The savage utters his will to live, his intense desire for food; but it
should be noted, it is desire and will and longing, not certainty and
satisfaction that he utters. In this respect it is interesting to note
that his rites and ceremonies, when periodic, are of fairly long
periods. Winter and summer are not the only natural periodic cycles;
there is the cycle of day and night, and yet among primitive peoples but
little ritual centres round day and night. The reason is simple. The
cycle of day and night is so short, it recurs so frequently, that man
naturally counted upon it and had no cause to be anxious. The emotional
tension necessary to ritual was absent. A few peoples, _e.g._ the
Egyptians, have practised daily incantations to bring back the sun.
Probably they had at first felt a real tension of anxiety, and
then--being a people hidebound by custom--had gone on from mere
conservatism. Where the sun returns at a longer interval, and is even,
as among the Esquimaux, hidden for the long space of six months, ritual
inevitably arises. They play at cat's-cradle to catch the ball of the
sun lest it should sink and be lost for ever.

Round the moon, whose cycle is long, but not too long, ritual very early
centred, but probably only when its supposed influence on vegetation was
first surmised. The moon, as it were, practises magic herself; she waxes
and wanes, and with her, man thinks, all the vegetable kingdom waxes and
wanes too, all but the lawless onion. The moon, Plutarch[16] tells us,
is fertile in its light and contains moisture, it is kindly to the young
of animals and to the new shoots of plants. Even Bacon[17] held that
observations of the moon with a view to planting and sowing and the
grafting of trees were "not altogether frivolous." It cannot too often
be remembered that primitive man has but little, if any, interest in sun
and moon and heavenly bodies for their inherent beauty or wonder; he
cares for them, he holds them sacred, he performs rites in relation to