In both these kinds of dances, the dance that commemorates by re-presenting and the dance that anticipates by pre-presenting, Plato would have seen the element of imitation, what the Greeks called mimesis, which we saw he believed to be the very source and essence of all art.  In a sense he would have been right.  The commemorative dance does especially re-present; it reproduces the past hunt or battle; but if we analyse a little more closely we see it is not for the sake of copying the actual battle itself, but for the emotion felt about the battle.  This they desire to re-live.  The emotional element is seen still more clearly in the dance fore-done for magical purposes.  Success in war or in the hunt is keenly, intensely desired.  The hunt or the battle cannot take place at the moment, so the cycle cannot complete itself.  The desire cannot find utterance in the actual act; it grows and accumulates by inhibition, till at last the exasperated nerves and muscles can bear it no longer; it breaks out into mimetic anticipatory action.  But, and this is the important point, the action is mimetic, not of what you see done by another; but of what you desire to do yourself.  The habit of this mimesis of the thing desired, is set up, and ritual begins.  Ritual, then, does imitate, but for an emotional, not an altogether practical, end.

Plato never saw a savage war-dance or a hunt-dance or a rain-dance, and it is not likely that, if he had seen one, he would have allowed it to be art at all.  But he must often have seen a class of performances very similar, to which unquestionably he would give the name of art.  He must have seen plays like those of Aristophanes, with the chorus dressed up as Birds or Clouds or Frogs or Wasps, and he might undoubtedly have claimed such plays as evidence of the rightness of his definition.  Here were men imitating birds and beasts, dressed in their skins and feathers, mimicking their gestures.  For his own days his judgment would have been unquestionably right; but again, if we look at the beginning of things, we find an origin and an impulse much deeper, vaguer, and more emotional.

The beast dances found widespread over the savage world took their rise when men really believed, what St. Francis tried to preach:  that beasts and birds and fishes were his “little brothers.”  Or rather, perhaps, more strictly, he felt them to be his great brothers and his fathers, for the attitude of the Australian towards the kangaroo, the North American towards the grizzly bear, is one of affection tempered by deep religious awe.  The beast dances look back to that early phase of civilization which survives in crystallized form in what we call totemism.  “Totem” means tribe, but the tribe was of animals as well as men.  In the Kangaroo tribe there were real leaping kangaroos as well as men-kangaroos.  The men-kangaroos when they danced and leapt did it,