Ancient Art and Ritual | Page 5

life-work! Few people to-day, perhaps, regard art as the close and
realistic copy of Nature; photography has at least scotched, if not slain,
that error; but many people still regard art as a sort of improvement on
or an "idealization" of Nature. It is the part of the artist, they think, to
take suggestions and materials from Nature, and from these to build up,
as it were, a revised version. It is, perhaps, only by studying those
rudimentary forms of art that are closely akin to ritual that we come to
see how utterly wrong-headed is this conception.
Take the representations of Osiris that we have just described--the
mummy rising bit by bit from his bier. Can any one maintain that art is
here a copy or imitation of reality? However "realistic" the painting, it
represents a thing imagined not actual. There never was any such
person as Osiris, and if there had been, he would certainly never, once
mummified, have risen from his tomb. There is no question of fact, and
the copy of fact, in the matter. Moreover, had there been, why should
anyone desire to make a copy of natural fact? The whole "imitation"
theory, to which, and to the element of truth it contains, we shall later
have occasion to return, errs, in fact, through supplying no adequate
motive for a widespread human energy. It is probably this lack of
motive that has led other theorizers to adopt the view that art is
idealization. Man with pardonable optimism desires, it is thought, to
improve on Nature.
* * * * *
Modern science, confronted with a problem like that of the rise of art,
no longer casts about to conjecture how art might have arisen, she
examines how it actually did arise. Abundant material has now been
collected from among savage peoples of an art so primitive that we
hesitate to call it art at all, and it is in these inchoate efforts that we are
able to track the secret motive springs that move the artist now as then.
Among the Huichol Indians,[4] if the people fear a drought from the
extreme heat of the sun, they take a clay disk, and on one side of it they
paint the "face" of Father Sun, a circular space surrounded by rays of
red and blue and yellow which are called his "arrows," for the Huichol

sun, like Phoebus Apollo, has arrows for rays. On the reverse side they
will paint the progress of the sun through the four quarters of the sky.
The journey is symbolized by a large cross-like figure with a central
circle for midday. Round the edge are beehive-shaped mounds; these
represent the hills of earth. The red and yellow dots that surround the
hills are cornfields. The crosses on the hills are signs of wealth and
money. On some of the disks birds and scorpions are painted, and on
one are curving lines which mean rain. These disks are deposited on the
altar of the god-house and left, and then all is well. The intention might
be to us obscure, but a Huichol Indian would read it thus: "Father Sun
with his broad shield (or 'face') and his arrows rises in the east, bringing
money and wealth to the Huichols. His heat and the light from his rays
make the corn to grow, but he is asked not to interfere with the clouds
that are gathering on the hills."
Now is this art or ritual? It is both and neither. We distinguish between
a form of prayer and a work of art and count them in no danger of
confusion; but the Huichol goes back to that earlier thing, a
presentation. He utters, expresses his thought about the sun and his
emotion about the sun and his relation to the sun, and if "prayer is the
soul's sincere desire" he has painted a prayer. It is not a little curious
that the same notion comes out in the old Greek word for "prayer,"
_euchè_. The Greek, when he wanted help in trouble from the
"Saviours," the Dioscuri, carved a picture of them, and, if he was a
sailor, added a ship. Underneath he inscribed the word _euchè_. It was
not to begin with a "vow" paid, it was a presentation of his strong inner
desire, it was a sculptured prayer.
Ritual then involves _imitation_; but does not arise out of it. It desires
to recreate an emotion, not to reproduce an object. A rite is, indeed, we
shall later see (p. 42), a sort of stereotyped action, not really practical,
but yet not wholly cut loose from practice, a reminiscence or an
anticipation of actual practical doing; it is fitly, though not quite
correctly, called by the Greeks a dromenon, "a thing done."