e of participation and oneness, by conscious imitation. Thus
though imitation is not the object of these dances, it grows up in and
through them. It is the same with art. The origin of art is not
_mimesis_, but _mimesis_ springs up out of art, out of emotional
expression, and constantly and closely neighbours it. Art and ritual
are at the outset alike in this, that they do not seek to copy a fact,
but to reproduce, to re-enact an emotion.

* * * * *

We shall see this more clearly if we examine for a moment this Greek
word _mimesis_. We translate m{-i}m{-e}sis by "imitation," and we do very
wrongly. The word _mimesis_ means the action or doing of a person called
a _mime_. Now a _mime_ was simply a person who dressed up and acted in a
pantomime or primitive drama. He was roughly what we should call an
_actor_, and it is significant that in the word _actor_ we stress not
imitating but acting, doing, just what the Greek stressed in his words
_dromenon_ and _drama_. The actor dresses up, puts on a mask, wears the
skin of a beast or the feathers of a bird, not, as we have seen, to copy
something or some one who is not himself, but to emphasize, enlarge,
enhance, his own personality; he masquerades, he does not mimic.

The celebrants in the very primitive ritual of the Mountain-Mother in
Thrace were, we know, called _mimes_. In the fragment of his lost play,
AEschylus, after describing the din made by the "mountain gear" of the
Mother, the maddening hum of the _bombykes_, a sort of spinning-top,
the clash of the brazen cymbals and the twang of the strings, thus goes
on:

"And bull-voices roar thereto from somewhere out of the unseen,
fearful _mimes_, and from a drum an image, as it were, of thunder
underground is borne on the air heavy with dread."

Here we have undoubtedly some sort of "bull-roaring," thunder-and
wind-making ceremony, like those that go on in Australia to-day. The
_mimes_ are not mimicking thunder out of curiosity, they are making it
and enacting and uttering it for magical purposes. When a sailor wants a
wind he makes it, or, as he later says, he whistles _for_ it; when a
savage or a Greek wants thunder to bring rain he makes it, becomes it.
But it is easy to see that as the belief in magic declines, what was
once intense desire, issuing in the making of or the being of a thing,
becomes mere copying of it; the mime, the maker, sinks to be in our
modern sens