PRIMITIVE RITUAL: PANTOMIMIC DANCES
In books and hymns of bygone days, which dealt with the religion of "the
heathen in his blindness," he was pictured as a being of strange
perversity, apt to bow down to "gods of wood and stone." The question
_why_ he acted thus foolishly was never raised. It was just his
"blindness"; the light of the gospel had not yet reached him. Now-a-days
the savage has become material not only for conversion and hymn-writing
but for scientific observation. We want to understand his psychology,
_i.e._ how he behaves, not merely for his sake, that we may abruptly
and despotically convert or reform him, but for our own sakes; partly,
of course, for sheer love of knowing, but also,--since we realize that
our own behaviour is based on instincts kindred to his,--in order that,
by understanding his behaviour, we may understand, and it may be better,
our own.
Anthropologists who study the primitive peoples of to-day find that the
worship of false gods, bowing "down to wood and stone," bulks larger in
the mind of the hymn-writer than in the mind of the savage. We look for
temples to heathen idols; we find dancing-places and ritual dances. The
savage is a man of action. Instead of asking a god to do what he wants
done, he does it or tries to do it himself; instead of prayers he utters
spells. In a word, he practises magic, and above all he is strenuously
and frequently engaged in dancing magical dances. When a savage wants
sun or wind or rain, he does not go to church and prostrate himself
before a false god; he summons his tribe and dances a sun dance or a
wind dance or a rain dance. When he would hunt and catch a bear, he does
not pray to his god for strength to outwit and outmatch the bear, he
rehearses his hunt in a bear dance.
Here, again, we have some modern prejudice and misunderstanding to
overcome. Dancing is to us a light form of recreation practised by the
quite young from sheer _joie de vivre_, and essentially inappropriate to
the mature. But among the Tarahumares of Mexico the word _nolávoa_
means both "to work" and "to dance." An old man will reproach a young
man saying, "Why do you not go and work?" (_nolávoa_). He means "Why do
you not dance instead of looking on?" It is strange to us to learn that
among savages, as a man passes from childhood to youth, from youth to
mature manhood, so the number of his "dances" increase, and the number
of these "dances" is the measure _pari passu_ of his social importance.
Finally, in extreme old age he falls out, he ceases to exist, _because
he cannot dance_; his dance, and with it his social status, passes to
another and a younger.
* * * * *
Magical dancing still goes on in Europe to-day. In Swabia and among the
Transylvanian Saxons it is a common custom, says Dr. Frazer,[5] for a
man who has some hemp to leap high in the field in the belief that this
will make the hemp grow tall. In many parts of Germany and Austria the
peasant thinks he can make the flax grow tall by dancing or leaping high
or by jumping backwards from a table; the higher the leap the taller
will be the flax that year. There is happily little possible doubt as
to the practical reason of this mimic dancing. When Macedonian farmers
have done digging their fields they throw their spades up into the air
and, catching them again, exclaim, "May the crop grow as high as the
spade has gone." In some parts of Eastern Russia the girls dance one by
one in a large hoop at midnight on Shrove Tuesday. The hoop is decked
with leaves, flowers and ribbons, and attached to it are a small bell
and some flax. While dancing within the hoop each girl has to wave her
arms vigorously and cry, "Flax, grow," or words to that effect. When she
has done she leaps out of the hoop or is lifted out of it by her
partner.
Is this art? We shall unhesitatingly answer "No." Is it ritual? With
some hesitation we shall probably again answer "No." It is, we think,
not a rite, but merely a superstitious practice of ignorant men and
women. But take another instance. Among the Omaha Indians of North
America, when the corn is withering for want of rain, the members of the
sacred Buffalo Society fill a large vessel with water and dance four
times round it. One of them drinks some of the water and spirts it into
the air, making a fine spray in imitation of mist or drizzling rain.
Then he upsets the vessel, spilling the water on the ground; whereupon
the dancers fall down and drink up the water, getting mud all over their
faces. This saves the corn. Now probably any dispassionate person would
describe such a ceremonial as "an interesting instance of primitive
_ritual_." The sole difference between the two types is that, in the one
the practice is carried on privately, or at least unofficially, in the
other it is done publicly by a collective authorized body, officially
for the public good.
The distinction is one of high importance, but for the moment what
concerns us is, to see the common factor in the two sets of acts, what
is indeed their source and mainspring. In the case of the girl dancing
in the hoop and leaping out of it there is no doubt. The words she says,
"Flax, grow," prove the point. She _does_ what she _wants done_. Her
intense desire finds utterance in an act. She obeys the simplest
possible impulse. Let anyone watch an exciting game of tennis, or better
still perhaps a game of billiards, he will find himself _doing_ in
sheer sympathy the thing he wants done, reaching out a tense arm where
the billiard cue should go, raising an unoccupied leg to help the
suspended ball over the net. Sympathetic magic is, modern psychology
teaches us, in the main and at the outset, not the outcome of
intellectual illusion, not even the exercise of a "mimetic instinct,"
but simply, in its ultimate analysis, an utterance, a discharge of
emotion and longing.
But though the utterance of emotion is the prime and moving, it is not
the sole, factor. We may utter emotion in a prolonged howl, we may even
utter it in a collective prolonged howl, yet we should scarcely call
this ritual, still less art. It is true that a prolonged _collective_
howl will probably, because it is collective, develop a rhythm, a
regular recurrence, and hence probably issue in a kind of ritual music;
but for the further stage of development into art another step is
necessary. We must not only _utter_ emotion, we must _represent_ it,
that is, we must in some way reproduce or imitate or express the thought
which is causing us emotion. Art is not imitation, but art and also
ritual frequently and legitimately _contain an element of imitation_.
Plato was so far right. What exactly is imitated we shall see when we
come to discuss the precise difference between art and ritual.
* * * * *
The Greek word for a _rite_ as already noted is _dromenon_, "a thing
done"--and the word is full of instruction. The Greek had realized that
to perform a rite you must _do_ something, that is, you must not only
feel something but express it in action, or, to put it psychologically,
you must not only receive an impulse, you must react to it. The word for
rite, _dromenon_, "thing done," arose, of course, not from any
psychological analysis, but from the simple fact that rites among the
primitive Greeks were _things done_, mimetic dances and the like. It is
a fact of cardinal importance that their word for theatrical
representation, _drama_, is own cousin to their word for rite,
_dromenon_; _drama_ also means "thing done." Greek linguistic instinct
pointed plainly to the fact that art and ritual are near relations. To
this fact of crucial importance for our argument we shall return later.
But from the outset it should be borne in mind that in these two Greek
words, _dromenon_ and _drama_, in their exact meaning, their relation
and their distinction, we have the keynote and clue to our whole
discussion.
* * * * *
For the moment we have to note that the Greek word for rite, _dromenon_,
"thing done," is not strictly adequate. It omits a factor of prime
importance; it includes too much and not enough. All "things done" are
not rites. You may shrink back from a blow; that is the expression of an
emotion, that is a reaction to a stimulus, but that is not a rite. You
may digest your dinner; that is a thing done, and a thing of high
importance, but it is not a rite.
One element in the rite we have already observed, and that is, that it
be done collectively, by a number of persons feeling the same emotion. A
meal digested alone is certainly no rite; a meal eaten in common, under
the influence of a common emotion, may, and often does, _tend_ to become
a rite.
Collectivity and emotional tension, two elements that tend to turn the
simple reaction into a rite, are--specially among primitive
peoples--closely associated, indeed scarcely separable. The individual
among savages has but a thin and meagre personality; high emotional
tension is to him only caused and maintained by a thing felt socially;
it is what the tribe feels that is sacred, that is matter for ritual. He
may make by himself excited movements, he may leap for joy, for fear;
but unless these movements are made by the tribe together they will not
become rhythmical; they will probably lack intensity, and certainly
permanence. Intensity, then, and collectivity go together, and both are
necessary for ritual, but both may be present without constituting art;
we have not yet touched the dividing line between art and ritual. When
and how does the _dromenon_, the _rite done_, pass over into the
_drama_?
The genius of the Greek language _felt_, before it consciously _knew_,
the difference. This feeling ahead for distinctions is characteristic of
all languages, as has been well shown by Mr. Pearsall Smith[6] in
another manual of our series. It is an instinctive process arising
independently of reason, though afterwards justified by it. What, then,
is the distinction between art and ritual which the genius of the Greek
language felt after, when it used the two words _dromenon_ and _drama_
for two different sorts of "things done"? To answer our question we must
turn for a brief moment to psychology, the science of human behaviour.
* * * * *
We are accustomed for practical convenience to divide up our human
nature into partitions--intellect, will, the emotions, the
passions--with further subdivisions, _e.g._ of the intellect into
reason, imagination, and the like. These partitions we are apt to
arrange into a sort of order of merit or as it is called a hierarchy,
with Reason as head and crown, and under her sway the emotions and
passions. The result of establishing this hierarchy is that the
impulsive side of our nature comes off badly, the passions and even the
emotions lying under a certain ban. This popular psychology is really a
convenient and perhaps indispensable mythology. Reason, the emotions,
and the will have no more separate existences than Jupiter, Juno, and
Minerva.
A more fruitful way of looking at our human constitution is to see it,
not as a bundle of separate faculties, but as a sort of continuous
cycle of activities. What really happens is, putting it very roughly,
something of this sort. To each one of us the world is, or seems to be,
eternally divided into two halves. On the one side is ourself, on the
other all the rest of things. All our action, our behaviour, our life,
is a relation between these two halves, and that behaviour seems to have
three, not divisions, but stages. The outside world, the other half, the
object if we like so to call it, acts upon us, gets at us through our
senses. We hear or see or taste or feel something; to put it roughly, we
perceive something, and as we perceive it, so, instantly, we feel about
it, towards it, we have emotion. And, instantly again, that emotion
becomes a motive-power, we _re_-act towards the object that got at us,
we want to alter it or our relation to it. If we did not perceive we
should not feel, if we did not feel we should not act. When we talk--as
we almost must talk--of Reason, the Emotions, or the Passions and the
Will leading to action, we think of the three stages or aspects of our
behaviour as separable and even perhaps hostile; we want, perhaps, to
purge the intellect from all infection of the emotions. But in reality,
though at a given moment one or the other element, knowing, feeling, or
acting, may be dominant in our consciousness, the rest are always
immanent.
When we think of the three elements or stages, knowing, feeling,
striving, as all being necessary factors in any complete bit of human
behaviour, we no longer try to arrange them in a hierarchy with knowing
or reason at the head. Knowing--that is, receiving and recognizing a
stimulus from without--would seem to come first; we must be acted on
before we can _re_-act; but priority confers no supremacy. We can look
at it another way. Perceiving is the first rung on the ladder that leads
to action, feeling is the second, action is the topmost rung, the
primary goal, as it were, of all the climbing. For the purpose of our
discussion this is perhaps the simplest way of looking at human
behaviour.
* * * * *
Movement, then, action, is, as it were, the goal and the end of thought.
Perception finds its natural outlet and completion in doing. But here
comes in a curious consideration important for our purpose. In animals,
in so far as they act by "instinct," as we say, perception, knowing, is
usually followed immediately and inevitably by doing, by such doing as
is calculated to conserve the animal and his species; but in some of the
higher animals, and especially in man, where the nervous system is more
complex, perception is not instantly transformed into action; there is
an interval for choice between several possible actions. Perception is
pent up and becomes, helped by emotion, conscious _representation_. Now
it is, psychologists tell us, just in this interval, this space between
perception and reaction, this momentary halt, that all our mental life,
our images, our ideas, our consciousness, and assuredly our religion and
our art, is built up. If the cycle of knowing, feeling, acting, were
instantly fulfilled, that is, if we were a mass of well-contrived
instincts, we should hardly have _dromena_, and we should certainly
never pass from _dromena_ to _drama_. Art and religion, though perhaps
not wholly ritual, spring from the incomplete cycle, from unsatisfied
desire, from perception and emotion that have somehow not found
immediate outlet in practical action. When we come later to establish
the dividing line between art and ritual we shall find this fact to be
cardinal.
We have next to watch how out of _representation repeated_ there grows
up a kind of _abstraction_ which helps the transition from ritual to
art. When the men of a tribe return from a hunt, a journey, a battle, or
any event that has caused them keen and pleasant emotion, they will
often re-act their doings round the camp-fire at night to an attentive
audience of women and young boys. The cause of this world-wide custom is
no doubt in great part the desire to repeat a pleasant experience; the
battle or the hunt will not be re-enacted unless it has been successful.
Together with this must be reckoned a motive seldom absent from human
endeavour, the desire for self-exhibition, self-enhancement. But in this
re-enactment, we see at once, lies the germ of history and of
commemorative ceremonial, and also, oddly enough, an impulse emotional
in itself begets a process we think of as characteristically and
exclusively intellectual, the process of abstraction. The savage begins
with the particular battle that actually _did_ happen; but, it is easy
to see that if he re-enacts it again and again the _particular_ battle
or hunt will be forgotten, the representation cuts itself loose from
the particular action from which it arose, and becomes generalized, as
it were abstracted. Like children he plays not at a funeral, but at
"funerals," not at a battle, but at battles; and so arises the
war-dance, or the death-dance, or the hunt-dance. This will serve to
show how inextricably the elements of knowing and feeling are
intertwined.
So, too, with the element of action. If we consider the occasions when a
savage dances, it will soon appear that it is not only after a battle or
a hunt that he dances in order to commemorate it, but before. Once the
commemorative dance has got abstracted or generalized it becomes
material for the magical dance, the dance pre-done. A tribe about to go
to war will work itself up by a war dance; about to start out hunting
they will catch their game in pantomime. Here clearly the main emphasis
is on the practical, the active, doing-element in the cycle. The dance
is, as it were, a sort of precipitated desire, a discharge of pent-up
emotion into action.
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, not
to _imitate_ kangaroos--you cannot imitate yourself--but just for
natural joy of heart because they _were_ kangaroos; they belonged to the
Kangaroo tribe, they bore the tribal marks and delighted to assert their
tribal unity. What they felt was not _mimesis_ but "participation,"
unity, and community. Later, when man begins to distinguish between
himself and his strange fellow-tribesmen, to realize that he is _not_ a
kangaroo like other kangaroos, he will try to revive his old faith, his
old sense of participation and oneness, by conscious imitation. Thus
though imitation is not the object of these dances, it grows up in and
through them. It is the same with art. The origin of art is not
_mimesis_, but _mimesis_ springs up out of art, out of emotional
expression, and constantly and closely neighbours it. Art and ritual
are at the outset alike in this, that they do not seek to copy a fact,
but to reproduce, to re-enact an emotion.
* * * * *
We shall see this more clearly if we examine for a moment this Greek
word _mimesis_. We translate mīmēsis by "imitation," and we do very
wrongly. The word _mimesis_ means the action or doing of a person called
a _mime_. Now a _mime_ was simply a person who dressed up and acted in a
pantomime or primitive drama. He was roughly what we should call an
_actor_, and it is significant that in the word _actor_ we stress not
imitating but acting, doing, just what the Greek stressed in his words
_dromenon_ and _drama_. The actor dresses up, puts on a mask, wears the
skin of a beast or the feathers of a bird, not, as we have seen, to copy
something or some one who is not himself, but to emphasize, enlarge,
enhance, his own personality; he masquerades, he does not mimic.
The celebrants in the very primitive ritual of the Mountain-Mother in
Thrace were, we know, called _mimes_. In the fragment of his lost play,
Æschylus, after describing the din made by the "mountain gear" of the
Mother, the maddening hum of the _bombykes_, a sort of spinning-top,
the clash of the brazen cymbals and the twang of the strings, thus goes
on:
"And bull-voices roar thereto from somewhere out of the unseen,
fearful _mimes_, and from a drum an image, as it were, of thunder
underground is borne on the air heavy with dread."
Here we have undoubtedly some sort of "bull-roaring," thunder-and
wind-making ceremony, like those that go on in Australia to-day. The
_mimes_ are not mimicking thunder out of curiosity, they are making it
and enacting and uttering it for magical purposes. When a sailor wants a
wind he makes it, or, as he later says, he whistles _for_ it; when a
savage or a Greek wants thunder to bring rain he makes it, becomes it.
But it is easy to see that as the belief in magic declines, what was
once intense desire, issuing in the making of or the being of a thing,
becomes mere copying of it; the mime, the maker, sinks to be in our
modern sense the mimic; as faith declines, folly and futility set in;
the earnest, zealous _act_ sinks into a frivolous mimicry, a sort of
child's-play.
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.