So at the Feast of the Ascension in Transylvania.  After morning service the girls of the village dress up the Death; they tie a threshed-out sheaf of corn into a rough copy of a head and body, and stick a broomstick through the body for arms.  Then they dress the figure up in the ordinary holiday clothes of a peasant girl—­a red hood, silver brooches, and ribbons galore.  They put the Death at an open window that all the people when they go to vespers may see it.  Vespers over, two girls take the Death by the arms and walk in front; the rest follow.  They sing an ordinary church hymn.  Having wound through the village they go to another house, shut out the boys, strip the Death of its clothes, and throw the straw body out of the window to the boys, who fling it into a river.  Then one of the girls is dressed in the Death’s discarded clothes, and the procession again winds through the village.  The same hymn is sung.  Thus it is clear that the girl is a sort of resuscitated Death.  This resurrection aspect, this passing of the old into the new, will be seen to be of great ritual importance when we come to Dionysos and the Dithyramb.

These ceremonies of Death and Life are more complex than the simple carrying in of green boughs 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 perception there is no conception.  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.