"And bull-voices roar thereto from somewhere out of the unseen, fearful _mimes_, and from a drum an image, as it were, of thunder underground is borne on the air heavy with dread." Here we have undoubtedly some sort of "bull-roaring," thunder-and wind-making ceremony, like those that go on in Australia to-day. The _mimes_ are not mimicking thunder out of curiosity, they are making it and enacting and uttering it for magical purposes. When a sailor wants a wind he makes it, or, as he later says, he whistles _for_ it; when a savage or a Greek wants thunder to bring rain he makes it, becomes it. But it is easy to see that as the belief in magic declines, what was once intense desire, issuing in the making of or the being of a thing, becomes mere copying of it; the mime, the maker, sinks to be in our modern sense the mimic; as faith declines, folly and futility set in; the earnest, zealous _act_ sinks into a frivolous mimicry, a sort of child's-play. FOOTNOTES [5] These instances are all taken from _The Golden Bough,^3 The Magic Art_, I, 139 _ff._ [6] "The English Language," _Home University Library_, p. 28. CHAPTER III SEASONAL RITES: THE SPRING FESTIVAL We have seen in the last chapter that whatever interests primitive man, whatever makes him feel strongly, he tends to re-enact. Any one of his manifold occupations, hunting, fighting, later ploughing and sowing, provided it be of sufficient interest and importance, is material for a _dromenon_ or rite. We have also seen that, weak as he is in individuality, it is not his private and personal emotions that tend to become ritual, but those that are public, felt and expressed officially, that is, by the whole tribe or community. It is further obvious that such dances, when they develop into actual rites, tend to be performed at fixed times. We have now to consider when and why. The element of fixity and regular repetition in rites cannot be too strongly emphasized. It is a factor of paramount importance, essential to the development from ritual to art, from _dromenon_ to drama.