Thus, emotion is the principal active agent; but intellectual power also must gradually lay its hold on the system of belief. The principles discovered are formulated into a science and the cultivation of this science becomes the special duty of the priesthood, often as a secret art—esoteric system—in which concealment is conducive to the maintenance of the exclusiveness and peculiar power of the priest class. The science becomes partly mythologic-historical, partly dogmatic, and partly ritualistic.
Out of Religion Came Art
The artistic instinct develops partly in connection with worship, partly in the direction of its practical application to life; and although no very sharp line of distinction is drawn between the two tendencies, the germ at least of the difference between the fine and the industrial arts is thus in existence from the very earliest times. Worship gives rise to images and pictures, at first of the very roughest form. They are not mere symbols; they are the garments or habitations with which the spirit invests itself. The spirit may take up its abode anywhere according to the different beliefs of man—in a plant, an animal, a stone, above all, in a picture or effigy that symbolically reflects its peculiarities. Therefore, the ghosts of ancestors are embodied in ancestral images. Just as skulls were reverenced in earlier times, in later days the images of the dead (korwar) are worshipped. Such images are the oldest examples of the art of portraiture; and the oldest dolls are the rude puppets which according to the rites of many races—the American Indians, for example—widows must wear about them as tokens, or as the husks or wrappers of their husbands’ doubles.
Religion itself becomes poetry. The belief in the identity of spirits of the departed with animals, and the myths of metamorphosis, take the form of fables and fairy tales; the cosmogonic and theogonic conceptions develop into mythologies; hero sagas become epics; the myths of life in Nature become a glorification of the external world, an expression of unity with Nature, and thus a form of lyric poetry.
Artistic Expression of Life
Everyday life, too, demands artistic expression. At first the childish passion for the changing pictures that correspond with different ideas of the imagination joins with the desire to impress others, and finery in dress and ornamentation result. This has developed in every clime. Tattooing arises not only from a religious motive, but also from the desire for ornament. The painting of men’s bodies, the often grotesque ideas, such as artificial deformation of the head, knocking out and blackening of teeth, ear ornaments and mutilation of ears, pegs thrust through the lips, and various methods of dressing the hair, may be in part connected with religious conceptions, for here the most varied of motives co-operate to the same end. Yet, on the other hand, there is no doubt that they are also the outcome of a craving for variation in form and in colour. In the same way the dance is not only an act of worship; it is also a means of giving vent to latent animal spirits: thus, dances are often expressions of the tempestuous sensual instincts of a people.
The Birth of the Drama
The dance exhibits a special tendency to represent the ordinary affairs of life in a symbolic manner; thus there are war and hunting dances, and especially animal dances in which each of the participants believes himself to be permeated by the spirit of some animal which throughout the dance he endeavours to mimic. In this way dramatic representation, which is certainly based on the idea of personification, on the notion that a man for the time being may be possessed by the spirit of some other creature that speaks and acts through him, originates. Thus arose the primitive form of masques, in which men dressed themselves up to resemble various creatures, real or imaginary, as in the case of the animal masques of old time; for according to the popular idea the spirit dwells in the external, visible form, and through the imitation or adoption of its outward appearance we become identified with the spirit whose character we assume. Among many races not only masks proper were worn, but also the hides and hair or feathers of the creatures personated. Dramatic representation was furthered by the dream plays—especially popular among the American Indians—in which the events of dreams are adapted for acting and performed. Even as men seek illumination in dreams as to questions both divine and mundane, so do they anticipate through dreams the dramatic representations which shall be performed on holidays as expressions of life.
SAVAGE DANCES: THE FAR-OFF BEGINNINGS OF THE DRAMA