It seems as though the change came and life was born by magic, and the primitive Australian takes care that magic should not be wanting, and magic of the most instructive kind.  As soon as the season of fertility approaches he begins his rites with the avowed object of making and multiplying the plants, and chiefly the animals, by which he lives; he paints the figure of the emu on the sand with vermilion drawn from his own blood; he puts on emu feathers and gazes about him vacantly in stupid fashion like an emu bird; he makes a structure of boughs like the chrysalis of a Witchetty grub—­his favourite food, and drags his body through it in pantomime, gliding and shuffling to promote its birth.  Here, difficult and intricate though the ceremonies are, and uncertain in meaning as many of the details must probably always remain, the main emotional gist is clear.  It is not that the Australian wonders at and admires the miracle of his spring, the bursting of the flowers and the singing of birds; it is not that his heart goes out in gratitude to an All-Father who is the Giver of all good things; it is that, obedient to the push of life within him, his impulse is towards food.  He must eat that he and his tribe may grow and multiply.  It is this, his will to live, that he utters and represents.

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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