Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/45

 Preside7itial Address. 33

To put the idea in its crudest form, a gang of savage zealots by rubbing shoulders in an orgiastic dance, — a mimic repre- sentation of the action or event in which they are, for the time, most deeply interested, such as a hunt, the outburst of vegetation in spring, the ripening of the harvest, — imbibe each other's Jiiaiia, "the common element in ghosts and gods, in the magical and the mystical, the supernal and the infernal, the unknown within and the unknown without," the vague feeling of Power or Awe, Supernaturalism, Teratism. " This vague force in man and in almost every- thing," says Miss Harrison.^s " is constantly trembling on the verge of personality," and becomes embodied in what is now called, by a rather clumsy term, the Eniautos Daimon, the spirit and potency of each recurring year. This spirit primitive man, fixing his glance not on the heaven above but on the earth beneath, by the practice of sympathetic or homoeopathic magic endeavours periodically to stimulate and reinforce. The group deity, then, in its ultimate analysis, is but the shadow of the Brocken mist, and as little remains of the sanctions or sentiment popularly associated with what we term religion, as of the conception . of a personal Deity."-^

This is not the place or time to criticise these far-reaching hypotheses. But we must remember that they rest upon the latest fashionable philosophy, which has been summed up in the expression, " Everything looks as if . . .," and on a scheme of .sociology which has encountered vigorous criticism.

Another important phase of the new doctrine is the mode by which this collective group emotion is expressed and recorded. This modern school attributes special import- ance to the dance as a representation in action of this emotion. In its pantomimic form the dance is the essence


 * Themis, p. 67.

"See the powerful criticism by L. R. Farnell, The Hihbert Joiiynal, vol. xi., No. 2 (Jan. 1913}, pp. 453 <-l •'<''/•

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