4 oo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tunate bridegroom undergoes the ordeal of whipping by the relations 

 of his bride, in order to test his courage. ... If the happy husband 

 wishes to be considered a man worth having, he must receive the 

 chastisement with an expression of enjoyment, in which case the 

 crowds of women in admiration again raise their thrilling cry." 

 Here, instead of the primitive abduction violently resisted by the 

 woman and her relatives instead of the actual capture required to 

 be achieved, as among the Kamtchadales, spite of the blows and 

 wounds inflicted by " all the women in the village " instead of those 

 modifications of the " form of capture " in which, along with mock 

 pursuit, there goes receipt by the abductor of more or less violence 

 from the pursuers ; we have a modification in which the pursuit has 

 disappeared, and the violence is passively received. And then there 

 arises the belief that this castigation of the bridegroom is a deliber- 

 ately chosen way " to test his courage." 



These facts are not given as adequately proving that, in all cases, 

 ceremonies are modifications of actions which had at first direct adap- 

 tations to desired ends, and that their apparently symbolic characters 

 result from their survival under changed circumstances. Here I have 

 aimed only to indicate, in the briefest way, the reasons for rejecting 

 the current hypothesis that ceremonies originate in conscious symbol- 

 ization, and for justifying the belief that we may in every case ex- 

 pect to find them originating by evolution. This expectation we 

 shall hereafter find abundantly fulfilled. 



A chief reason why little attention has been paid to phenomena of 

 this class, all-pervading and conspicuous as they are, is that while to 

 most social functions there correspond structures too large to be over- 

 looked, functions which make up ceremonial control have correlative 

 structures so small as to seem of no significance. That ceremonial 

 government has its special organization, just as the political and 

 ecclesiastical governments have, is a fact habitually passed over, be- 

 cause, while the last two organizations have developed, the first has 

 dwindled in those societies, at least, which have reached the stage 

 at which social phenomena become subjects of speculation. Original- 

 ly, however, the officials who direct the rites expressing political sub- 

 ordination have an importance second only to that of the officials who 

 direct religious rites ; and the two officialisms are homologous. To 

 whichever class belonging, these functionaries conduct propitiatory 

 acts : the visible ruler being the propitiated person in the one case, 

 and the ruler no longer visible being the propitiated person in the 

 other case. Both are performers and regulators of worship worship 

 of the living king and worship of the dead king. In our advanced 

 stage the differentiation of the divine from the human has become so 

 great that this proposition looks scarcely credible. But on going 

 back through stages in which the attributes of the conceived deitv 



