becomes an end in itself for ritual, even for art.

* * * * *

It is not easy, as we saw, to classify the Huichol prayer-disks. As
prayers they are ritual, as surfaces decorated they are specimens of
primitive art. In the next chapter we shall have to consider a kind of
ceremony very instructive for our point, but again not very easy to
classify--the pantomimic dances which are, almost all over the world, so
striking a feature in savage social and religious life. Are they to be
classed as ritual or art?

These pantomime dances lie, indeed, at the very heart and root of our
whole subject, and it is of the first importance that before going
further in our analysis of art and ritual, we should have some
familiarity with their general character and gist, the more so as they
are a class of ceremonies now practically extinct. We shall find in
these dances the meeting-point between art and ritual, or rather we
shall find in them the rude, inchoate material out of which both ritual
and art, at least in one of its forms, developed. Moreover, we shall
find in pantomimic dancing a ritual bridge, as it were, between actual
life and those representations of life which we call art.

In our next chapter, therefore, we shall study the ritual dance in
general, and try to understand its psychological origin; in the
following chapter (III) we shall take a particular dance of special
importance, the Spring Dance as practised among various primitive
peoples. We shall then be prepared to approach the study of the Spring
Dance among the Greeks, which developed into their drama, and thereby
to, we hope, throw light on the relation between ritual and art.