I
In his thoughtful and very suggestive volume, The Threshold of Religion, Marett makes the assumption that
an inductive study of the ideas and customs of savagery will show, firstly, that an awareness of a fundamental aspect of life and of the world, which aspect I shall provisionally term “supernatural,” is so general as to be typical, and, secondly, that such an awareness is no less generally bound up with a specific group of vital reactions (p. 124).
Every student of such ideas and customs must know how thoroughly justified this assumption is. In studying the particular custom, and the ideas connected with it, with which we are here concerned, we find that this “awareness of the supernatural,” together with the “vital reactions,” are, at any rate in the earlier stages of its history, invariably present. That much, at all events, we have to go upon in seeking a theory as to the origin of the sacred dance. To account for its origin is, however, difficult; that is fully realized; and the present writer would desire to lay stress on the fact that as in seeking such origin he is largely in the domain of speculation and theory, nothing is further from his mind than to be dogmatic. The whole subject of the sacred dance has been so little dealt with excepting as a mere rite, that one is to a great extent on new ground; one must, therefore, be quite prepared to be convicted of fallacies.
That the sacred dance originated in prehistoric times goes without saying; but this means that no proofs can be adduced in support of any theory as to its origin; it must be a question of probabilities; perhaps only of possibilities. What is, however, certain is that since the sacred dance originated at a time when man was in a very primitive stage of culture, what first induced him to perform it must have been something very naïve and childlike. That, presumably, everyone would agree with. Now, there is no sort of doubt that one of the most ingrained characteristics of human nature is the imitative propensity. This is more pronounced in the child than in the grown man; and what holds good of the individual applies also to the race; the more uncultured man is, the more does he, mentally, approximate to the child; so that the further back we go in the history of the race, the more pronounced and childlike will be that imitative propensity. As Crawley has reminded us[19], Aristotle maintained that dancing is imitative; and in all its forms it is an artistic imitation of physical movement expressive of emotions or ideas. Rightly or wrongly, then, we believe that the sacred dance owes its origin to this imitative propensity in man.
Now, in the animistic stage what first suggested the presence of life in anything was movement. The cause of the movement was neither understood nor enquired into. A tree, swayed by the wind, moved; therefore it was alive. But it would not strike a more or less primitive savage that it was the wind which caused the movement. What he would instinctively have recognized was that here was something which he did not understand; and therefore there was a mystery about it which inspired awe. So, too, with streams, and rivers, and the sea; they were alive because they had motion. In course of time this would be modified in so far that the belief arose that the tree or stream contained life because of an indwelling spirit which caused the movement, thus indicating its presence; but even so, it would have been difficult for the savage to draw a distinction between the two at first. Whether the same course of savage “reasoning” will apply in regard to the sun, moon, and, later, to the stars, in the earlier stages of the period when he first began to take “reasoning” note of his surroundings, is doubtful; for it is probable that he looked around and downwards before he looked upwards. At any rate, sooner or later he would have realized that they too moved, and that therefore they were alive, either themselves, or animated by something, more probably by somebody. Thus motion, movement, which, on the analogy of man himself, was believed to denote life, was the first thing which the savage mind connected with supernatural powers[20].
We suggest, then, that the origin of the sacred dance was the desire of early man to imitate what he conceived to be the characteristic of supernatural powers. Not that this was, in the first instance, a dance in the generally accepted sense of the word; but merely a movement, whether in the form of the swaying of the body in imitation of trees, or a single-file running in imitation of a stream, or a more boisterous movement in imitation of the waves of the sea or of a storm-swept lake. The innate tendency to rhythmic motion would soon have asserted itself, and primitive dance, in the more usual sense, would result. But it would be a sacred dance in so far that it was performed in imitation of some supernatural power, vague and originally impersonal, as it undoubtedly was; to honour such by an imitative dance denotes a religious intention.
The reasonable objection will be urged that it was not only things which “moved” that early man regarded as living or as indwelt by a spirit, but that stones, for example, were among the very early things which were treated with veneration because they were believed to be the abodes of spirits; these did not move, so that the suggested theory of the origin of the sacred dance breaks down here. But when one seeks to penetrate the mind of uncultured man and to get behind his mental outlook, and especially when one contemplates the working of the child-mind which offers so many analogies with, and illustrations of that of the mentally immature savage, one becomes convinced that this veneration of stones, early as it was in the history of religion, was later than that of things which move. And the reason of this is simple; a moving thing attracts attention before that which does not move; that lies in the nature of things alike with the child and the savage mind. When once the moving things are believed to be the abodes of spirits, and the existence of these is universally recognized, then the further step that they exist in other things follows easily and naturally. We are thinking of the time when as yet early man was only impressed by those things which, because of their motion, attracted his attention.
Réville says that