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 has, it would seem, little sensitiveness to the aesthetic impulse of the beauty of a spring morning, to the pathos of autumn.  What he realizes first and foremost is, that at certain times the animals, and still more the plants, which form his food, appear, at certain others they disappear.  It is these times that become the central points, the focuses of his interest, and the dates of his religious festivals.  These dates will vary, of course, in different countries and in different climates.  It is, therefore,