2 CEREMONIAL INSTITUTIONS. 



Taken as proof that the advancing stranger is without arms, 

 the green bough is primarily a sign that he is not an enemy. 

 It is thereafter joined with other marks of friendship. It 

 survives when propitiation passes into submission. And so 

 it becomes incorporated with various other actions which 

 express reverence and worship. 



One more instance I must add, because it clearly shows 

 how there grow up interpretations of ceremonies as arti 

 ficially-devised actions, when their natural origins are un 

 known. At Arab marriages, Baker says, &quot; there is much 

 feasting, and the unfortunate 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 chas 

 tisement with an expression of enjoyment; in which case 

 the crowds of women in admiration again raise their thrill 

 ing cry.&quot; Here, instead of the primitive abduction violent 

 ly resisted by the woman and her relatives instead of the 

 actual capture required to be achieved, as among the Kamt- 

 schadales, spite of the blows and wounds inflicted by &quot; all 

 the women in the village &quot; instead of those modifications 

 of the k form of capture in which, along with mock pur 

 suit, there goes receipt by the abductor of more or less vio 

 lence from the pursuers; we have a modification in which 

 pursuit has disappeared, and the violence is passively re 

 ceived. And then there arises the belief that this castiga- 

 linn of the bridegroom is a deliberately-chosen way to u test 

 his courage.&quot; 



These facts are not given as adequately proving that in 

 all cases ceremonies are modifications of actions which had 

 at iirst direct adaptations 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 

 symbolization ; and for entertaining the belief that in every 



