[110] A Meray, La Vie au Temps des Libres Precheurs, vol. ii, Ch.  X. A good and scholarly account of the Feast of Fools is given by E.K.  Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, Ch.  XIII.  It is true that the Church and the early Fathers often anathematized the theatre.  But Gregory of Nazianzen wished to found a Christian theatre; the Mediaeval Mysteries were certainly under the protection of the clergy; and St. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the schoolmen, only condemns the theatre with cautious qualifications.

[111] Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes of Central Australia, Ch.  XII.

[112] Journal Anthropological Institute, July-Dec., 1904, p. 329.

[113] Westermarck (Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, vol. ii, pp. 283-9) shows how widespread is the custom of setting apart a periodical rest day.

[114] A.E.  Crawley, The Mystic Rose, pp. 273 et seq., Crawley brings into association with this function of great festivals the custom, found in some parts of the world, of exchanging wives at these times.  “It has nothing whatever to do with the marriage system, except as breaking it for a season, women of forbidden degree being lent, on the same grounds as conventions and ordinary relations are broken at festivals of the Saturnalia type, the object being to change life and start afresh, by exchanging every thing one can, while the very act of exchange coincides with the other desire, to weld the community together” (Ib., p. 479).

[115] See “The Analysis of the Sexual Impulse” in vol. iii of these Studies.

[116] G. Murray, Ancient Greek Literature, p. 211.

[117] The Greek drama probably arose out of a folk-festival of more or less sexual character, and it is even possible that the mediaeval drama had a somewhat similar origin (see Donaldson, The Greek Theatre; Gilbert Murray, loc. cit.; Karl Pearson, The Chances of Death, vol. ii, pp. 135-6, 280 et seq.).

[118] R. Canudo, “Les Choreges Francais,” Mercure de France, May 1, 1907, p. 180.

[119] “This is, in fact,” Cyples declares (The Process of Human Experience, p. 743), “Art’s great function—­to rehearse within us greater egoistic possibilities, to habituate us to larger actualizations of personality in a rudimentary manner,” and so to arouse, “aimlessly but splendidly, the sheer as yet unfulfilled possibilities within us.”

[120] Even when monotonous labor is intellectual, it is not thereby protected against degrading orgiastic reactions.  Prof.  L. Gurlitt shows (Die Neue Generation, January, 1909, pp. 31-6) how the strenuous, unremitting intellectual work of Prussian seminaries leads among both teachers and scholars to the worst forms of the orgy.

[121] Rabutaux discusses various definitions of prostitution, De la Prostitution en Europe, pp. 119 et seq.  For the origin of the names to designate the prostitute, see Schrader, Reallexicon, art.  “Beischlaeferin.”