n the leader. This leader, this focus, is
then remembered, thought of, imaged; from being _per_ceived year by
year, he is finally _con_ceived; but his basis is always in actual fact
of which he is but the reflection.

Had there been no periodic festivals, personification might long have
halted. But it is easy to see that a recurrent _per_ception helps to
form a permanent abstract _con_ception. 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 conception, a
kind of _daimon_, or spirit, is fashioned, who dies and lives again in a
perpetual cycle. The periodic festival begets a kind of not immortal,
but perennial, god.

Yet the faculty of conception is but dim and feeble in the mind even of
the peasant to-day; his function is to perceive the actual fact year by
year, and to feel about it. Perhaps a simple instance best makes this
clear. The Greek Church does not gladly suffer images in the round,
though she delights 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 Euboea[18] during Holy Week had been struck by the genuine
grief shown at the Good Friday services. On Easter Eve there was the
same general gloom and despondency, and he asked an old woman why it
was. She answered: "Of course I am anxious; for if Christ does not rise
to-morrow, we shall have no corn this year."

The old woman's state of mind is fairly clear. Her emotion is the old
emotion, not sorrow for the Christ the Son of Mary, but fear, imminent
fear for the failure of food. The Christ again is not the historical
Christ of Judaea, still less the incarnation of the Godhead proceeding
from the Father; he is the actual figure fashioned by his village chorus
and laid by the priests, the leaders of that chorus, in the local
sepulchre.

* * * * *

So far, then, we have seen that the vague emotional dance tends to
become a periodic rite, performed at regular intervals. The periodic
rite may occur at any date of importance to the food-supply of the
community, in summer, in winter, at the coming of the annual rains, or
the regular rising of a river. Among Mediterranean peoples, both in
ancient