s or even the dancing round maypoles. When we
have these figures, these "impersonations," we are getting away from the
merely emotional dance, from the domain of simple psychological motor
discharge to something that is very like rude art, at all events to
personification. On this question of personification, in which so much
of art and religion has its roots, it is all-important to be clear.

* * * * *

In discussions on such primitive rites as "Carrying out the Death,"
"Bringing in Summer," we are often told that the puppet of the girl is
carried round, buried, burnt; brought back, because it "personifies 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 the villager first forms
an idea or conception of a Spirit of Vegetation and then later
"embodies" it. We naturally wonder that he should perform a mental act
so high and difficult as abstraction.

A very little consideration shows that he performs at first no
abstraction at all; abstraction is foreign to his mental habit. He
begins with a vague excited dance to relieve his emotion. That dance
has, probably almost from the first, a leader; the dancers choose an
actual _person_, and he is the root and ground of _personification_.
There is 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
_per_ception there is no _con_ception. We noted in speaking of dances
(p. 43) how the dance got generalized; how from many commemorations of
actual hunts and battles there arose the hunt dance and the war dance.
So, from many actual living personal May Queens and Deaths, from many
actual men and women decked with leaves, or trees dressed up as men and
women, arises _the_ Tree Spirit, _the_ Vegetation Spirit, _the_ Death.

At the back, then, of the fact of personification lies the fact that the
emotion is felt collectively, the rite is performed by a band or chorus
who dance together _with a common leader_. Round that leader 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 o