not to imitate kangaroos—­you cannot imitate yourself—­but just for natural joy of heart because they were kangaroos; they belonged to the Kangaroo tribe, they bore the tribal marks and delighted to assert their tribal unity.  What they felt was not mimesis but “participation,” unity, and community.  Later, when man begins to distinguish between himself and his strange fellow-tribesmen, to realize that he is not a kangaroo like other kangaroos, he will try to revive his old faith, his old sense of participation and oneness, by conscious imitation.  Thus though imitation is not the object of these dances, it grows up in and through them.  It is the same with art.  The origin of art is not mimesis, but mimesis springs up out of art, out of emotional expression, and constantly and closely neighbours it.  Art and ritual are at the outset alike in this, that they do not seek to copy a fact, but to reproduce, to re-enact an emotion.

* * * * *

We shall see this more clearly if we examine for a moment this Greek word mimesis.  We translate m{-i}m{-e}sis by “imitation,” and we do very wrongly.  The word mimesis means the action or doing of a person called a mime.  Now a mime was simply a person who dressed up and acted in a pantomime or primitive drama.  He was roughly what we should call an actor, and it is significant that in the word actor we stress not imitating but acting, doing, just what the Greek stressed in his words dromenon and drama.  The actor dresses up, puts on a mask, wears the skin of a beast or the feathers of a bird, not, as we have seen, to copy something or some one who is not himself, but to emphasize, enlarge, enhance, his own personality; he masquerades, he does not mimic.

The celebrants in the very primitive ritual of the Mountain-Mother in Thrace were, we know, called mimes.  In the fragment of his lost play, AEschylus, after describing the din made by the “mountain gear” of the Mother, the maddening hum of the bombykes, a sort of spinning-top, the clash of the brazen cymbals and the twang of the strings, thus goes on: 

     “And bull-voices roar thereto from somewhere out of the unseen,
     fearful mimes, and from a drum an image, as it were, of thunder
     underground is borne on the air heavy with dread.”

Here we have undoubtedly some sort of “bull-roaring,” thunder-and wind-making ceremony, like those that go on in Australia to-day.  The mimes are not mimicking thunder out of curiosity, they are making it and enacting and uttering it for magical purposes.  When a sailor wants a wind he makes it, or, as he later says, he whistles for it; when a savage or a Greek wants thunder to bring rain he makes it, becomes it.  But it is easy to see that as the belief in magic declines, what was once intense desire, issuing in the making of or the being of a thing, becomes mere copying of it; the mime, the maker, sinks to be in our modern sense the mimic; as faith declines, folly and futility set in; the earnest, zealous act sinks into a frivolous mimicry, a sort of child’s-play.