ater mores to the ancient "natural" ways, because the
later ways are a reflection on the ancestors who were "uncultivated."
Their ghosts will be displeased at the new ways and will inflict ill
fortune on the group. The festival is not a time at which to emphasize
the novelty, but to set it aside and revert to old ways. How far back
shall the reversion go? What is "natural"? As no one ever has known from
what depths of beastliness, rendered more acute by some intelligence,
man came, no one has ever known what "nature" would be. Men reverted
actually to some ancient custom of their ancestors beyond which they
knew nothing, and which therefore to them seemed primitive and original.
The festivals were always outside of the routine of regular life. We,
for a holiday frolic, relax, for ourselves and our children, the
discipline of ordinary life; for instance, on the Fourth of July. In the
theater we make allowances for what we would not tolerate in the street
or parlor. That a thing is in jest is, and always has been, an excuse
for what is a little beyond the limit otherwise observed. It was a
favorite Arab jest to fasten the train of a woman's dress, while she was
sitting, to the waist of it, so that when she arose her dress would be
disordered.[1987] She must learn to guard herself.

+616. Chaldean and Mexican myths of reproduction dramatically
represented.+ In the mythical period of Chaldea the worship of the Great
Mother Ishtar (the patroness of sex attraction, but a goddess whose love
was a calamity to all her husbands,[1988] perhaps a mythical
representation of the perils and pains of sex) was a setting loose of
sex passion from the later societal ("moral") regulations, in favor of
the original passionate impulse of sex and reproduction. The festival
was, therefore, a period of license. The seat of the licentious rites,
and of sacral prostitution, was Uruk, the city of the dead (i.e. of
ancestors), where men liked to be buried (in order to join their
ancestors).[1989] The Tammuz (Adonis) worship was connected with the
worship of Ishtar, the relation between the god and the goddess being
different in different myths. The Tammuz worship was a dramatic
enactment of the death and resurrection of the god (connected with the
decay and renewal of the world of vegetation), with corresponding
lamentations and rejoicings of the worshipers.[1990] In Mexico we find a
parallel pantomime of the nature process at a religious harvest
f