The instinct of play found a foothold at the village feast in the débris which ritual, in its gradual transformation, left behind. It has already been noted as a constant feature in the history of institutions that a survival does not always remain merely a survival; it may be its destiny, when it is emptied of its first significance, to be taken up into a different order of ideas, and to receive a new lease of vitality under a fresh interpretation. Sacrifice ceases to be sacrament and becomes oblation. Dipping and smoking customs, originally magical, grow to be regarded as modes of sacrificial death. Other such waifs of the past become the inheritance of play. As the old conception of sacrifice passed into the new one, the subsidiary rites, through which the sacramental influence had of old been distributed over the worshippers and their fields, although by no means disused, lost their primitive meaning. Similarly, when human sacrifice was abolished, that too left traces of itself, only imperfectly intelligible, in mock or symbolical deaths, or in the election of the temporary king. Thus, even before Christianity antiquated the whole structure of the village festivals, there were individual practices kept alive only by the conservatism of tradition, and available as material for the play instinct. These find room in the festivals side by side with other customs which the same instinct not only preserved but initiated. Of course, the antithesis between play and cult must not be pushed too far. The peasant mind is tenacious of acts and forgetful of explanations; and the chapters to come will afford examples of practices which, though they began in play, came in time to have a serious significance of quasi-ritual, and to share in the popular imagination the prestige as fertility charms of the older ceremonies of worship with which they were associated. The _ludi_ to be immediately discussed, however, present themselves in the main as sheer play. Several of them have broken loose from the festivals altogether, or, if they still acknowledge their origin by making a special appearance on some fixed day, are also at the service of ordinary amusement, whenever the leisure or the whim of youth may so suggest.