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526 MEMOIR ON THE STUDY OF |
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effectual means to restore him to health; and if he himself cannot endure the fatigue of such an exercise, the physician or conjurer performs it in his name, as if the virtue of his activity could be transferred to his patient."
Sir J. Lubbock mentions some special dances practised among different peoples, and gives an illustration of a circle dance practised by the natives of Virginia round a circle of upright stones (p. 268).
Dr. Tylor (Anthropology', p. 296) says, " Savages and barbarians dance their joy and sorrow, love and rage, even their magic and religion. The forest Indians of Brazil, rattle in hand, stamp in one-two-three time round the great earthen pot of intoxicating kawi-liquor; or men or women dance a rude courting dance, advancing in lines with a kind of primitive polka step; or the ferocious war-dance is performed by armed warriors in paint. We have enough of the savage left in us to feel how Australians leaping and yelling at a corrobboree by firelight in the forest can work themselves up into frenzy for next day's fight. But with our civilised notions it is not so easy to understand that barbarians' dancing may mean still more than this; it seems to them so real, that they expect it to act on the world outside. Such an example as the buffalo dance (given ante, p. 518) shows how, in the lower level of culture, men dance to express their feeling and wishes. All this explains how in ancient religion dancing came to be one of the chief acts of worship. Religious processions went with song and dance to the Egyptian temples, and Plato said all dancing ought to be thus an act of religion. . . . Modern civilisation has mostly cast off the sacred dance. . . . To see this near its old state the traveller may visit the temples of India, or among the Lamas of Tibet watch the mummers in animal masks dancing the demons out or the new year in, to wild music of drums and shell-trumpets. Remnants of such ceremonies come down from the religion of England before Christian times are still sometimes to be seen in the dances of boys and girls round the midsummer bonfire or mummers of Yuletide."
Dr. Tylor continues: "At low levels in civilisation it is clear |
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