(M84) Thus the ceremonies which in many lands have been performed to hasten the departure of winter or stay the flight of summer are in a sense attempts to create the world afresh, to “re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s desire.” But if we would set ourselves at the point of view of the old sages who devised means so feeble to accomplish a purpose so immeasurably vast, we must divest ourselves of our modern conceptions of the immensity of the universe and of the pettiness and insignificance of man’s place in it. We must imagine the infinitude of space shrunk to a few miles, the infinitude of time contracted to a few generations. To the savage the mountains that bound the visible horizon, or the sea that stretches away to meet it, is the world’s end. Beyond these narrow limits his feet have never strayed, and even his imagination fails to conceive what lies across the waste of waters or the far blue hills. Of the future he hardly thinks, and of the past he knows only what has been handed down to him by word of mouth from his savage forefathers. To suppose that a world thus circumscribed in space and time was created by the efforts or the fiat of a being like himself imposes no great strain on his credulity; and he may without much difficulty imagine that he himself can annually repeat the work of creation by his charms and incantations. And once a horde of savages had instituted magical ceremonies for the renewal or preservation of all things, the force of custom and tradition would tend to maintain them in practice long after the old narrow ideas of the universe had been superseded by more adequate conceptions, and the tribe had expanded into a nation.