ghters of Shiloh"--a touching example apparently of early
so-called 'marriage by capture'! Or there were dances, also partly or
originally religious, of a quite orgiastic and Bacchanalian character,
like the Bryallicha performed in Sparta by men and women in hideous
masks, or the Deimalea by Sileni and Satyrs waltzing in a circle; or the
Bibasis carried out by both men and women--a quite gymnastic exercise in
which the performers took a special pride in striking their own buttocks
with their heels! or others wilder still, which it would perhaps not be
convenient to describe.

(1) [gr Epilhnioi umnoi]: hymns sung over the winepress
(Dictionary).

We must see how important a part Dancing played in that great panorama
of Ritual and Religion (spoken of in the last chapter) which, having
originally been led up to by the 'Fall of Man,' has ever since the dawn
of history gradually overspread the world with its strange procession of
demons and deities, and its symbolic representations of human destiny.
When it is remembered that ritual dancing was the matrix out of which
the Drama sprang, and further that the drama in its inception (as still
to-day in India) was an affair of religion and was acted in, or in
connection with, the Temples, it becomes easier to understand how all
this mass of ceremonial sacrifices, expiations, initiations, Sun and
Nature festivals, eucharistic and orgiastic communions and celebrations,
mystery-plays, dramatic representations, myths and legends, etc., which
I have touched upon in the preceding chapters--together with all the
emotions, the desires, the fears, the yearnings and the wonderment which
they represented--have practically sprung from the same root: a root
deep and necessary in the psychology of Man. Presently I hope to show
that they will all practically converge again in the end to one meaning,
and prepare the way for one great Synthesis to come--an evolution also
necessary and inevitable in human psychology.

In that truly inspired Ode from which I quoted a few pages back, occur
those well-known words whose repetition now will, on account of their
beauty, I am sure be excused:--

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come