Ancient Art and Ritual | Page 6

At the bottom of art, as its motive power and its mainspring, lies, not
the wish to copy Nature or even improve on her--the Huichol Indian

does not vainly expend his energies on an effort so fruitless--but rather
an impulse shared by art with ritual, the desire, that is, to utter, to give
out a strongly felt emotion or desire by representing, by making or
doing or enriching the object or act desired. The common source of the
art and ritual of Osiris is the intense, world-wide desire that the life of
Nature which seemed dead should live again. This common emotional
factor it is that makes art and ritual in their beginnings well-nigh
indistinguishable. Both, to begin with, copy an act, but not at first for
the sake of the copy. Only when the emotion dies down and is forgotten
does the copy become an end in itself, a mere mimicry.
It is this downward path, this sinking of making to mimicry, that makes
us now-a-days think of ritual as a dull and formal thing. Because a rite
has ceased to be believed in, it does not in the least follow that it will
cease to be done. We have to reckon with all the huge forces of habit.
The motor nerves, once set in one direction, given the slightest impulse
tend always to repeat the same reaction. We mimic not only others but
ourselves mechanically, even after all emotion proper to the act is dead;
and then because mimicry has a certain ingenious charm, it becomes an
end in itself for ritual, even for art.
* * * * *
It is not easy, as we saw, to classify the Huichol prayer-disks. As
prayers they are ritual, as surfaces decorated they are specimens of
primitive art. In the next chapter we shall have to consider a kind of
ceremony very instructive for our point, but again not very easy to
classify--the pantomimic dances which are, almost all over the world,
so striking a feature in savage social and religious life. Are they to be
classed as ritual or art?
These pantomime dances lie, indeed, at the very heart and root of our
whole subject, and it is of the first importance that before going further
in our analysis of art and ritual, we should have some familiarity with
their general character and gist, the more so as they are a class of
ceremonies now practically extinct. We shall find in these dances the
meeting-point between art and ritual, or rather we shall find in them the
rude, inchoate material out of which both ritual and art, at least in one

of its forms, developed. Moreover, we shall find in pantomimic
dancing a ritual bridge, as it were, between actual life and those
representations of life which we call art.
In our next chapter, therefore, we shall study the ritual dance in general,
and try to understand its psychological origin; in the following chapter
(III) we shall take a particular dance of special importance, the Spring
Dance as practised among various primitive peoples. We shall then be
prepared to approach the study of the Spring Dance among the Greeks,
which developed into their drama, and thereby to, we hope, throw light
on the relation between ritual and art.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Adonis, Attis, Osiris_,^2 p. 324.
[2] _Vit. Nik._, 13.
[3] _Rep._ X, 596-9.
[4] C.H. Lumholtz, Symbolism of the Huichol Indians, in _Mem. of the
Am. Mus. of Nat. Hist._, Vol. III, "Anthropology." (1900.)
CHAPTER II
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