The beast dances found widespread over the savage world took their rise when men really believed, what St. Francis tried to preach: that beasts and birds and fishes were his "little brothers." Or rather, perhaps, more strictly, he felt them to be his great brothers and his fathers, for the attitude of the Australian towards the kangaroo, the North American towards the grizzly bear, is one of affection tempered by deep religious awe. The beast dances look back to that early phase of civilization which survives in crystallized form in what we call _totemism_. "Totem" means tribe, but the tribe was of animals as well as men. In the Kangaroo tribe there were real leaping kangaroos as well as men-kangaroos. The men-kangaroos when they danced and leapt did it, not to _imitate_ kangaroos--you cannot imitate yourself--but just for natural joy of heart because they _were_ kangaroos; they belonged to the Kangaroo tribe, they bore the tribal marks and delighted to assert their tribal unity. What they felt was not _mimesis_ but "participation," unity, and community. Later, when man begins to distinguish between himself and his strange fellow-tribesmen, to realize that he is _not_ a kangaroo like other kangaroos, he will try to revive his old faith, his old sense of participation and oneness, by conscious imitation. Thus though imitation is not the object of these dances, it grows up in and through them. It is the same with art. The origin of art is not _mimesis_, but _mimesis_ springs up out of art, out of emotional expression, and constantly and closely neighbours it. Art and ritual are at the outset alike in this, that they do not seek to copy a fact, but to reproduce, to re-enact an emotion. * * * * * We shall see this more clearly if we examine for a moment this Greek word _mimesis_. We translate mīmēsis by "imitation," and we do very wrongly. The word _mimesis_ means the action or doing of a person called a _mime_. Now a _mime_ was simply a person who dressed up and acted in a pantomime or primitive drama. He was roughly what we should call an _actor_, and it is significant that in the word _actor_ we stress not imitating but acting, doing, just what the Greek stressed in his words _dromenon_ and _drama_. The actor dresses up, puts on a mask, wears the skin of a beast or the feathers of a bird, not, as we have seen, to copy something or some one who is not himself, but to emphasize, enlarge, enhance, his own personality; he masquerades, he does not mimic. The celebrants in the very primitive ritual of the Mountain-Mother in Thrace were, we know, called _mimes_. In the fragment of his lost play, Æschylus, after describing the din made by the "mountain gear" of the Mother, the maddening hum of the _bombykes_, a sort of spinning-top, the clash of the brazen cymbals and the twang of the strings, thus goes on: