Themis, a study of the social origins of Greek ... - Warburg Institute

n] Collective Emotion 45
dance, men about to start out hunting will catch their game in
pantomime. Such cases are specially instructive because it is
fairly clear that the drama or Spco/j-ei'ou here is a sort of pre-
cipitated desire, a discharge of pent-up emotion. The thought of
the hunt, the desire to catch the game or kill the enemy cannot
find expression yet in the actual act; it grows and accumulates by
inhibition till at last the exasperated nerves and muscles can bear
it no longer and it breaks out into mimetic, anticipatory actiun.
Mimetic, not of what you see done by another, but of what you
desire to do yourself.
Now so far in these mimetic rites, whether commemorative or
anticipatory or magical, though they cover a large portion of the
ceremonies that when practised by savage peoples we call religious,
there is certainly nothing present that by any straining of language
can be called a god, nothing equivalent to what we mean now-a-
days by worship. In the Hymn of the Kouretes, as has already
been noted, though the god is there as Kouros, he is not wor-
shipped ; there is no praise, nor prayer, nor sacrifice, he is simply
bidden to come and to 'leap,' he and his attendants. The all-
important question must now be asked, how did this figure of the
god arise ? The answer has been in part anticipated in the
account of the Kouros.
The Dithyramb, we are always told, was not the outpouring of
an individual inspired singer, but rather a choric dance, the dance
and song of a band. As singing a Birth-Song the band must have
been a band of youth's just initiated or about to be initiated, dancing
an excited mimetic dance; but in less specialized rites it might be
a war- dance, a rain-dance, a thunder-dance. The dancers dancing
together utter their conjoint desire, their delight, their terror, in
steps and gestures, in cries of fear or joy or lamentation, in shrieks
of war. In so uttering they inevitably emphasize and intensify
it. Moreover being a collective emotion it is necessarily felt as
something more than the experience of the individual, as some-
thing dominant and external. The dancers themselves by every
means in their power seek to heighten this effect. They sink
their own personality and by the wearing of masks and disguises,
by dancing to a common rhythm, above all by the common
excitement, they become emotionally one, a true congregation, not