VII RITUAL, ART AND LIFE 204

BIBLIOGRAPHY 253

INDEX 255




ANCIENT ART AND RITUAL

CHAPTER I

ART AND RITUAL


The title of this book may strike the reader as strange and even
dissonant. What have art and ritual to do together? The ritualist is, to
the modern mind, a man concerned perhaps unduly with fixed forms and
ceremonies, with carrying out the rigidly prescribed ordinances of a
church or sect. The artist, on the other hand, we think of as free in
thought and untrammelled by convention in practice; his tendency is
towards licence. Art and ritual, it is quite true, have diverged to-day;
but the title of this book is chosen advisedly. Its object is to show
that these two divergent developments have a common root, and that
neither can be understood without the other. It is at the outset one
and the same impulse that sends a man to church and to the theatre.

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