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 REVIEWS 707

Stone-Worship;" "Aquatic Theogamies and Water-Worship;" "Fecundating Practices of Plant- Worship ;" "Phytomorphic Theo- gamies;" "Of Miraculous Births Due to Simultaneous Action of Divine Plants and Sacred Waters;" "Theromorphic Theoga- mies;" "Meteorological Fecundations;" Solar Theogamies, or Births Due to the Action of the Sun;" "Anthropomorphic Theo- gamies." These chapter-titles indicate the material and the method of presentation, as well as the related topics suggested thereby. In two closing chapters Saintyves discusses the subject of Christ's birth, which he considers at once solar and anthropomor- phic, ranging it thus under the last two of his recognized classes.

Frederick Starr

Les rites de passage. By Arnold Van Gennep. Paris : Emile Nourry, 1909. 8vo., pp. ii+288.

The author of this important and original work begins by pre- senting a classification of rites in general. He recognizes four coupled groups; thus a right may be animistic (personal) or dynamistic (impersonal), sympathetic or contagious, positive or negative, direct or indirect. These characteristic and fundamental forms may be variously combined so that a rite may be dynamistic- contagious, direct-negative, animistic-sympathetic, indirect-posi- tive, etc., etc. Each case presented needs individual analysis and study. Van Gennep then calls attention to ceremonial sequences, which he believes have been sadly neglected: too much attention has been given to one or another detail, little or none at all to sequences. While in actual study, in any g^ven ensemble of cere- monies the greater part of the rites belong to one category, we find other elements entering. Thus, in the midst of a clearly ani- mistic-positive ritual, one encounters a group of dynamistic-positive elements. The purpose of the author is to present what he calls "rites of passage" — i. e., those rites which accompany the passage of the individual from one situation to another, from one world (cosmic or social) to another. These rites have been often pre- sented in detail, from one or another point of view ; they have not, heretofore been recognized as identical, nor grouped into one class. Rites of passage include the rites of the doorway and threshold, of hospitality, of adoption, of conception and childbed, of birth, of