595. The same customs in the Old Testament. In 1 Sam. i Hannah vowed that if God would give her a son she would devote him to the Lord, in sign of which no razor should touch him. She gave him to be an aedituus, who lived in the temple awaiting divine instructions and commissions. In Josh. ix. 23, 27 we have a case of war captives condemned to menial service in the temple. In Ezek. xliv. 8, 9, the people are blamed for putting heathen in the temple service instead of doing it themselves. The kedeshim, temple prostitutes of both sexes, are frequently mentioned in the Old Testament, especially at every reformation of the religion. They seem to become objects of condemnation within the period of the history.

596. Antagonism of abundance and excess. The Germans had a Corn-mother, a goddess of agricultural growth and fertility. The Mexicans also had a mother-of-the-gods, Teteoinnan. The former became a harlot. The latter, by her sex activity, brought about growth and abundant reproduction, and became a goddess of lewdness.[1925] Thus wherever the agricultural interest controls this set of ideas we see the struggle between the idea that unrestrained sex indulgence produces abundance and the idea that it produces excess, lewdness, and harm. We can still trace to the metaphorical use of "mother," "father," and "son," and also to the use of the same words to express the possession of a quality in a high degree, or a tie of destiny, some of the most important concepts of our own religion.

597. Survivals of sacral harlotry. Analogous customs in Hindostan. The early Portuguese travelers to the East found sacral harlotry in Cochin China. All virgins of noble birth were bound by vows from infancy. Otherwise no honorable man would marry them.[1926] Modern Egyptian dancing girls, Ghowazy or Barmeky, had a tradition that they belonged to a race by themselves. They kept up isolation and peculiar customs. Each was compelled to surrender to a stranger and then to marry a man of her own group.[1927] "Probably Heaven and Earth are the most ancient of all Vedic gods, and from their fancied union, as husband and wife, the other deities and the whole universe were at first supposed to spring." "The whole world is embodied in the woman.... Women are gods. Women are vitality," say the Vedic Scriptures. In Manu[1928] "the self-existent god is described as dividing his own substance and becoming half male and half female."[1929] A competent author, who wrote at the beginning of the nineteenth century, says that the women attached to the temples in Hindostan sang and danced twice a day, the songs being about mythological subjects and indecent according to the current mores of everyday life. Vows play a very important part in the Hindoo system of sacral harlotry. A woman, with the consent of her husband, vowed her unborn child, if a girl, to the temple, in order to get an easy confinement. It was no disgrace to a family to have a daughter living this life. Barren women visited remote temples, under a vow of self-devotion, in order to bear children. They were victimized by the priests. At festivals of Vishnu priests tried to enlist girls in the attendant multitude. The line between the sacral usage and licentiousness was broken down at some remote resorts, but in the great temples the conduct of the women was not at all shameless, although they were trained to please. They observed perfect decorum. No one could venture on any impropriety with them. The bystanders would not allow it, and the proceedings were all controlled by strict rules. The Brahmins propounded a doctrine that intercourse with the consecrated women would free from sin.[1930] The vows show us the motive which maintained this usage, and these statements clearly show the conventionalization which enveloped the whole. Although the practices in the temples have undergone some modification, they still exist. There are secret mysteries, and dramatic representations of mythological incidents, which seem like survivals of the ancient usages above mentioned.[1931] There are courtesans at the temples near which pilgrims congregate, and they pay part of their earnings to the temple.[1932] The holy festival of Jugganatha, at Puri, which is a spring festival of Vedic origin, is a kind of Saturnalia, in which the bonds of social order are loosened and the standards of decency are laid aside. There are rites in which "words are uttered by persons who, on other occasions, would think themselves disgraced by the use of them."[1933] The Phalgun festival in northern India commemorates Krishna's voluptuous amusements. The rites are indecent.[1934] The mythological stories about the gods have to be converted by interpretation or special pleas into something which modern mores can tolerate.[1935] Songs, dances, pantomimes, and mythological dramas are represented in front of the image of a deity by men, but in the presence of a general company of men and women.[1936] The Sakta worshipers are a sect who worship Sakta, the mighty, mysterious, feminine force recognized in nature, and which they personify as the Mother of the Universe, like the ancient Mother-goddess. This goddess is manifested, for Hindoos, in natural appetites, in highly developed faculties by which one exalts one's self and defeats one's enemies. The rites of the sect are horrible and obscene, and have for their purpose to violate and outrage the restrictions in the mores. By those rites men and women obtain union with the Supreme Being. The members of the sect call themselves "perfect ones" and all others "beasts." They use mystic texts and secret orgies, at which they drink strong drinks, eat meat and fish, and practice sex license. They recognize no caste.[1937] There are also other sects which have inverted all conceptions of decency, propriety, and expediency. They practice self-torture, crime, and uncleanliness, and use loathsome food, etc. In all these matters they show great ingenuity of invention. They are dying out.[1938] There are also sects which are cannibal, incestuous, and practicers of secret license and obscenity.[1939] In some parts of the Madras presidency, girls are made basivis by a vow of the parents, in order to give them the privileges of males. This custom may be derived from the institution of the "appointed daughter," that is, a daughter selected in order that her son may perform the rites for her father (who had no son) and may carry on the line. Modern basivis "live in their father's house. They do not marry, yet they bear children, the father of whom they may choose at pleasure, and the children inherit their family name." It is a device to insure male descendants, and is so regulated by religious consecration and rules that it is recognized in the mores. If a basivi breaks the rules she falls to a status which is very different. Men are also dedicated and wear female dress, if they are born imperfect or malformed.[1940]

598. Lingam and yoni. The lingam symbol is to be seen all over India, alone or with the yoni. In some parts of India the lingam is worn as an amulet.[1941] The word "lingam" is said to mean "symbol."[1942] To Europeans the object seems indecent and obscene. If it is of phallic origin, "the Hindus are no more conscious of the fact than we of the similar origin of the maypole."[1943] It is no more erotic than an egg or a seed. It is a symbol of Siva, the eternal reproductive power of nature, reintegrating after disintegration. One form of Siva is androgyne. The dualism of the male, spirit, and the female, matter, is essential to all creation. "To one imbued with these dualistic conceptions the lingam and the yoni are suggestive of no improper ideas."[1944]

599. Conventionalization. In all these cases it is evident that the mores extend their protection over archaic and sacred things, and preserve them instead of forbidding them. The great means of preserving them is by conventionalization. They are put under a conventional understanding, different from the everyday usages with their ethics, and are judged by an arbitrary standard. In the English translation of the Bible words and phrases are used which are archaic and now under taboo in everyday life. Our children have to be taught that "that is in the Bible," that is, they have to learn the conventionalization by which the archaic forms are covered. The words in the Bible are not subject to criticism, and they cannot be cited to justify similar usage in common life.

600. Mores of Hindostan. The phenomena which are presented in Hindostan, when studied from our standpoint, show how completely different may be the estimate of things according to use and wont. The phenomena are very different in character. Some of them are cases of degeneracy and aberration of customs, after they have been discarded by the mores, have become vicious, and have fallen into the hands of abandoned persons who have given up all position inside the mores. Others of these customs show how old usages, when brought in question, lose innocence. Consciousness and reflection produce doubt and then shame. Sometimes things which are private or secret by convention come in contact with things which are secret by vice. All the phenomena in Hindostan show how completely the moral effect depends on the integrity or decay of conventionalization. The conventionalization is still so strong that the effects on public morals which we might expect are not produced. Public manners are marked by decency and propriety and the society is not vicious.[1945] Things which exist under conventionalization never furnish grounds for an ethical judgment on the group which practices them.

601. Mexican mores. Drunkenness. In Mexico also there were goddesses of erotic passion to whom men and women were consecrated. Courtesans sometimes immolated themselves in the service of the goddess. The notion of virtue in resistance to passion existed, but the goddess, like the Greek Venus, resented any effort to escape her sway and exerted herself to defeat it.[1946] The Mayas did not maintain a severe form of sex taboo and they had festivals at which that taboo was entirely suspended.[1947] Pederasty also existed under the sanction of religion. Young men in the training house, which was a house of lamentation and penance, were allowed license which was contrary to the current mores of the society, but was an old privilege of soldiers. The dances which they performed daily were obscene. The persons in the dance represented vegetation demons, and the dances helped to get good crops.[1948] The notion was not to employ sympathetic magic, but the men, by parallel operations, were supposed to help in the work of fructification which the demons were accomplishing in the plant. Hence a great drama of human cooperation was carried on in the dances. Snakes and frogs were eaten because they were demons of rain and growth. The obscene dances were "not consequences of sex desire, but, on account of their antiquity, they were accepted as a matter of course."[1949] At the time of the Spanish conquest public opinion about the dances was not fixed, but they lasted on through the force of ancient religious tradition. We may be sure that the case of Mexico throws light on the ancient usages of sacral harlotry. In comparatively recent times there were cases in Russia of sex license on the eve of great Christian festivals.[1950] There is a parallel also, amongst the Mexicans, in the case of drunkenness. Religion controlled and forbade drunkenness, but then again allowed it on specified occasions. To drink pulque was forbidden, under penalty of death, except to prescribed persons at certain festivals, but on the festival of the fire god all intoxicated themselves by custom and tradition.[1951] Kings in Central America were expressly allowed to intoxicate themselves at festivals, and functionaries were appointed to perform their duties while they were incapacitated. It is nowadays considered not dishonorable to become intoxicated during festivals, and "it may be observed that Indians now thank God for the gift of drunkenness."[1952] That is a case of the persistence of ideas born of old mores long after another religion and social system have displaced the folkways themselves.

602. Japanese mores. In Japan the government formerly bought girls of fourteen from their parents and caused them to be educated in feminine accomplishments. For ten years they lived as courtesans to the profit of the state. They were then discharged with a sum of money. The number of them at one time was twenty thousand. They furnished at the tea houses afternoon entertainments at which families were present, but men alone remained later.[1953] When a people, through acquaintance with mores different from its own, is led to philosophize about the latter, or is made conscious of them and uncertain about them, then the old mores of that people lose their innocence. The Japanese have had much experience of this within fifty years.

603. Chinese religion and mores. For contrast it may be worth while to notice the evidence collected by Schallmeyer[1954] that the specifically Chinese religions are free from all immoral notions and usages. Indeed the Chinese religions are said to be hostile to indecency. Meadows is quoted as saying that any sentence of the canonical writings of China could be read in any English family without offense, and that there is nothing in Chinese religious rites resembling the immoral rites which are met with elsewhere. Chinese lyric poetry is said to be pure.

604. Philosophy of interest in reproduction. Incest. Some reserve in regard to the interpretation of myths is proper and necessary, but the absorbing interest of sex production for man, after he begins to depend upon it and cooperate with it for his food supply, is a product of the study of myths which may be accepted with confidence. That interest was no more sensual than interest in the rainfall, and the mythologizing about it was no more depraved than mythologizing about creation or language. Men were sure to apply all which they learned about reproduction in food plants and animals to their own reproduction. If Chaldean civilization goes back five or six thousand years before Christ, then the Chaldeans had had ample time, even before Hammurabi, to experience the evils of overpopulation and of sex vice. In the Chaldean mythology Ishtar, goddess of all sex attraction and repulsion, destroyed all the lovers whom she selected. She had the double character, which appears in all myths and philosophy, of sex license and sex renunciation together. She was a goddess of the mother family and polyandric.[1955] The two policies, sex license and sex renunciation, were both advocated at the same time in the early centuries of the Christian era and in the Middle Ages. Men found out that the problem of reproduction for them was far more complicated than the multiplication of dates to the utmost limit. At this point of knowledge instinctive or intelligent regulations had to be put on physical appetites. For primitive men the reproductive function is as simple a function as eating or sleeping. It is not in itself wicked or base. It is naive until knowledge comes. Then it is found that rules must be made to regulate the interest. If there are rules, there is the sense of wrongdoing in the breach of them. A thing which is tabooed becomes interesting and more or less awful. The numbers of the sexes are never exactly equal, and the proportion is further disturbed by polygamy. Therefore experience of evil and inconvenience forced some reflection and some judgments as to life policy. Regulations were devised behind which there was a philosophy of the satisfaction of interests; that is to say, mores were developed to cover the case. There seems also to be some connection between sacral harlotry and the prevention of incest. The poorest who cannot marry or buy slaves have always practiced incest (sec. 516). Sacral harlotry won another religious sanction from these cases. In the laws of Hammurabi we find two classes of women attached to the temple. If the interpretations of the specialists may be trusted, the arrangement was in one class of cases in the nature of a life annuity, and those who had no husband had the god for a husband,—an idea which, with one or another new coloring, has come down to our own time. That any one should renounce the sex function was not within the mental horizon of early times. When the women lived in the temple that fact established conventionalization about them and gave to their life that regulation which has made decency and order in all ages. Their case was defined and sanctioned in the mores. The couples retired outside the temple.[1956] When marriage was accompanied by very easy divorce and could not be defined except as a form of property right of the husband, when there were concubines who were not wives only because they had no property, and slaves who had no defined relation to the household until they had borne children to the head of it, the women in the temple might be surrounded by other special forms of taboo which would give them a status within the mores. They were "holy" by virtue of their consecration to the goddess.[1957] So far as we know, their lives were not spent in dissipation. The accounts in Herodotus and Baruch vi. 43, of the later usage at Babylon show that there was method and decorum in the institution, and that it was carried on with conventional dignity. It is our custom to think out the consistency of all our doctrines and usages. It is certain that ancient peoples did not do that, just as the masses now do not. They accepted and lived in unquestioned usage. Therefore we know of cases in classic society in which maidens and matrons on special occasions shared in functions which seem totally repugnant to their character. The explanation lies in conventionalization within the mores for an occasion or under a conjuncture of circumstances. It is unquestionably possible that in that way lewdness can be set aside and thus corrupting effect on character can be prevented.

605. The archaic is sacred. In the minds of primitive people all which is archaic is sacred and all which is novel is questionable. Therefore religion holds and consecrates whatever is archaic and traditional. The appetites of men were anterior to any mores regulative of them, and the goddess Ishtar, Astarte, Aphrodite, or Venus is a goddess of erotic passion and reproduction. The folkways devised to prevent experienced ills are an invasion of her domain and a rebellion against her sway. The regulations cannot be made absolute for a long time. There must be a compromise. Some females must be given to the goddess as devotees, at least under conditions, or there must be set times and places within which her sway shall be unhampered by human rules. The conditions establish conventionalization around an institution. It is by this process and by changing the conditions that marriage has been made what it now is. Concubinage, slave women, harlotry, and all other forms but the prescribed one have been put under taboo. It is very possible that some future generation will look back in wonder at our self-complacency, which feels no care or responsibility for the women who are forced, in our system, to renounce sex. It is safe to say that the Chaldeans of 2500 B.C. would have been as much shocked at the inhumanity of our arrangement as we can be at the lewdness of theirs.

606. Child sacrifice. The temple consecration of women must be connected with child sacrifice. The latter is logically anterior. Their historical relation we do not know. To dedicate a girl to the goddess would be an alternative to the sacrifice of her. All forms of child sacrifice and sacral suicide go back to the pangs and terrors of men under loss and calamity. Something must be found which would wring pity and concession from the awful superior powers who afflict mankind. Every one born under this human lot must perish if he is not redeemed. His first vicarious sacrifice is his firstborn, but if he can get a war captive from a foreign group this substitute may be accepted. The Mexican human sacrifices were of this kind. The people stood around assenting and rejoicing, because the rite meant salvation to themselves and their children. A man who took a captive in war gave him to the priest to be sacrificed, and he might not eat of the flesh, "since the victim was in a sense his son," that is, took the place of his son as a vicarious sacrifice for himself. They also sacrificed their own infants.[1958] Child sacrifice expresses the deepest horror and suffering produced by experience of the human lot. Men must do it. Their interests demanded it, however much it might pain them. Human sacrifices may be said to have been universal. They lasted down to the half-civilized stage of all nations and sporadically even later,[1959] and they have barely ceased amongst the present half-civilized peoples.[1960] They are not primarily religious. They are a reaction of men under the experience of the ills of life, inventing a world philosophy and putting agents behind it, in order to have something, if it be only a delusion, to which hope of escape can attach. Human sacrifices are based on an inference or deduction. There is behind them an assumption as to the character and logic of the superior powers who rule the aleatory interest. It is not until skepticism arises as to this assumption that the usage can be given up.

607. Beast sacrifice substituted for human sacrifice. In the case of Abraham and Isaac, the former was "tried" by God, apparently meaning that he underwent some doubt whether he ought not to sacrifice his son as other west Semites did theirs, and whether a beast would not suffice (Gen. xxii. 7). For his descendants the legend fixed the usage and doctrine (verse 13), different from that of the other west Semites, that a beast was a due substitute. The Chaldees followed the same reasoning.[1961] According to the mythology of the Egyptians there was a great destruction of men in the reign of the god Ra, but when he mounted to the sky he replaced the sacrifice of men by that of beasts.[1962] In the tragedy of Iphigenia, Iphigenia is not slain. Artemis snatches her away and puts a hind in her place. Robertson Smith[1963] thinks that the notion of the ancients that the sacrifice of human beings was anterior to that of beasts, and that the latter were substitutes, was a "false inference from traditional forms of ritual that had ceased to be understood." At Hierapolis sacrificed children were called oxen.[1964] All the Baals demanded human sacrifices.[1965] In every case in which the mores had overcome the terror which made human sacrifices, the mythology invented explanations. It was forbidden to the Jews to make their children "pass through the fire" to Molech.[1966] They often did it. This shows that their mores had not yet outgrown it, but that religious teachers were trying to forbid it.[1967] They held the same doctrine as the neighboring nations, that the firstborn belonged to God.[1968] The firstborn must be sacrificed or redeemed.[1969] They had doctrines of ransom by beasts, as above, or by money,[1970] or by circumcision, if the incoherent text is rightly interpreted.[1971] Nevertheless, they never were sure enough of their position before the captivity to hold to it against the faith and usage of neighboring nations.[1972] The doctrine in Micah vi. 6-8, as early as the end of the eighth century B.C., raised the real issue about the sense and utility of all sacrifices in its widest form, but that doctrine was much too far beyond the mores of the time to have any effect.

608. Mexican doctrine of greater power through death. Preuss says: "In the ancient Mexican cultus I recognized, to my astonishment, that really spirits were killed in the sacrificed men, in order that they [the spirits] might thus be rendered capable of being born again, and rendering greater services to men."[1973] Death was believed to enhance the power of the spirits who ruled meteorological phenomena. The notion was that insects caused meteorological phenomena; then they were gods; the insects and beasts gave to the gods the magic power which they (insects and beasts) once had over rainfall, etc. The humming bird which hibernates and wakes again in spring was thought to cause the heat of summer. Therefore it was taken to be an envelope of the war god. Free flow of blood lets loose magic power. Hence the great bloodshedding in the Mexican cultus. "Human sacrifice is in Mexico the same in sense as beast sacrifice. In both cases, magic powers, magic beasts and spirits, are killed." By death new birth with greater magic power becomes possible.[1974]

609. Motives of child sacrifice. The Semites adopted the world philosophy which lies back of human sacrifice and incorporated it with their religion, which thereby became gloomy and ferocious. What a man must sacrifice was what he loved most, and that was his firstborn child. It was rationalizing to argue that a beast could be substituted with equal effect, and we often find that people who had advanced to that point of philosophy, when face to face with a great calamity showed that they did not believe that the effect was equal. They went back to child sacrifice.[1975] The Hebrews in the seventh century thought that they felt the wrath of God and they tried to avert it in this way.[1976] Tiele thinks that there is no evidence of child sacrifice or of the temple consecration of women in the Euphrates valley in historical times, but in Syria and Arabia child sacrifice lasted on in spite of the culture of the Aramaeans and Phoenicians. In old Arabia fathers burned their little daughters as sacrifices to the goddess.[1977] Human sacrifices were used for auguries before any important enterprise, and as thank offerings for victory or success. Every year a number of children of the foremost families were sacrificed as an expiation for the sins of the nation, "while fiendish music drowned their cries and the lamentations of their mothers."[1978] The Carthaginians kept up the custom. The leading families were bound to furnish the sacrifice as representatives of the commonwealth. The children to be sacrificed were selected by lot from those who were liable. Children were exchanged in order to be saved. The parents might not lament, for to do so would deprive the sacrifice of its efficacy.[1979] The custom was an abomination to the Romans, but it was so firmly fixed in the mores of the Carthaginians that the conquerors could not stop it. The proconsul Tiberius put an end to it by hanging the priests of the cult to the trees of their own temple grove.[1980] As Tertullian says that soldiers who executed this order were still living when he wrote, the order of Tiberius must have been issued about the middle of the second century A.D. or a little later.

610. Dedication by vows. The connection between child sacrifice and the temple consecration of girls is in the substitution of the latter for the former, as a ransom. The girl devoted to death belonged to the goddess in one way, if not in the other. Vows made in illness sometimes included such substitution. In the historic period, after child sacrifice had ceased in the Euphrates valley, many variations occurred. Barren women made vows. Children were vowed to the goddess for life or for a time. They were redeemed by money which they earned in the temple life. The accumulation of a dowry was only a variation.[1981] In later times (second century A.D.) we find the sacrifice of a woman's hair as a substitute for herself.[1982] Men were also dedicated in sex perversion.

611. Degeneration of the customs of consecrating women. Evidently vicarious sacrifice and expiatory sacrifice are very ancient heathen ideas. They contain deductions and assumptions about the nature of the deity which are of the first theological importance. The cases of custom which have been described also show the power and persistency of theological dogma to override for centuries the strongest interests and sentiments. Evidently the variations in the custom marked the breaking down of the boundaries which held it firm in the religious mores. The Babylonian custom described by Herodotus seems to be a variation by which every woman was held bound to the goddess. Then sensuality, priestcraft, greed, and frivolity easily used such a custom until it became a root of corruption. This is what happened, and forms of the custom which had no sense but the gratification of licentiousness spread around the Mediterranean. The old female sex mores were very simple and austere, but they were corrupted after the middle of the second century B.C. Those of Roman Carthage, if we can trust Salvianus, became more corrupt than those of Punic Carthage ever had been. They were less ferocious and more frankly voluptuous. Salvianus's description of southern Gaul makes it as bad as Africa. According to him the Vandals were pure-minded, and their mores were so pure and firm that they successfully resisted the Roman corruption and put the sex relation back again on the basis of the "law of God."[1983]

612. Our traditions from Israel. If now we turn back to the Israelites we can see the stream by which our own mores have come down to us. There arose amongst the Israelites, in the tenth century B.C., an opposition to the religion which was common to the west Semites. It was like the reform of the Iranian religion by the magi, who produced a religion which was too severe and exacting for any but priests to live by it. There have also been many attempts to reform Islam from within. They have taken the form of throwing off later additions and returning to primitive purity, that is, to the mode of life of Arabs in Mohammed's time. In some cases (e.g. the Wahabees of the nineteenth century) the reforms have originated with people who were on a lower grade of life than the mass of Moslems. Present-day scholars find the origin of the resistance of Israelitish prophets to the prevailing religion of western Asia in the hostility of a rustic population, with a primitive mode of life and archaic mores, to the luxury of Tyre and Sidon, wealthy cities of commerce and industry.[1984] The conflict was between two sets of mores. The biblical scholars now tell us that Jahveh was a Baal amongst other Palestinian Baals until this antagonism arose. Then he was made the god in whose name the ancient mores of Israel were defended against the introduction of luxury and licentiousness. The antagonism was between simple, rustic, largely pastoral modes of life and the ways of cities with wealth, culture, and luxury. This is a permanent social antagonism, but it carried with it the antagonism of simplicity to sensuality, materialism, formal manners, and luxury. For four or five centuries a succession of "prophets" developed the antagonism between the Jahveh religion and heathenism. They maintained that Jahveh was not only the single god of the Hebrews but the sole God of all the earth. Other gods were nullities. The prophets condemned idolatry, and all sensuality, licentiousness, and bestiality, with which they connected all sorcery and divination. They insisted on a broad and firm sex taboo and denounced sacral harlotry and child sacrifice together. It must be remembered that the peoples of that age generally regarded sex usages which seem to us the most abominable as trivial, unworthy of notice, matters of personal liberty and choice. Brahmins, a century ago, held that view of pederasty.[1985] The prophets also set in opposition to their own traditional ritual religion a doctrine of righteousness, by which religion was made ethical. It was a marvelous product for an insignificant hill people. It is, however, to be noticed that in the Zend-Avesta there was also a great revolt against sex vice.[1986]

613. How the Jewish view of sensuality came to prevail. The religious system of the Jewish prophets never has become the actual popular religion of any people. The Old Testament contains the story of the protests and failures of the prophets. Their work did not issue from the mores of the Jewish nation, and did not influence the mores before the captivity. The prophets were trying to introduce a new world philosophy by virtue of its ethical value and by interpretations of current political history. In Jer. xliv we see the latter argument turned against the prophet. The people cite their own experience. When they served the Queen of Heaven they fared well. In the rabbinical period the Jews emphasized everything which could differentiate them from heathen, and in the New Testament we find that idolatry and sensuality are presented as the two great heathen characteristics which Christians are to avoid. It is impossible for us to know to what extent the mores of the masses, in the western Roman empire, were marked by the ancient Roman austerity in the sex mores. It is, however, reasonable to believe that the ancient mores prevailed most in the class amongst whom Christian converts were found. Salvianus also gives to the German nations very remarkable testimony as to their freedom from sensuality and sex vice. The experience of societies also went to prove that such vice can corrupt the finest brain and the most cultivated character; also that, if it becomes current in a society, as pederasty and prostitution did in the Greco-Roman world, it will eat out all manly virtues, all cooperative devotion, the love of children, the energy of invention and production, of an entire population. Thus by the syncretism of the mores of the nations, and by experience, the conviction was produced that the view of sensuality and sex vice which the Jewish prophets taught was true, and that that view was the most important part of the mores and of religion for the welfare of mankind.

[1885] Snouck-Hurgronje, De Atjehers, I, 64-66; Bur. Eth., XVIII, 285; Amer. Anthrop., XI, 56; Codrington, Melanesians, 102, 299; Serpa Pinto, Como eu Atravassei Africa, I, 82; Kubary, Karolinenarchipel., 47, 226, 244; Powers, Calif. Indians, 24.

[1886] Ellis, Ewe-speaking Peoples, 141.

[1887] Barton, Semitic Origins, 78.

[1888] Wellsted, Arabia, II, 12.

[1889] Proc. Soc. Bibl. Archeol., 1890, XII, 383.

[1890] Herodotus, I, 193.

[1891] Wilken, Volkenkunde, 550.

[1892] Maspero, Peuples de l'Orient, I, 576, 589.

[1893] Amer. Jo. Semit. Lang. and Lit., XV, 201.

[1894] Archiv f. Anthrop., XXIX, 156.

[1895] Archiv f. Anthrop., XXIX, 150.

[1896] Ibid., 183.

[1897] W. R. Smith, Relig. of the Semites, 447.

[1898] Lucian, De Syria Dea, 6.

[1899] Herodotus, I, 93, 181, 199.

[1900] Globus, LXXXVI, 360.

[1901] Maurer, Voelkerkunde, Bibel, und Christenthum, 95.

[1902] W. R. Smith, Relig. of the Semites, 56-59.

[1903] Maspero, Peuples de l'Orient, I, 50, 126.

[1904] Archiv f. Religionsgesch., VII, 88.

[1905] Priester und Tempel im Hellen. Aeg., I, 316.

[1906] Valer., Max., II, 6, 15.

[1907] Lucian, De Syria Dea, 6; Pietschmann, Phoenizier, 229.

[1908] De Civit. Dei, II, 4.

[1909] W. R. Smith, Relig. of the Semites, 56.

[1910] Ibid.

[1911] Strabo, XI, 14, 16.

[1912] Num. xxiii. 28; xxv. 1; Josh. xxii. 17.

[1913] Die Lustseuche im Alterthum, 77.

[1914] 1 Kings xv. 12.

[1915] 1 Kings xiv. 24.

[1916] 1 Kings xxii. 46; 2 Kings xxiii. 7.

[1917] Deut. xxiii. 18.

[1918] Cults of the Greek States, 635.

[1919] Athenaeus; XII, 11.

[1920] Cults of the Greek States, 641.

[1921] II, 3, 20.

[1922] Globus, LXXV, 286.

[1923] Scripta Hist. Islandorum, II, 67.

[1924] Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific Coast, I, 123; II, 676.

[1925] Archiv f. Anthrop., XXIX, 138, 150.

[1926] Oliveira Martins, As Racas Humanas, II, 181.

[1927] Burckhardt, Arabic Proverbs, 145.

[1928] Laws, I, 5.

[1929] Monier-Williams, Brahmanism and Hinduism, 181-183.

[1930] Dubois, Moeurs de l'Inde, I, 434-439; 478-480; II, 353, 366, 370, 377.

[1931] Wilkins, Modern Hinduism, 94, 216, 290; Monier-Williams, Brahmanism and Hinduism, 451.

[1932] Wilkins, 242.

[1933] Jo. Roy. As. Soc., 1841, 239; Wilkins, 286.

[1934] Wilkins, 235.

[1935] Ibid., 317.

[1936] Ibid., 216.

[1937] Monier-Williams, 185, 190.

[1938] JASB, I, 477; III, 200; JAI, XXVI, 341; Monier-Williams, 87; Hopkins, Relig. of India, 491.

[1939] Hopkins, Relig. of India, 456; JASB, I, 477, 492; III, 201.

[1940] JASB, II, 322, 349; cf. JASB, I, 502.

[1941] Monier-Williams, 254.

[1942] Nivedita, Web of Indian Life, 212.

[1943] Nivedita, 212.

[1944] Monier-Williams, 78, 183, 224.

[1945] Dubois, I, 439.

[1946] Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific Coast, II, 336; III, 377.

[1947] Ibid., II, 676.

[1948] Archiv f. Anthrop., XXIX, 153, 158, 164.

[1949] Ibid., 173.

[1950] Petri, Anthropology (russ.), 435.

[1951] Archiv f. Anthrop., XXIX, 169.

[1952] Globus, LXXXVII, 130.

[1953] Oliphant, China and Japan, II, 494.

[1954] Vererbung und Auslese, 200.

[1955] Tiele-Gehrich, Relig. in Alterthume, I, 169.

[1956] Herod., I, 199; Hosea iv. 14; W. R. Smith, Relig. of the Semites, 454.

[1957] W. R. Smith, Relig. of the Semites, 141.

[1958] Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific Coast, II, 305, 308-309.

[1959] Schrader, Prehist. Antiq. of the Aryans, 422.

[1960] Hopkins, Relig. of India, 363, 450.

[1961] Maspero, Peuples de l'Orient, I, 680.

[1962] Maspero, Peuples de l'Orient, I, 123.

[1963] Relig. of the Semites, 365.

[1964] Ibid., 366, 375.

[1965] Cf. Deut. xviii. 10; 2 Kings xvi. 3; xxi. 6.

[1966] Levit. xviii. 21; Deut. xviii. 10. Molech is a false word. It has the consonants of the word for "king" and the vowels of the word for "shameful thing" (W. R. Smith, Relig. of the Semites, 67).

[1967] 2 Kings xvi. 3; xvii. 7; xxi. 6; xxiii. 10.

[1968] Ex. xxii. 29.

[1969] Ex. xxxiv. 20.

[1970] Num. xviii. 15.

[1971] Ex. iv. 24.

[1972] Jer. xxxii. 35; Ezek. xx. 26, 31. According to 2 Chron. xxviii. 3, Ahaz offered his son in the stress of war (Hastings, Dict. of the Bible, Relig. of Israel).

[1973] Globus, LXXXVI, 321.

[1974] Globus, LXXXVI, 117-119.

[1975] Possibly 2 Kings iii. 27; 2 Chron. xxviii. 3; Pietschmann, Phoenizier, 167.

[1976] W. R. Smith, Relig. of the Semites, 465.

[1977] Ibid., 370.

[1978] Tiele-Gehrich, Relig. im Alterthum, I, 212, 240; Maspero, Peuples de l'Orient, I, 680; Sanchuniathon apud Euseb., Prep. Evang., I, 10.

[1979] Pietschmann, Phoenizier, 229.

[1980] Tertullian, Apol., 9.

[1981] Pietschmann, Phoenizier, 222.

[1982] Lucian, De Syria Dea, 6.

[1983] De Gubernat. Dei, VII, 72-77; cf. VII, 15-16, 27, 86, 97-100.

[1984] Barton, Semitic Origins, 300.

[1985] Dubois, Moeurs de l'Inde, 439.

[1986] Darmstetter, Zend-Avesta, I, 100, 102.



CHAPTER XVII

POPULAR SPORTS, EXHIBITIONS, AND DRAMA

Limits of the study, Introduction.—Literature and drama in ethology.—Public amusements of the uncivilized; reversion to archaic, "natural" ways.—Chaldean and Mexican myths of reproduction dramatically represented.—Limit of toleration for propriety in exhibitions.—Origin of the Athenian drama.—Drama and worship; customs derived from the mysteries.—The word "God."—Kinship yields to religion as social tie.—Religion and drama; syncretism.—Beginnings of the theater at Rome.— Gladiatorial exhibitions.—Spread of gladiatorial exhibitions.— The folk drama.—The popular taste; realism; conventionality; satire.—Popular exhibitions.—Ancient popular festivals.—The mimus.—Modern analogies.—Biologs and ethologs.—Dickens as a biolog.—Early Jewish plays.—The Roman mimus.—The Suffering Christ; Pseudo-querolus.—The mimus and Christianity.—Popular phantasms.—Effects of vicious amusements.—Gladiatorial games.—Compromise between the church and popular customs.—The cantica.—Passion for the games.— German sports.—The mimus from the third to the eighth century.—The drama in the Orient.—Marionettes.—The drama in India.—Punch in the West.—Resistance of the church to the drama.—Hrotsvitha.—The jongleurs; processions.—Adam de la Halle.—The flagellants.—Use of churches for dramatic exhibitions.—Protest against misuse of churches.—Toleration of jests by the ecclesiastics.—Fictitious literature.— Romances of roguery.—Picaresque novels.—Books of beggars.— At the beginning of the sixteenth century.—The theater at Venice.—Dancing; public sports.—Women in the theater and on the stage.—The commedia del arte.—Jest books; Italian comedy at Paris.—Commedia del arte in Italy.—Summary and review.—Amusements need the control of educated judgment and will.—Amusements do not satisfy the current notions of progress.

Limits. The cases of public amusement and entertainment which shall here be mentioned are such as were within the limits of usage and accepted propriety at the time. They are not cases of vice or of disputed propriety at the time. Drunkenness, gambling, bull baiting, cockfighting, and prize fighting are amusements which have entered into the mores of groups and subgroups, as bullfighting still does in Spain, but they were limited to classes or groups, or they were important on account of the excess, or they were disapproved by great numbers or by the ecclesiastical authorities. They would, therefore, lie outside the mores, to which the cases to be noticed belonged. The theater in England in Charles II's time testified to a depraved taste and a low standard of morals, but it was temporary and indeed limited in time. In different groups also the moral standards are unequal at the same time, and the mores are on different levels. There is a wider limit now for romances and dramas in France than in English-speaking countries. The cases which now interest us are those of long and wide currency, which the mores have firmly established according to current standards, even though moralists may have inveighed against them sometimes, as the same class now sometimes denounces all dancing.

The cases here to be noticed are further illustrations of the fact that the mores can make anything right, and can protect anything from condemnation, in addition to those in the last two chapters.

614. Literature and drama in ethology. Poetry, drama, and literary fiction are useful to ethology in one or the other of two ways: (1) they reveal facts of the mores; (2) they show the longings and ideals of the group,—in short, what the people like and wish for. The second division includes mythology, fairy tales, and extravaganzas. The taste for them, if it exists, is a feature of the mores, but in fact such a taste is hardly ever popular. It is a product of culture. Myths, legends, proverbs, fables, riddles, etc., are popular products.

615. Public amusements of the uncivilized. Reversion to archaic, "natural" ways. We find in savage life, almost universally unless the group has been crushed by conquest or misfortune, festivals, games, dances, and orgies, which are often celebrated with masks and dramatic action. The motives are fidelity to the traditions of ancestors, entertainment, sex excitement, war enthusiasm, and occult influence in aid of the food quest. The dramatic representation of sex attraction and of the ways of animals is often intensely graphic, and it gives great pleasure to the spectators. An occult effect, to bring about what is desired in war or the chase by enacting it in a dance or play, involves demonism, the existing form of religion. Therefore religion, dramatic dances, music, songs, emotional suggestion, and sex stimulation are intertwined from low barbarism or savagery. Experience of the perils and pains of sexual excess and overpopulation force the development of folkways of restraint, which are customary and conventional regulations of primary natural impulses. At the recurring points of time at which the festivals are held there is often a reversion from the moral status created by the later 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 festival, the pantomime being used for occult magic, in order to get good crops in the next season. Obscene figures and rites were used. There is a maize goddess who is the "Mother of the Gods." The union of the sun god with the earth gives fertility, so that the food supply is at stake in these rites and notions.[1991] This most absorbing interest of mankind drove men's minds along the same lines of world philosophy. The "Mother of the Gods," by her sex activity, brought about growth on earth and became goddess of lewdness and filth, just as the German Corn-mother became a harlot. So the goddess by whose activity the earth bears flowers was honored at a festival at which boys and girls nine or ten years old became senselessly drunk and perpetrated sex vice. This was at a religious festival.[1992] Here then we find reversion to more primitive sex mores, and dramatic representation of a myth, conjoined in religion, on the very threshold of the higher civilization. The reversion to primitive sex mores to satisfy notions of duty to religion and ancestors comes to us as an incomprehensible violation of "primary instincts," which we have inferred from ideas that we can trace back beyond any known origin, which we suppose to be universally accepted, and which seem to us axiomatic as to social welfare. The only way to understand the case is to take the standpoint of the mores of that time. The mores contained the answer to the questions: How far back shall we go? What shall be the degree of license at the festival? At the limit fixed by custom the mores extend their sanction over the function and make it "right." Another source of barbaric festivals may be noticed. Men won victories over the elements and over beasts before they won victories over each other. This is true of remote antiquity and of primitive society. It is also true of the Middle Ages. The destruction of great beasts, demons, and other monsters led to dramatic and religious festivals. Magnin[1993] thinks that he could make a cycle of beasts, of which Reineke Fuchs would be the last link, anterior to the cycles of Arthur and Charlemagne.

617. Limit of toleration for propriety in exhibitions. Therefore: What shall be the limit of toleration in theatrical and other exhibitions with respect to dress, language, gesture, etc., in order to define propriety, is altogether a matter of the mores. It is not conceivable that the Lysistrata of Aristophanes could be presented on any public stage in Christendom. The whole play is beyond the toleration of modern mores. We meet with jugglers in Homer,[1994] also mountebanks and tumblers.[1995] The kubisteteres spun around on the perpendicular axis of the body, and are compared to the wheel of the potter. Then they pitched down head-foremost, like plungers or tumblers turning somersaults. Some archaeologs have thought that the play of these persons had some analogy with that of the cubic stones which were so prominent in the cult of the Phrygian Cybele. If that analogy is accepted, then the pyramidal dance must be regarded as originally hieratic and consecrated to Cybele. That dance was at first aristocratic, but speedily became popular and descended to the mountebanks.[1996]

618. Origin of Athenian drama. The theater originated in the Dionysiac mysteries of the Greeks, in which dramatic action and responsive choruses were employed. Sex symbols were used without reserve. Intoxication and ecstasy belonged to due performance. In later mysteries dramatic action was employed to present myths and legends, or religious doctrines, in order to get the powerful effects in suggestion which dramatic action exerts. Many myths presented acts such as later mores could not tolerate. Allowance had to be made for the representations, as we now make allowances for Bible stories and Shakespeare. We know that the mysteries were often in bad repute for their indecency and realism, even in an age of low standards. Anybody who is not in the convention can scoff at it, however low his own code may be. The Greeks described the Phrygian mysteries as abominable and immoral, while they praised and admired the Eleusinian. "The former were introduced by slaves and foreigners, and participated in by the superstitious and ignorant. They were celebrated for money by strolling priests, and any one who paid a fee was initiated without preparation, except some ritual acts. There was no solemnity in the surroundings, and no dignity in the ceremonial, but all was vulgar and sordid."[1997] The Athenian drama, in the fifth century B.C., went through an amazing development and reached high perfection. The art of the theater was especially cultivated. As to the effect of the dramas on the character of the spectators, it is to be noticed that they were presented only once in the year, at the greater festival of Dionysus in the spring, and that then a large number of plays were represented. The spectators, at Athens, were a very mixed assemblage and included the populace, "who remained populace in spite of any beautiful verses which they might chance to hear." They cared only to be amused, "just like modern audiences."[1998]

619. Dramatic taste and usage in worship. Customs derived from the mysteries. About the time of Christ, by syncretism all the religions took on a dramatic form in their ritual, with liturgies and responses, on account of the attractiveness of that form for worshipers. The Christian year was built up as a drama of the life of Christ. The ceremony of the mass was produced by an application of modes of worship which, so far as we can learn, were devised and used in the mysteries. "There is unmistakable evidence that a marriage ceremony of a religious nature existed, and that this ceremony stood in close relation to a part of the ritual of the mysteries. In fact, the marriage was, as it were, a reproduction by the bride and bridegroom of a scene from the divine life, i.e. from the mystic drama. The formula, 'I escaped evil: I found better,' was repeated by the celebrant who was initiated in the Phrygian mysteries; and the same formula was pronounced as part of the Athenian marriage ceremony. Another formula, 'I have drunk from the kymbalon,' was pronounced by the initiated; and drinking from the same cup has been proved to have formed part of a ceremony performed in the temple by the betrothed pair." "It is an extremely important fact that the human marriage ceremony was thus celebrated by forms taken from the mysteries; and the conclusion must be that the human pair repeat the action in the way in which the god and goddess first performed and consecrated it, and that, in fact, they play the parts of the god and goddess in the sacred drama. This single example is, as we may be sure, typical of a whole series of actions."[1999]

620. The word "god." "That man when he dies becomes a god was considered already in the fourth century B.C. to be part of the teaching conveyed in the mysteries."[2000] This meant no more than the earlier notion that when a man died he became a ghost. The word "god" was used in senses very strange to our ears,[2001] and to quote an expression of any writer of the beginning of the Christian era in which he uses the word "god," and to give to that word our sense of it, is to be led into great error. The age was one which put all its religion in dramatic form and acted it out. It was an age with a gift for manufacturing rites and liturgies.

621. Kin yields to religion as social tie. This was due to a great ethnological change which was then coming to its culmination. The kin tie, which had been the primitive mode of association and coherence of groups, began to break down in the sixth century B.C. in Greece. It was superseded by the social tie of a common religious faith and ritual. The Pythagorean and Orphic sects developed this tie. They had a revelation of the other world, a system of mystic and cathartic rites, which cleared men of ritual uncleanness, purified them, and "saved" them. The cathartic rites were a means of warding off evil spirits and did the work of the old shamans.[2002] The sectarian brotherhood of the initiated, the "church," the faith, the contrast of ordinary life with the ecstatic emotions of the mysteries, the consequent antagonism of the "flesh" or the "world," and the "spirit," were easy deductions from the teaching and ritual of the sects.[2003] It was all concentrated in the godlikeness, divinity, or immortality of the human soul, with the mystic notions of union between the soul and God. "Mysticism, as doctrine and theory, grew up from the soil of a more ancient practice in worship." "The worship of Dionysus must have furnished the first germ of the belief in the immortality of the soul."[2004] The idea of the Orphic mysteries was that humanity is suffering and sinful, and must be initiated in order to wash away its stains and be redeemed from its sins. Initiation puts a man in communication with the divinity. The soul is raised by ecstasy to feel its own divinity, which is the deepest element in all mystic religion. In all this compound of rites and notions the great antecedent philosophy was not the same as ours. It was demonism, superstitious anxiety about the world of demons, who floated around men and stretched their hands out of the surrounding darkness to seize them. It was from these that men wanted to be "saved." Atonement was to be made to the chthonic gods, for they were displeased at ritual uncleanness, and the chthonic cults had the other world in view.[2005] The uncleanness was ritual, and hence it came from anything far out of the regular order, either by abomination or holiness. The rabbis held that the handling of the Scriptures defiled the hands and called for ceremonial washing (Num. xix. 8, 10).[2006]

622. Combination of religion and drama. Syncretism. The interest of all this for our present purpose is the combination of religious ideas with dramatic representation. Processions of all kinds easily turn into such representations. Rites and ceremonies are but a form of drama. Symbols and emblems have the same character. The old religions were subjected to criticism, which means that they had lost their authority. They did not verify when the attempt was made to use them for societal needs. Slaves, merchants, soldiers, etc., afloat in the world, associated from choice and contributed traditions from the whole known world. Then syncretism began, and a body of sectarian notions was formed. There was a new totemism, a breaking down of national religion, a spirit of propaganda, and a setting forth of the whole in all dramatic forms.[2007] In the sects women were admitted, a fact of double significance. It was an emancipation for the women and a peril for the sect. The doubt with which the mysteries are now regarded is due to the uncertainty as to the relations of the sexes in them. The word "orgy" originally meant worship, or rites, then secret rites, that is, mysteries. The sense in which the word has come down to us shows the notion about secret meetings which became commonly accepted.

The customs which had grown out of religious interest had reached the desire for entertainment and pleasure. They satisfied it and stimulated it, and the religious element might be forgotten.

623. Beginnings of the theater at Rome. The Floralia were instituted at Rome in 240 B.C. They were celebrated by courtesans with processions, lascivious pantomimes, etc. They are said to have come from Greece.[2008] In the same year Livius Andronicus presented at Rome the first play translated from the Greek. In 154 the first permanent theater was established there against great opposition. In 146 the first theater outside the circus, with seats, was provided.[2009] All mimic actions were foreign to the austere mores of the early Romans, but in the second century B.C. the mores changed through the growth of wealth and contact with other nations. Young Romans learned from actors to sing and dance, acts which their ancestors thought unworthy of free persons. The earliest plays were called saturae, because they were mixed dialogues, music, and dances. The sense of the word was closely that of "farce" in the Middle Ages,[2010] i.e. an episode or intermezzo of a comic character interjected into a drama. The saturae contained an Etruscan element, but atellans were entirely Etruscan. They were comic and grotesque, and got their name from Atella (i.e. Aversa or Santo Arpino) in Campania. They could be played by persons who did not on that account lose their places in their tribes or their right to serve in the legion. No personalities at all were allowed on the Roman stage. Cynicism and obscenity characterized the Oscan style.[2011] In 55 B.C. the younger Cato was present at the Floralia. The populace hesitated to call, in his presence, for the stripping of the mimae. He left in order not to hinder the celebration from taking its usual course.[2012] Valerius Maximus[2013] says that the pantomime was brought to Rome from Etruria, the Etruscans having brought it from their old home in Lydia. We see from the epigrams in the first book of Martial that at the Roman theater in the first century of the Christian era incidents of the Roman mythology were made into dramas and represented in pantomime.

624. Gladiatorial exhibitions. The gladiatorial exhibitions are supposed to have been of Etruscan origin in the form of funeral games. Games to rejoice the ghosts, sacrifices of prisoners, a chance given to a prisoner to fight for his life, are steps of a development of which we find many examples. The Romans showed the pitilessness and inhumanity of their mores in the development they gave to the gladiatorial exhibitions. "Campanian hosts used to entertain their guests at dinner with them in the days before the Second Punic War. It was in Campanian towns that in the first century was displayed most glaringly the not unusual combination of cruelty and voluptuousness."[2014] Some murmurs of dissent arose from the philosophers of the first and second centuries of the Christian era,—Plutarch, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius,[2015]—but at that time the popular sentiment had not faltered at all in its love and zeal for the gladiatorial shows and beast contests on account of any doubt whether the exhibitions were "right." Tertullian, at the end of the second century, wrote a tract, Ad Nationes, in which he criticised the theater, and also another, De Spectaculis, against the public entertainments. Although the latter is chiefly controversial against heathen and heathenism, it contains direct and noble arguments against the games of the arena on account of their inhumanity. He says that the games were at first connected with funerals, and that the theater was a temple of Venus, under cover of which the games won a footing. That would mean, then, that they were at first under a convention of time, place, occasion, and religion. Correctly understood, therefore, what happened at Rome was that the convention was broken over and the exceptional rite was made the everyday usage, the religious sentiment being disregarded and the sensual entertainment alone being valued. When we have reached this point we can understand the original place of the games within the intellectual horizon of the nation, and also the deep demoralization which they caused in later times. They were consonant with early Roman mores which were warlike. Cicero thought them an excellent school to teach contempt for pain and death. He cited gladiators as examples of bodily exercise, courage, and discipline. He seems to have known that some disapproved of the exhibitions, and he was disposed to agree with them if the gladiators were others than criminals condemned to death.[2016] A usage which is consonant with the tastes, mores, and world philosophy of a people need work no corruption on them, for it is under taboos and conventions; but if all the restraints are taken away it enters into their life for just what it is in its character,—sensual, cruel, bloody, obscene, etc. What had been savage and bloodthirsty when the Romans were warriors became base and cowardly when they never risked their own blood in any way. Condemned criminals were compelled to take roles in which they suffered torture and a frightful death, in order to entertain the Roman crowd. Such roles were Prometheus, Daedalus, Orpheus, Hercules, and Attys; Pasiphae and the bull, and Leda and the swan were also enacted. In Martial's Epigrams, Book I, the cases are mentioned where a woman fought with a lion; Laureolus, a robber, was crucified and torn, as he hung on the cross, by a bear; Daedalus, when his wing broke, was precipitated amongst bears who tore him to pieces; and Orpheus was torn by a bear. These exhibitions were recognized as indecencies.[2017] Later the exhibitions had no limit.[2018] "From father to son, for nearly seven centuries, the Roman character became more and more indurated under the influence of licensed cruelty. The spectacle was also surrounded by the emperors, even the greatest and best, for politic reasons, with ever growing splendor."[2019] "It is a grave deduction from the admiring judgment of the glory of the Antonine age, that its most splendid remains are the stately buildings within whose enclosure for centuries the populace were regaled with the sufferings and the blood of the noblest creatures of the wild animal world and of gallant men. The deserts and forests of Africa and the remotest East contributed their elephants and panthers and lions to these scenes."[2020]

625. Spread of gladiatorial exhibitions. The Romans carried gladiatorial exhibitions wherever their conquests extended. "The Teutonic regions of the North and Greece were almost the only provinces in which the bloody games were not popular. The one Greek town where the taste for them was fully developed was the mongrel city of Corinth, which was a Roman colony. In the novel of Apuleius we meet a high Corinthian magistrate traveling through Thessaly to collect the most famous gladiators for his shows. Plutarch urges public men to banish or to restrain these exhibitions in their cities. When the Athenians, from an ambition to rival the splendor of Corinth, were meditating the establishment of a gladiatorial show, the gentle Demonax bade them first to overturn their altar of Pity. The apostles of Hellenism,—Dion, Plutarch, and Lucian,—were unanimous in condemning an institution which sacrificed the bravest men to the brutal passions of the mob."[2021] At Byzantium the lack of any standard of decency and propriety in the exhibitions was even more complete, and they lasted indefinitely.[2022] Constantine in 325 A.D. absolutely forbade gladiatorial exhibitions, because bloody shows were unfit for a time of peace. He forbade the condemnation of criminals to be gladiators. His laws, however, failed of effect.[2023] At the end of the fourth century Symmachus, "who was regarded as one of the most estimable pagans of his age," collected some prisoners to fight in honor of his son. They committed suicide to escape the destiny for which he designed them. He lamented the misfortune which had befallen him from their "impious hands," but endeavored to calm his feelings by recalling the patience of Socrates and the precepts of philosophy. He will not, he says, use such people any more, but Libyan lions, more docile than men.[2024] He serves to point a moral on the mores of his age.

626. The folk drama. The culture classes pass by the sports of the "vulgar" with contempt; but the student of the mores cannot do so. The tastes of the crowd are manifested in them. We read the great dramas which have become a part of the world literature, and we form from them our ideas of the current intellectual interest of the time of their origin and of the society in which they were produced. Such inferences need to be corrected. They are certainly erroneous. The Greeks were not all of them, nor any of them all the time, on a plane of classical severity and correctness. Far from it. They were realistic, egoistic, cold, cruel, and fond of sensual pleasure.[2025] The great dramas, epics, etc., were enjoyed only by the real upper strata of the society, just as is the case in regard to Shakespeare amongst us. The great populace of no society has ever found its amusement in purely intellectual suggestions. With us popular amusement is found in the circus, negro minstrels, the variety show, opera bouffe, the spectacle, and ballet, and it attaches to parody and burlesque, "knock-down business," buffoonery, and broad allusion. Stupidity is always funny. Everything which breaks over the social taboo is funny. A violation of propriety, accidental disorder of the dress, grotesque postures, vulgar gestures of derision or defiance, blows, painful accidents and mishaps,—if not too serious,—deformations of the body (humpbacks), epithets and nicknames, slang and other abuses of language (like mispronunciation by foreigners), vituperation, caricature and burlesque of respectable types like the pedant, dandy, Puritan, imbecile, or the rich and great, always raise a laugh in the crowd and are relished by the crowd. They are constant elements of farce and fun. They have been so for three thousand years. Jugglery and feats of strength and skill excite wonder until they become familiar. They are proofs of individual capacity. They do not give amusement like the points which have just been mentioned and which have been repeated to generation after generation. The crowd always delights in any degradation of the things which the selected classes prefer and try to impose on all. They rejoice to see the restrictions trampled upon which they hear preached as the rules of life. In opera bouffe classical heroes, gods of the classical mythology, royalty, nobles of the mediaeval type, feudalism, dominies, are turned to ridicule. The crowd worships its heroes fanatically while they are in fashion, but it likes to turn about and roll them in the mud of satire, in order to teach them who made them and how easily it can unmake them. Aristophanes derided all which was serious in the Athenian social system. Long before Don Quixote was written chivalry was treated with derision. Satire is a reversal of respect and admiration.

627. The popular taste. Realism. Conventionality. Satire. That which is realistic and graphic appeals to the popular and uneducated taste, not that which is conventional, regulated, and refined according to rule and standard. That which is realistic reproduces all the facts of life. If the mirror is held up to nature it will show some nasty things. The social taboos began in superstitious fear, but they formed a series of conventional folkways under which some acts and facts of life were veiled from sight, knowledge, speech, and publicity. Other lesser conventions were grafted on these, and produced the great mass of usages within which our lives are passed. That which is artistic is the highest form of conventional refinement. Realism antagonizes and breaks through all these conventions and taboos, which are always a strain upon those who are not brought up in them from infancy. Therefore we hear demands for realism and naturalness from those who weary of the strain and do not want to submit to it. The conventionalities define respectability, and respectability has always been sneered at. In all comedy it is made ridiculous. The husband was possessed of conventional rights in which he was protected by society so that he had a secured and uneventful status. In comedy his rights have been violated and his security has been broken. The crowd has always enjoyed this. It rejoiced to see the wife deceive the husband, and the adulterer fool him. The latter represented freedom and cleverness at war with philistinism. On the other hand, all the taboos and conventions which have penetrated the masses and become familiar to them from infancy are fiercely defended by them (e.g. female dress and the taboo on man's dress for females). The popular magazines and the "great moral shows" religiously respect the standards of the crowd. That which is broad is funny, but there is always a limit of toleration. What is prudish, puritanical, fastidious, affected, pharisaical, etc.? These adjectives are in use, and they apply to things which are beyond a line which is undefined and indefinable. It depends on the codes and standards of the group. Realism presents everyday experience, no humbug, the world as it is. It must, therefore, be cynical and ruthless to all conventions. It shows the meanness of greatness, the other side of virtue, the weakness of heroes. No doubt it is great fun to pour scorn and ridicule on all who assume to be better than we are, and to look down on us. The easiest way to do it is to show up their weaknesses, follies, and sins. Here is another task for the satirists. Satire in comedy may be a gratification of envy. The role of Pierrot is dangerous to him who exercises it. In fact no man is fit for it. Where does any one get a charter to be censor of all the rest? He will certainly become proud, arrogant, self-seeking, and tyrannical. Each one satirizes follies which are not to his taste, or sins to which he is not tempted. Satire to be artistic and permanently effective must be marked by light and shade. It always exaggerates what it wants to impress on the attention, but to do this artistically it must subdue other elements. This is very difficult to accomplish when for popular effect it must use big brushes and glaring colors.

628. Popular exhibitions. From the time of Homer we can trace popular exhibitions which accompanied the theatrical forms above described as an inferior class of the same species. The popular exhibitions were marked by the features which have been described (sec. 626), to which we may add bloodshed and cruel rites.

629. Ancient popular festivals. The thargelia were ancient sanguinary festivals celebrated in Greece in honor of Apollo and Diana. Two men, or a man and a woman, were immolated in Attica, to expiate the sins of the people. "The circular dances of the Greeks around the victims, or later around the altar, can only be compared with the songs and furious dances of the Iroquois and Brazilians around their prisoners."[2026] At Athens also the kronia were festivals of Saturn. The notion that there was a period of original liberty and equality "at the beginning" was entertained at that time, and this festival was held to represent it. Also on Crete there were festivals of Mercury. In Thessaly the peloria were a festival, the name of which was derived from Pelor, the man that brought news that an earthquake had drained the valley of Tempe. The sacea were a festival at Babylon similar to the saturnalia. A slave in each house, including the palace of the king, ruled as a house sovereign for five days. The leading idea was to reverse or invert everything in ordinary life. The kordax was an ancient dance of the old comedy, with indecent gestures, in which the human figure was caricatured according to all the deformations which it underwent by vice or sensuality. All the effects of gluttony and Bacchic excess were caricatured in the figure of Silenus. The old woman fond of wine lost all modesty under the influence of wine.[2027] The leaders of the choruses, in a later time at Athens, offered reminders of primitive barbarism and of the immolation of human beings, and a representation of savage nudity, but they presented no image which was ridiculous or base. Tragedy had a long struggle to become separate from lyric forms, but AEschylus at last accomplished the separation. This was really the separation of the high literary drama from the popular mimus. After ten centuries of glory in Greece tragedy was lost again under the lyric form.[2028] The popular drama, however, lasted on until to-day, and it has never changed its characteristic elements.

630. The mimus. The essence of the mimus is in pantomime as the name denotes. It imitates facts of life and behavior and is, therefore, essentially realistic. It may well be derived from the mimetic dances of nature peoples, in which beasts, warriors, and lovers are imitated, with jest and satirical exaggeration of characteristic traits. In the folk drama in its simplest forms nothing has ever been written. The actor, assumed a role and improvised all which he had to say in trying to act it out. His responsibility for the role was far greater than that of an actor in a culture drama. The actor, by repeating a role, produced a representation of it which was personal to himself and which he perfected. The most interesting and marked characters became fixed. A large number of them are now established in literature and have become known all over the world. The latest instance of such a type is, perhaps, Lord Dundreary. The word mimus appears in Greece in the fifth century B.C. The mimus was a picture of life or, more exactly, an unwritten parody of life. It was divided into grades and the actors into castes. Women had previously appeared as jugglers and mountebanks. They now appeared amongst the actors of the popular drama. This made the exhibitions questionable according to Greek standards. The exhibitions were given by wandering companies. While actors of the culture drama always wore masks, those of the mimus were the first to appear unmasked;[2029] later others imitated them. At the present day the theatrical exhibitions which may be seen on the outskirts of a fair in central Europe well represent the ancient mimus. The marionettes were an early offshoot of the mimus, and the modern Punch-and-Judy show is a descendant in part of both. For the mores the mimus and the marionette theater are a thousandfold more important than the great tragedies, but the former have left no mark on history. They never were written down; the actors are dead; their reputation is forgotten. The mores contain the effect as a fact but no explanation of it. From the time of Alexander the Great that which is common, popular, realistic prevailed in politics and literature. The heroic and ideal-poetic declined and was made an object of satire in the mimus. "The trivial, prosaic, and libertine taste of the Macedonian princes of Egypt and Syria at last reigned alone in enslaved Greece." Then, under different forms and names, nothing remained but mimes, realistic representation of common life.[2030] The Olympian gods and Homeric heroes were burlesqued for fun. The mimus won acceptance at courts and in higher circles. It was developed into the so-called "hypothesis" and won a place on the stage. The most distinguished maker of hypotheses was Philistion,[2031] who lived at the beginning of the Christian era. They became popular throughout the Greco-Roman world in the first centuries of the Christian era.[2032] The emperor Tiberius caused actors to be expelled from Italy as disturbers of the peace, and because the old Oscan farce, once amusement for the common people, had become indecent.[2033] Out of the common origin of all dramatic exhibitions (sec. 616) the mimus kept the corn demons, or growth demons, which always commanded the interest of husbandmen. The actors of this role wore masks in which the features of a low and sensual countenance were greatly exaggerated. An artificial phallus (sec. 473) was worn outside of the dress, and the entire region of the hips was enlarged so as to produce a conventional, extravagant, and stereotyped figure, like the modern clown, punch, or Mephisto, being, in fact, in some measure, their ancestor.[2034] Greek vases represent these figures. The same set of ideas and course of thought has been traced in Mexico in connection with crop interests and growth demons.[2035] There also the public rites at festivals passed by imperceptible steps into dramatic representations with dogmatic meaning or magical significance.

631. Modern analogies. The end man of the negro minstrel troupe is a modern creation like the Greek phlyax, for he is a buffoon of the plantation-negro type, with every feature exaggerated to the utmost, so that he is unreal and a caricature; but the exaggerations direct attention to familiar facts and display characteristic features which are a cause of merriment. The rise, development, and decline of negro ministrelsy illustrate, within our observation, many features in the history of popular comedy. It originated in fun making by the imitation of a foreign group, whose peculiar ways appeared to be ridiculous antics. Then the negro was used to burlesque and satirize the weaknesses, follies, and affectations of whites. The negro plantation hand is a type which is disappearing and interest in him is declining. He is no longer available for direct study or derived satire.

632. Biologs and ethologs. The Greek phlyax (the play) passed to southern Italy in the fourth century B.C., whence it was transmitted to Rome and confused with the atellan. It became very popular, and lasted until the fifth century A.D.[2036] Reich divides the mimes into two classes: (1) biologs, i.e. those who represent individual types, e.g. an unfaithful wife, an imbecile husband, a fatuous nobleman, a physician, etc.; (2) ethologs, i.e. those who impersonate some feature in the mores of the time and satirize it, e.g. faith in miracles, fondness for drink or gambling, sycophancy to the rich, or "getting on in the world." This is a very important distinction and one which illuminates the connection between the drama and the mores. Socrates was an etholog, although not an actor. He spent sarcasm, irony, and humor on the ways of the Athenians of his time.[2037] Aristophanes was another, Rabelais was another, Erasmus was an inferior one. In his Colloquies and Praise of Folly he is more of a preacher, but his aim is to influence by graphic satirical description. In our day the comic papers attempt the task of the etholog. They try to satirize manners and men. A comic paper owned or subsidized by a political party is the sorriest representative of Pierrot that the world has yet seen. The biolog personates an individual type, like an aberration of human nature, which may be found anywhere and at any time. The etholog personates a specimen of a class which helps to characterize a period. Dandies exist at all times, but vary in detail. The fatuity and vanity of all dandies are features for the etholog; the follies of the dandy of a period belong to the biolog. Beau Brummel would be a model for a biolog. The etholog is apt to overlook his best subjects. He cannot himself escape from his own times enough to recognize them. He never satirizes the reigning features. The American etholog never satirizes democracy, or the politician, or the newspaper. The etholog wants a big party or a strong sentiment behind him. It is not until after skepticism about a ruling "way" has formed in the minds of a large section of the masses that the etholog makes himself the mouthpiece of it. We have no satire yet on militarism, or imperialism, or the Monroe doctrine. A protective tariff is a grand object for satire, but so long as the masses believe in it satire is powerless. The same is true of any folkway so long as it is not yet doubted. Satire is then blasphemy. While a way is prevalent there is pathos about it (sec. 178), as there is now amongst us about democracy, but there never can be satire, and pathos at the same time, in the same society, about the same thing. One might have believed that nothing need be sacred to the theaters of Paris, but a few years ago a play was written which set the French Revolution in a different light from the now consecrated commonplace in regard to it. It was found impossible to produce it. A marionette player and his wife made fun of Pere Duchesne on the boulevard during the Revolution. Both were guillotined.[2038] These facts limit very much the high moral function sometimes ascribed to satire. It never gets into action until the mischief is done. It never squelches a folly at its commencement. That function belongs to educated reason, but educated reason is not in the masses.

633. Dickens as a biolog. Charles Dickens was a biolog. His novels contain very little evidence of the manners and customs of his time, and what they do contain is forced and untrue. He invented characters whose names have become common nouns and adjectives for individual types which are found in all societies at all times (Pecksniff, Micawber, Turveydrop, Uriah Heep, etc.), but which may, at a time, be especially common and produce fine specimens.

634. Early Jewish plays. Ezekiel (an Alexandrian Jew, fl. c. 200 B.C.) is said to have written a play on the exodus from Egypt, with the same motive as the mystery plays,—the edification of the faithful. Herod Atticus ([Symbol: cross] c. 180 A.D.), having caused the death of his wife, Regilla, was not satisfied with the expiations in the usual funeral rites. He built, as a monument to her, a theater with a roof.[2039] Ezekiel's play on the exodus was presented in Herod's theater. Nicholas of Damascus (b. 74 B.C.) is said to have written a play on the story of Susanna.[2040]

635. Roman mimus. The mimus, in the Greco-Roman empire, stereotyped its figures for a period, since of course they did not change suddenly or greatly. In the Roman mimus the recurring features were the pursuit of legacies, the impotency of men, the stupidity of the clown, blows and other physical violence. The fixed types were: old women as drunkards, sorceresses, go-betweens, peddlers, and panders; men as scholasticus (the pedant and learned imbecile), Ardalio (a character introduced by Philistion), the fatuous, fussy old man, and then the Christian, a type which was kept up for several centuries.[2041] These personages, remaining unchanged in character, were put in various assumed positions and conjunctures. The actors had to invent the dialogue and work out the situation. The characters have come down to us as Punch, Harlequin, Pantaloon, etc.[2042] Punch (=Pulcino, Pulcinella) is only a Neapolitan rendering of Maccus, a character in the atellans. "Maccus," in Etruscan, meant a little cock.[2043] Christian antiphonal singing, like the Greek mystery acts of Dionysus, helped to develop the drama.[2044] In the first centuries of the Christian era "obscenity dominated the theater." "It was no longer a school of patriotism, recalling the heroes of the early ages or criticising the misdoings of contemporaries. It was a scene of vice and corruption for actors and spectators. There was nothing represented but the adventures of deceived husbands, adulteries, intrigues of libertines, incidents in lupanars. The only characters represented were shameless women and effeminate men. The most shameful things were exhibited. Everything which ought to be respected was there degraded. Virtue was mocked and the gods were derided. The actor caused the taste for evil things to penetrate the mind of the spectator; he stimulated ignoble and criminal passions, and, familiar as he was with vice, he blushed sometimes at the shameful role which he was forced to play before the crowd."[2045]

636. "The Suffering Christ." "Pseudo-Querolus." In the fourth century the Christians tried to use the theater for their purposes. The drama The Suffering Christ is attributed to Gregory of Nazianz. It represents the passion of Jesus as understood by the Nicene theologians. It consists of twelve hundred and seventy-three verses taken more or less exactly from the tragedies of Euripides and patched together. Lintilhac[2046] says it is now the accepted opinion that it cannot be of remoter origin than the eleventh century, so that the most noteworthy fact about it would be that it is a Greek liturgical play of even date with the earliest western plays of that class. In it the Virgin Mary is a pagan woman, who uses verses of Hecuba and Medea, and thinks of suicide.[2047] Another play of the fourth century, which is mentioned as important in the history of the drama, is the Pseudo-Querolus. It is an imitation of Plautus. Querolus is the forerunner of Moliere's Misanthrope and so a biolog,—a permanent type of person.[2048] Dramas representing martyrdom and other Christian incidents were presented with very great realism.[2049]

637. The mimus and Christianity. The mimus opened war on Christianity. The religion was unpopular and hated. It set itself against the mores of the society at the time. It was scoffed at just as Puritans, Quakers, Mormons, and Christian Scientists have been scoffed at since and for the same reasons. It shared the unpopularity of the Jews, who came before the heathen world claiming the isolation of superiority, exclusive favor of God, ascendancy by rights over all the world. To the pagans the Christians seemed to make a great fuss about nothing. The mimus seized the popular sentiment and gave it expression. The Christian became the clown and simpleton. Christian rites were parodied and ridiculed. Martyrdoms were represented on the stage, the martyr being the buffoon. The heathen gods were taken under the protection of the mimus, instead of being burlesqued as they had been for several centuries. This mockery ran through the Roman empire until the end of the fourth century, when the church got the protection of the state against public insult, but Christianity fell under the dominion of heathen mores. The great ecclesiastics of the fifth century preached fiercely against the theater, not because of the insults of the theater against the church, for they were silenced, but on account of the action of the theater upon Christian mores. Chrysostom denounced the theater on account of the manners of actresses in the mimus, on account of false hair, paint, exposed bodies, uncovered heads, melodies, gross language, gestures, strife, representations of adultery and other sex vice, and because it was the school of intrigue and seduction. This became the attitude of the church towards the theater.[2050]