The spirit of the rite, the belief in its efficacy, dies, but the rite itself, the actual mould, persists, and it is this ancient ritual mould, foreign to our own usage, that strikes us to-day, when a Greek play is revived, as odd and perhaps chill.  A chorus, a band of dancers there must be, because the drama arose out of a ritual dance.  An agon, or contest, or wrangling, there will probably be, because Summer contends with Winter, Life with Death, the New Year with the Old.  A tragedy must be tragic, must have its pathos, because the Winter, the Old Year, must die.  There must needs be a swift transition, a clash and change from sorrow to joy, what the Greeks called a peripeteia, a quick-turn-round, because, though you carry out Winter, you bring in Summer.  At the end we shall have an Appearance, an Epiphany of a god, because the whole gist of the ancient ritual was to summon the spirit of life.  All these ritual forms haunt and shadow the play, whatever its plot, like ancient traditional ghosts; they underlie and sway the movement and the speeches like some compelling rhythm.

Now this ritual mould, this underlying rhythm, is a fine thing in itself; and, moreover, it was once shaped and cast by a living spirit:  the intense immediate desire for food and life, and for the return of the seasons which bring that food and life.  But we have seen that, once the faith in man’s power magically to bring back these seasons waned, once he began to doubt whether he could really carry out Winter and bring in Summer, his emotion towards these rites would cool.  Further, we have seen that these rites repeated year by year ended, among an imaginative people, in the mental creation of some sort of daemon or god.  This daemon, or god, was more and more held responsible on his own account for the food-supply and the order of the Horae, or Seasons; so we get the notion that this daemon or god himself led in the Seasons; Hermes dances at the head of the Charites, or an Eiresione is carried to Helios and the Horae.  The thought then arises that this man-like daemon who rose from a real King of the May, must himself be approached and dealt with as a man, bargained with, sacrificed to.  In a word, in place of dromena, things done, we get gods worshipped; in place of sacraments, holy bulls killed and eaten in common, we get sacrifices in the modern sense, holy bulls offered to yet holier gods.  The relation of these figures of gods to art we shall consider when we come to sculpture.

So the dromenon, the thing done, wanes, the prayer, the praise, the sacrifice waxes.  Religion moves away from drama towards theology, but the ritual mould of the dromenon is left ready for a new content.