Nature.

* * * * *

Modern science, confronted with a problem like that of the rise of art,
no longer casts about to conjecture how art _might_ have arisen, she
examines how it actually _did_ arise. Abundant material has now been
collected from among savage peoples of an art so primitive that we
hesitate to call it art at all, and it is in these inchoate efforts
that we are able to track the secret motive springs that move the artist
now as then.

Among the Huichol Indians,[4] if the people fear a drought from the
extreme heat of the sun, they take a clay disk, and on one side of it
they paint the "face" of Father Sun, a circular space surrounded by rays
of red and blue and yellow which are called his "arrows," for the
Huichol sun, like Phoebus Apollo, has arrows for rays. On the reverse
side they will paint the progress of the sun through the four quarters
of the sky. The journey is symbolized by a large cross-like figure with
a central circle for midday. Round the edge are beehive-shaped mounds;
these represent the hills of earth. The red and yellow dots that
surround the hills are cornfields. The crosses on the hills are signs of
wealth and money. On some of the disks birds and scorpions are painted,
and on one are curving lines which mean rain. These disks are deposited
on the altar of the god-house and left, and then all is well. The
intention might be to us obscure, but a Huichol Indian would read it
thus: "Father Sun with his broad shield (or 'face') and his arrows rises
in the east, bringing money and wealth to the Huichols. His heat and the
light from his rays make the corn to grow, but he is asked not to
interfere with the clouds that are gathering on the hills."

Now is this art or ritual? It is both and neither. _We_ distinguish
between a form of prayer and a work of art and count them in no danger
of confusion; but the Huichol goes back to that earlier thing, a
_presentation_. He utters, expresses his thought about the sun and his
emotion about the sun and his relation to the sun, and if "prayer is the
soul's sincere desire" he has painted a prayer. It is not a little
curious that the