The charms, the prayer, the sacrifice, make up that side of the agricultural festival which may properly be regarded as cult: they do not make up the whole of it. It is natural to ask whether, side by side with the observances of a natural religion, there were any of a more spiritual type; whether the village gods of our Keltic and Teutonic ancestors were approached on festival occasions solely as the givers of the good things of earth, or whether there was also any recognition of the higher character which in time they came to have as the guardians of morality, such as we can trace alike in the ritual of Eleusis and in the tribal mysteries of some existing savage peoples. It is not improbable that this was so; but it may be doubted whether there is much available evidence on the matter, and, in any case, it cannot be gone into here[484]. There is, however, a third element of the village festival which does demand consideration, and that is the element of play. The day of sacrifice was also a day of cessation from the ordinary toil of the fields, a holiday as well as a holy day. Sacred and secular met in the amorous encounters smiled upon by the liberal wood-goddess, and in the sacramental banquet with its collops of flesh and spilth of ale and mead. But the experience of any bank holiday will show that, for those who labour, the suspension of their ordinary avocations does not mean quiescence. When the blood is heated with love and liquor, the nervous energies habitually devoted to wielding the goad and guiding the plough must find vent in new and for the nonce unprofitable activities. But such activities, self-sufficing, and primarily at least serving no end beyond themselves, are, from pushpin to poetry, exactly what is meant by play[485].