“And to this day the people of Delphi send high-born boys in procession there.  And they, when they have reached Tempe and made a splendid sacrifice return back, after wearing themselves wreaths from the very laurel from which the god made himself a wreath.”

We are inclined to think of the Greeks as a people apt to indulge in the singular practice of wearing wreaths in public, a practice among us confined to children on their birthdays and a few eccentric people on their wedding days.  We forget the intensely practical purport of the custom.  The ancient Greeks wore wreaths and carried boughs, not because they were artistic or poetical, but because they were ritualists, that they might bring back the spring and carry in the summer.  The Greek bridegroom to-day, as well as the Greek bride, wears a wreath, that his marriage may be the beginning of new life, that his “wife may be as the fruitful vine, and his children as the olive branches round about his table.”  And our children to-day, though they do not know it, wear wreaths on their birthdays because with each new year their life is re-born.

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Apollo then, was, like Dionysos, King of the May and—­saving his presence—­Jack-in-the-Green.  The god manifestly arose out of the rite.  For a moment let us see how he arose.  It will be remembered that in a previous chapter (p. 70) we spoke of “personification.”  We think of the god Apollo as an abstraction, an unreal thing, perhaps as a “false god.”  The god Apollo does not, and never did, exist.  He is an idea—­a thing made by the imagination.  But primitive man does not deal with abstractions, does not worship them.  What happens is, as we saw (p. 71), something like this:  Year by year a boy is chosen to carry the laurel, to bring in the May, and later year by year a puppet is made.  It is a different boy each year, carrying a different laurel branch.  And yet in a sense it is the same boy; he is always the Laurel-Bearer—­“Daphnephoros,” always the “Luck” of the village or city.  This Laurel-Bearer, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, is the stuff of which the god is made.  The god arises from the rite, he is gradually detached from the rite, and as soon as he gets a life and being of his own, apart from the rite, he is a first stage in art, a work of art existing in the mind, gradually detached from even the faded action of ritual, and later to be the model of the actual work of art, the copy in stone.

The stages, it would seem, are:  actual life with its motor reactions, the ritual copy of life with its faded reactions, the image of the god projected by the rite, and, last, the copy of that image, the work of art.

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