Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/216

188 Doubtless the fact that the spirit was—necessarily—assumed to be dead would in course of time require that the circumstances leading to his death should be represented dramatically as part of the rite. Doubtless, also, one natural course for the mythopoeic tendency to take would be to conceive and represent the death as a slaughter. But this tendency, though natural enough, was neither necessary nor universal. In other words, human sacrifice was not an original element in the rite or in its dramatic presentation, and that is why no trace of it is to be found either in the Mummers' Play or in Greek drama.

Greek tragedy, I have suggested, originated in funeral ceremonies commemorating the deeds and sufferings of deceased heroes. Greek comedy, we know, originated in harvest-festivals, in some ceremony in which the harvesters went about in procession wearing masks. It is therefore plausible to conjecture that the characters represented on this occasion were the vegetation-spirit and those who were concerned in bringing about his revivification—in fine, that Greek comedy and the Mummers' Play both sprang from the rite of revivification. At first the rite was a piece of serious magic performed for a practical object: the revivification was acted, but it was acted not as a drama but as a rite, not as a spectacle but as a means of bringing about a practical end. It became a performance and a mere piece of acting gradually, and became so in proportion as its original practical object became in the eyes of the performers and the spectators of less importance than the performance of the rite itself: the performance became the thing of real importance, it occupied the foreground of consciousness, while what had originally been its practical object gradually sank into the background and ultimately disappeared entirely from the consciousness of performers and spectators alike. This is but a case of a common psychological process: what was but a means to an end tends to become an end in itself. Money, which is but a means, becomes