e 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.

FOOTNOTES

[5] These instances are all taken from _The Golden Bough,^3 The Magic
Art_, I, 139 _ff._

[6] "The English Language," _Home University Library_, p. 28.

CHAPTER III

SEASONAL RITES: THE SPRING FESTIVAL

We have seen in the last chapter that whatever interests primitive man,
whatever makes him feel strongly, he tends to re-enact. Any one of his
manifold occupations, hunting, fighting, 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
individuality, it is not his private and personal emotions that tend to
become ritual, but those that are public, felt and expressed officially,
that is, by the whole tribe or community. It is further obvious that
such dances, when they develop into actual rites, tend to be performed
at fixed times. We have now to consider when and why. The element of
fixity and regular repetition in rites cannot be too strongly
emphasized. It is a factor of paramount importance, essential to the
development from ritual to art, from _dromenon_ to drama.

The two great interests of primitive man are food and children. As Dr.
Frazer has well said, if man the individual is to live he must have
food; if his race is to persist he must have children. "To live and to
cause to live, to eat food and to beget children, these were the primary
wants of man in the past, and they will be the primary wants of men 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
are the very foundation-stones of that ritual from which art, if we are
right, took its rise. From this need for food sprang seasonal, periodic
festivals. The fact that festivals are seasonal, constantly recurrent,
solidifies, makes permanent, and as already explained (p. 42), in a
sense intellectualizes and abstracts the emotion that prompts them.

The seasons are indeed only of value to primitive man because they are
related, as he swiftly and necessarily finds out, to his food supply.
He