Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/123

 held in honour of Ha-o-kah, "The Giant." We enter the wigwam within which the ceremony is taking place. Round a fire, over which are boiling kettles full of meat, there are Indians dancing and singing. They wear no clothing but a conical cap of birch, so streaked with paint as to represent lightning, and some strips of birch round their loins. As they sing and dance they thrust their bare hands into the boiling pots, pull out pieces of meat and eat them scalding hot. For does not the god, Ha-o-kah, in whose honour they dance and sing, shield them from all pains? Here, and in many like cases, it is clear that the words of the choral song are altogether of secondary importance—the magic symbolism of dance and gesture is nearly everything. We watch an infant drama, a savage mystery-play, in which dance and music and gesticulation are as yet confusedly blended. Perhaps in the next tribe we meet we may find another of these infant dramas going on. Here the supply of buffalo-meat has fallen short. The prairie is deserted by the herds. Somehow a new supply must be secured; and the magic dance which the braves are now performing is designed to lure back the herds to the old hunting-grounds. The Indians, dressed in buffalo skins, are dancing the Buffalo-Dance; and, as each tired warrior drops out, acting as he does so the death of the buffalo, another brave takes his place; and so the dance goes on, perhaps for weeks, until the object of the magic rite is secured and a herd discovered on the prairies. Here, again, the symbolism is everything; as yet we are far from having reached the stage at which the words of the choral song are separated from the music and the dancing, much less written down.