THE GENERAL explanation which we have been led to adopt of these and many similar ceremonies is that they are, or were in their origin, magical rites intended to ensure the revival of nature in spring. The means by which they were supposed to effect this end were imitation and sympathy. Led astray by his ignorance of the true causes of things, primitive man believed that in order to produce the great phenomena of nature on which his life depended he had only to imitate them, and that immediately by a secret sympathy or mystic influence the little drama which he acted in forest glade or mountain dell, on desert plain or wind-swept shore, would be taken up and repeated by mightier actors on a vaster stage. He fancied that by masquerading in leaves and flowers he helped the bare earth to clothe herself with verdure, and that by playing the death and burial of winter he drove that gloomy season away, and made smooth the path for the footsteps of returning spring. If we find it hard to throw ourselves even in fancy into a mental condition in which such things seem possible, we can more easily picture to ourselves the anxiety which the savage, when he first began to lift his thoughts above the satisfaction of his merely animal wants, and to meditate on the causes of things, may have felt as to the continued operation of what we now call the laws of nature. To us, familiar as we are with the conception of the uniformity and regularity with which the great cosmic phenomena succeed each other, there seems little ground for apprehension that the causes which produce these effects will cease to operate, at least within the near future. But this confidence in the stability of nature is bred only by the experience which comes of wide observation and long tradition; and the savage, with his narrow sphere of observation and his short-lived tradition, lacks the very elements of that experience which alone could set his mind at rest in face of the ever-changing and often menacing aspects of nature. No wonder, therefore, that he is thrown into a panic by an eclipse, and thinks that the sun or the moon would surely perish, if he did not raise a clamour and shoot his puny shafts into the air to defend the luminaries from the monster who threatens to devour them. No wonder he is terrified when in the darkness of night a streak of sky is suddenly illumined by the flash of a meteor, or the whole expanse of the celestial arch glows with the fitful light of the Northern Streamers. Even phenomena which recur at fixed and uniform intervals may be viewed by him with apprehension, before he has come to recognise the orderliness of their recurrence. The speed or slowness of his recognition of such periodic or cyclic changes in nature will depend largely on the length of the particular cycle. The cycle, for example, of day and night is everywhere, except in the polar regions, so short and hence so frequent that men probably soon ceased to discompose themselves seriously as to the chance of its failing to recur, though the ancient Egyptians, as we have seen, daily wrought enchantments to bring back to the east in the morning the fiery orb which had sunk at evening in the crimson west. But it was far otherwise with the annual cycle of the seasons. To any man a year is a considerable period, seeing that the number of our years is but few at the best. To the primitive savage, with his short memory and imperfect means of marking the flight of time, a year may well have been so long that he failed to recognise it as a cycle at all, and watched the changing aspects of earth and heaven with a perpetual wonder, alternately delighted and alarmed, elated and cast down, according as the vicissitudes of light and heat, of plant and animal life, ministered to his comfort or threatened his existence. In autumn when the withered leaves were whirled about the forest by the nipping blast, and he looked up at the bare boughs, could he feel sure that they would ever be green again? As day by day the sun sank lower and lower in the sky, could he be certain that the luminary would ever retrace his heavenly road? Even the waning moon, whose pale sickle rose thinner and thinner every night over the rim of the eastern horizon, may have excited in his mind a fear lest, when it had wholly vanished, there should be moons no more.
同类推荐
热门推荐
影响中国学生的经典成语故事之二
成语是语言中经过长期使用、锤炼而形成的固定短语,它是比词的含义更丰富而语法功能又相当于词的语言单位,而且富有深刻的思想内涵,简短精辟易记易用。并常常附带有感情色彩,包括贬义和褒义,当然,也有中性的。“影响中国学生的经典成语故事”汇集了众多的成语,详细地讲解了其释义及相关出处,使读者在增长知识的基础上、享受阅读带来的乐趣。莲步轻舞:偷心小贼你别跑
思晴莫明其妙穿越到了古代,却被当成了结婚冲喜的牺牲品,于是她果断决定,先逃了再说!千不该万不该,她遇到了那个偷心小贼。什么?你家缺个娘子?可是,那和我有什么关系啊……嫡女纨绔:邪王的小野妃
【爽文、欢乐、男强女强、一对一】她,二十一世纪的女特种兵,一朝穿越成了天盛朝有名的纨绔女,从小恶名昭著,劣迹斑斑,十岁因一把火烧了京畿司大牢而被自己的父亲赶出了盛京城,可她却在外面跟自己的小伙伴们玩得不亦乐乎。五年后,当她再次回到盛京城,她发现以冷酷无情闻名的天盛战神三番四次的向他献殷勤,可她不记得她什么时候沾惹过这朵桃花了啊?不仅如此,好像其他几朵桃花也开得挺欢乐的,到底哪里出了错?当一切谜底揭开时,原来她和他的缘分早在十年前就已经种下了······