Beatty—The St. George ^ or Mummers’, Plays. 287 
on desert plain or wind-swept shore, would be taken up and 
repeated by mightier actors on a vaster stage. He fancied 
that by masquerading in leaves and flowers he helped the bare 
earth to clothe herself with verdure, and that by playing the 
death and burial of winter he drove that gloomy season away, 
and made smooth the path for the returning spring. . .We may 
smile at his vain endeavors if we please, but it was only by mak¬ 
ing a long series of experiments, of which some were almost inev¬ 
itably doomed to failure, that man learned from experience the 
futility of some of his attempted methods and the fruitfulness 
of others. After all, magical ceremonies are nothing but ex¬ 
periments which have failed and which continue to be repeated 
merely because, for reasons which have already been indi¬ 
cated, 1 the operator is unaware of their failure. With the ad¬ 
vance of knowledge these ceremonies either cease to be per¬ 
formed altogether or are kept up from force of habit long after 
the intention with which they were instituted has been for¬ 
gotten. Thus fallen from their high estate, no longer re¬ 
garded as solemn rites on the punctual performance of which 
the welfare and even the life of the community depended, they 
sink gradually to the level of simple pageants, mummeries, and 
pastimes, till in the final stage of degeneration they are wholly 
abandoned by older people, and, from having once been the 
most serious occupation of the sage, become at last the idle 
sport of children. It is in this final stage of decay that most of 
the old magical rites of our Ekiropean forefathers linger on 
at the present day, and even from this, their last retreat, they 
are fast being swept away by the rising tide of those multitud¬ 
inous forces, moral, intellectual, and social, which are bearing 
mankind onward to a new and unknown goal.” 2 
1 Vol. 1, pp. 78 ff. 
2 “The Golden Bough,” vol. 1, pp. 110-112. Of the relations’ between 
ceremonial and myth ho says: 
“We shall probably not err in assuming that many myths, which we 
now know only as myths, had once their counterpart in magic; in other 
words,, that they used to be acted as a means of producing in fact the 
events they describe in figurative language. Ceremonies’ often die out 
while myths survive, a.nd thus we are left to infer the dead ceremony 
from the living myth.” L. c., vol. 2, pp. 164-165. 
