Chapter VIII

CEREMONIAL PATTERNS

IN THE ATTEMPT to analyze that aspect of behavior from which technology is to be distinguished, the student is a once confronted with terminological difficulties. Although a great many writers have made the distinction more or less clearly and consistently, no single term has come into anything like general use to refer to nontechnological behavior as a whole. Veblen used the word "ceremonial" in this connection, and it will have to serve for the present. But it must be used with caution from the outset. In particular the student must guard against the identification of "ceremonial behavior" with the vestigial ceremonies of which modern life affords so many instances, "mere" ceremonies which have lost the greater part of their original meaning and are now carried on for no particular reason by force of social habit. Academic life affords many instances of vestigial ceremonies of this sort. For example, commencement ceremonies are recognized by the academic community as "a lot of mumbo­jumbo" inherited from a remote past and carried on for no more important reason than to "give dignity" to a certain event by recalling its past associations. Pursued with caution, however, the analysis even of "mere" ceremonies may have valuable results.

Thus it is quite evident that even the most vestigial ceremony contains an element of "make­believe." We pretend that a person upon whom the degree has been conferred is in some subtle qualitative sense a different individual. He is now a "doctor of philosophy," entitled to all the advantages and emoluments which that rank confers as well as subject to its duties and responsibilities. No one really supposes that the commencement ceremony has made this difference. All it does is to "celebrate" the successful completion of the candidate's studies and researches, an event which has been effectively marked by examinations presumably of an explicitly technological character corresponding to the "workmanlike" activities which have preceded them. To be sure, ceremonial elements do creep into these activities and even into the examinations which are presumed to test only the technical adequacy of the preparation, a circumstance which is of great importance for the further analysis of ceremonial patterns. But the avowedly ceremonial character of the commencement exercises does not prevent their being taken seriously. However brilliant a young scholar may be and however genuine his contributions to the sum of human knowledge, the fact that he has not "taken his doctor's degree" is accounted a blemish on his character. As a well­known American sociologist once remarked, "it's easier to take the degree than to spend the rest of your life explaining why you didn't.

Behind such a ceremony there looms the phenomenon of status. As we continually explain to the impatient young, that is the way the world is, and we are all bound by it willy­nilly. Each of us knows, as a scholar, that the quality of scholarship is all that counts. But not only is the world at large ignorant of such matters, its thinking is dominated by considerations of status to which each of us as an individual is therefore obliged to conform. The schools and colleges and even the industrial research organizations to the staffs of which young scholars naturally aspire are all under the necessity of "putting up a front." It is not enough for them to make a sincere effort to engage competent scientists and scholars; they must be able to boast that possession of a Ph.D. degree is a condition of membership in their organizations. That is what the community expects. Trustees and executive vice­presidents are impressed by considerations of rank; and consequently the universities are obliged to co­operate by conferring rank and the young scholar must cooperate by achieving the rank which will enable college presidents and industrial executive officers to engage him without embarrassment.

Obviously this phenomenon of rank and status is a universal one. We sometimes call it "feudal," and so it is in the sense that feudal society was permeated by considerations of rank and status. But this is only the most general characterization of the feudal order. In this sense and to some degree all societies are "feudal." What distinguishes the feudal system of medieval Europe is the peculiar character of the particular system of status of which it was the manifestation. Modern Western society still contains many vestiges of those specific status relationships. But the organization of society in terms of some sort of system of rank is a universal phenomenon. All societies exhibit cases of it. The investigation of kinship systems and of divisions of rank and status along the lines of age, sex, occupation, and the rest is one of the principal concerns of anthropologists and sociologists. In our own society the system is so bewilderingly complex and multifarious as to constitute one of the chief concerns of all individuals throughout their lives. The informal education of children, of which we often say that it is much more important after all than formal education, consists largely in learning who are the "right" people and why; but this concern is by no means limited to childhood. The first difficulty with which the young scholar will be confronted when he becomes a member of the staff to which he aspires, apparently in good standing since he has conformed to the requirement that he be a doctor of philosophy, is that of determining the source of the special influence exerted on the organization by certain of its older members, an influence which he sees at once can have no relation to scholarly achievement. This influence he may eventually learn, derives from their decent from one of the "old families" of the region, or from their possession of large private means, circumstances which perhaps lead the trustees or executive vice­presidents to regard their beneficiaries as "one of themselves" in a sense that may not be true even of the president.

In contemplating these familiar aspects of our social life, many people cherish the belief that such cases are only minor deviations from "actual merit" which still remains the prevailing basis for discriminations of rank. After all, however spurious certain academic reputations may turn out to be, it still remains true that the scholarly attainments of Ph.D.'s as a group are greater than those of non­Ph.D.'s as a group. This belief is probably stronger in our own society that in any other, and it my have more justification in our own than in any other society. If so, the difference is very significant indeed for the future of industrial society and challenges serious investigation. But to some degree it prevails quite generally and exemplifies two universal features of the ceremonial pattern of behavior. One is the "make­believe" character of ceremonial behavior by virtue of which distinctions of rank and status ape differences of technological competence. There is no people and no individual to whom technological competence is not a genuine reality. Consequently the greatest possible genuineness that can be imputed to any distinction of rank is the supposition that it coincides with technological reality. Anthropologists report that if a member of a primitive community be asked why the members of the community regard the cultivation of crops as "women's work," he will invariably reply that women are the only ones who can make crops grow. This state of mind is universal. Our own community cherishes the belief that only men can drive nails and only women can boil water without burning it, that only business men and generals can make decisions. Furthermore these are beliefs for which we are prepared to die. Vilhjalmur Stefansson reports that until quite recently European explorers in the arctic have believed so firmly that only a born Eskimo can build a snow igloo that in the absence of Eskimos they have shivered and died in oiled silk tents, apparently without even making the attempt to master this esoteric art which he offers to teach any boy of twelve by mail.

Such beliefs are not actuated by technological reality. They pay reality the compliment of imputing it to ceremonial status, but they do so for the purpose of validating status, not that of achieving technological efficiency. The belief in the substantial identity of rank with actual competency implies, and means to imply, that it was considerations of actual competency which in the first place led to the recognition of the distinction of rank. But this is certainly not the case. Obviously the designation of Eskimos to build igloos and women to raise crops could never have resulted from any genuine trial in which Eskimos and women demonstrated their superior efficiency. The precise contrary is the case. The distinction of status was established first, and it was thereafter assumed to coincide with actual technological competency.

This is what Veblen called "ceremonial adequacy," meaning the determination of competence not by (technological) demonstration but by ritual. This second characteristic of status is also illustrated by the commencement ceremony. Such a ceremony is not merely a bit of pageantry, it is a particular kind of pageantry; or rather it is a pageant so directly inherited from the past and so fully preserved in its original form as to exhibit clearly the peculiar character of all pageantry. Clearly the commencement ceremony is an investiture­­ a quasi­sacrament. If we ask ourselves which of the seven sacraments of the Christian church it most closely resembles, there can be no doubt about the answer. It is a close approximation of the consecration of the priesthood, to which in historic fact it is closely related. The wearing of academic vestments, the recitation of a Latin Liturgy, and the laying­on of the doctoral hood­­ all are clearly suggestive of the sacrament.

This an extreme case, perhaps, and in view of its insignificance almost a frivolous one. Many distinctions of status which are of far greater importance in the life of the community are not accompanied by such a ceremony, or at least do not appear to be. The status of parents with reference to children, the "color line" by which Negro and white are distinguished, even the property distinction between owner and non­owner; and many other matters of rank and station, are of far greater moment than any academic degree, since they affect the whole community and in some cases all the activities of those who are affected. Outside the classroom and the laboratory a doctor of philosophy is just a common citizen; whereas children are children and Negroes are Negroes in all their affairs. Nevertheless students of the social sciences have long since recognized the ceremonial character of all these distinctions. Parents are not proved to be wiser than their children; they are so de jure. Negroes are not distinguished by any objective test of mind or body, not even color. Many Negroes are lighter than many "white" people. A Negro is by social definition a person either of whose parents was a Negro, likewise by social definition. An owner is not distinguished by intelligence, executive skill, or social conscience, but rather by legal investiture.

Moreover the ceremonial character of these distinctions is no mere invention of sociologists. In virtually every case it is in literal fact a matter of legal record. The registration of births, and marriages, and deeds, and of contracts generally, is the social mechanism by which distinctions of status are ceremonially established in modern society. This sort of thing may seem to be a far cry from the mystic rites of earlier societies, but the two ceremonial systems are in fact historically related. In a celebrated formula the great legal historian, Sir Henry Maine, declared that the whole movement of Western society has been "from status to contract." The difference is real and immensely significant; but the continuity which underlies the change is no less real and significant. It was not flint­chipping from which contract evolved but status. The substance which is perpetuated with modifications in the legal system of industrial society is that of status. Furthermore, the public records in which these distinctions are preserved are modifications of and substitutions for the sacraments. We have only to run over the original sacraments to see that what they consecrated was the ultimate basis of the distinctions which have since become secularized by the public record office and the civil law. This is true even of property, of which the original (feudal) basis of investiture was by birth, marriage, and death, each of which was the occasion of a sacrament by force of which alone the physical event became ceremonially adequate.

Lay readers and elementary students often get the impression from discussions of this sort that the purpose and to some extent the actual effect of scientific analysis of ceremonial patterns of behavior is only to "debunk" the distinctions under discussion; and this is especially true of a second major aspect of the ceremonial behavior function, that which is now generally identified in America at least, by Sumner's term "mores." But this is very far from being the case. The fact that distinctions of status are ceremonial does not mean that they do not exist nor that they are of negligible importance; and the fact that the prohibitions (and injunctions) by which all social life is ruled derive their sanction from tradition and their force from "public opinion" does not mean at all that such sanction and such force are of no effect in the behavior of "enlightened" people. Recognizing the very great force of community tradition, it is the object of social analysis to try to understand the nature of this force and the fashion in which it operates in the life of any given community and even more in the process of social change to which modern Western society is subject to such a notable degree.

In particular it is the object of social analysis to try to understand the relation between the different aspects or functions of social behavior. In The Theory of The Leisure Class Veblen was primarily concerned with status. In Folkways Sumner was primarily concerned with "mores." What is the relation between these matters each of which was the concern of a great modern classic? Neither Veblen, nor Sumner raised this question, Sumner because he did not make a clear distinction between technological and ceremonial behavior functions, and Veblen because he failed to recognized the "mores" as a universal characteristic of ceremonial behavior. But once the question is raised its answer is seen to be close at hand. The "mores" of course follow the pattern of the system of status­­ follow not in the temporal sense (status first and then mores) but in the analytical sense of a behavior pattern which is in one of its aspects a system of status and in another a corresponding system of mores. The mores, according to Sumner, define what is "right" and what is "wrong," what one must do and what one must not do. But these distinctions differ for different people; that is, the mores define for any given person in any given station in life what such a person in such a station must do and must not do.

What is important here is not merely the reduction of the larger status­structures to mores­atoms; it is rather the character of the ceremonial­status behavior function which is still further revealed in the analysis of the mores by which status is defined. In recent years anthropologists have adopted two words from the Polynesian language to refer to the prohibitions and injunctions which Sumner lumped together. One of these, taboo, has come into general use. Common usage has even dulled the edges of taboo by using it with reference to the mild prohibitions of everyday life, but the word still retains some of the original connotation of horror and disgust. Thus we say that incest is taboo, using another person's toothbrush is taboo, and nude bathing is taboo on public beaches even for little boys. Few people view nude bathing by little boys with horror and disgust (the "ole swimmin' hole" is a distinctly romantic memory ) ; but the use of another person's toothbrush is more or less disgusting. We rationalize these feelings by talk of hygiene, as we do also in the case of incest, but it is not the medical aspect of the case which gives rise to our feelings. We do not wait for the appearance of communicable disease before condemning the promiscuous use of toothbrushes, and we recognize nudity as an affront to decency even while we agree that the affront is mitigated by juvenility. The difference after all is one of degree.

Degree of what? We should agree that in every case there is a loss of virtue, or of moral quality, but of different degrees in different cases; and these words also may serve as guides to social analysis. For both of them and all their synonyms have the meaning not only of the distinction of right and wrong but also of moral character ("morale") and metaphysically unique individuality ("virtu") . We resent contamination of our toothbrushes as an infringement of personality. What we feel as a result of unceremonious exposure is a loss of personal integrity, even of force of character. After such an experience (say, accidental discovery in the nude) we feel that we "can't face" people. The oriental expression, "loss of face," is a graphic description of a universal experience, one which Polynesians would identify as of the essence of taboo; and the same is true of the Western phrase, "to feel small." It is as though individual personality or force of character were a quantitative matter, a mystic potency capable of being reduced by infractions of taboo. This is indeed the literal meaning of the mores. The whole ceremonial conception of life is one not merely of a distinction between what is and what is not to be done; it is also a conception of human personality in terms of mystic potency capable of being diminished by transgressions of the code.

This mystic potency is also capable of being increased. We gain in moral stature by scrupulous observance of the code and most particularly by "virtue" of ceremonial investiture. This is what the Polynesians call "mana," a word which has come into general use by anthropologist, though not as yet by the lay public. "Mana" is the affirmative of that of which "taboo" is the negative. There are certain things which we are expected to do, the doing of which results in an access of virtue. Most specifically "mana" is the mystic potency which is thereby increased. It is literally absorbed from contact with the virtuous who (and which) are thus also said to possess "mana." In ceremonial investiture "mana" flows from the person of the shaman or from the sacred stone into the person of the chief, just as one "takes courage" from association with persons of superior courage. Among some primitive peoples the successful warrior appropriates to himself the mystic potency of his fallen enemy by cutting out his heart and eating it.

This sort of thing may seem at first to be utterly remote from modern life, but students of the social sciences are agreed that it is not. Modern society has inherited these ways of thinking and acting from ancient society, and they comprise a very large part of ordinary social behavior. The evidence of this is by no means limited to ceremonial expressions such as that of the public official who prefaces his declarations with the words, "By virtue of the authority vested in me." The whole system of status rests on the assumption that the different orders of society possess different degrees of mystic potency. It would be quite intolerable otherwise. A belief on the part of both whites and Negroes in some sort of ineffable difference is essential to the maintenance of the color line and unquestionably will continue so long as the line exists. The difference is one of mystic potency to which the investigations of geneticists, ethnologists, sociologists and others, are quite irrelevant; and the same is true of the rich and the poor. Nothing is more touching to the sensibilities of the whole community, poor as well as rich, than the spectacle of a "gentlewoman" reduced to the necessity of manual labor; and nothing is more outrageous than that the unemployed should go to the movies or the "new rich" (current sarcasm for defense workers) employ servants. Both instances are "out of character."

In modern civilization the dependence of the whole system of status upon the mystic potencies of mana and taboo is concealed from common observation by the state and the law. Since all rights and obligations are defined by law, and since all titles to property, citizenship, and the like, derive ultimately from the state, this is ordinarily the end of the matter, especially in democratic communities where the state has come to be conceived as the will of the people. But social philosophers and students of jurisprudence must face the question, Why should the people will such things? What is the nature of exclusive possession, for example? How did it originate? Why has it become a feature of the legal systems of all peoples? These were the questions with which John Locke tried to deal in his celebrated Treatises on Government. It was his thesis that property relationships are "natural" and therefore antecedent to civil government because exclusive possession is established when man first mixes his labor with the soil. But just how is this done? In modern society a trepasser establishes no rights by raising crops on fields that are not his. Locke tried to extricate himself from this difficulty by distinguishing the "first" mixture as the determinant of a proprietorship which thereafter is transmitted in other ways; but of course the "original" appropriation is entirely supposititious. Furthermore the supposition is a suspiciously familiar one. Mixing one's labor with the soil is a kind of personality­projection of which students of primitive society find examples in every culture. Even today we speak of a person's "leaving the imprint his personality" upon a room. The peculiar intimacy we impute to toothbrushes and to articles of clothing, especially those worn next to the skin, is more than a matter of law. One's home has a more than legal significance. Indeed it is not at all uncommon for people to justify the institution of property in argument by reference to these personal intimacies as the ultimate essence of the relationship to which the law supplies only its institutional machinery.

Such justifications are essentially mystical­­ not such much natural as supernatural. What the exhibit is not rationality but "rationalization" as modern psychiatry understands that word. What they invoke is a spirit world of mystic potencies which act and react upon each other as though they were causal agents of the natural world. They can even be manipulated in quasi­causal fashion by magic rite and ceremony. It is in this fashion, of course, that transfer of title is effected. The potencies of the father flow into the son, in part at birth­­ as is evidenced by the mysterious but unmistakable resemblances between son and father­­ but in part at the father's death, on the occasion which mana flows from father to son, actuated by the appropriate ceremonies, by virtue of which the son is empowered to buckle on his father's sword and "come into" his father's property.

All these ideas have indeed been watered down, in some cases almost to the vanishing point, by the institutional machinery of the modern state. Thus the transfer of property has become in modern law a matter of convenience adapted to and enforced by the exigencies of an industrial economy. But if we inquire what it is that has been diluted, a ceremonial answer is inescapable. That is why Locke's analysis of property was unable to escape a paradoxical resemblance to the conception of divine right which had been presented by his antagonist, Sir Robert Filmer. Inevitably both are couched in terms of mystic potencies.

Under the influence of Sumner, modern social thinking has showed a disposition to identify all such matters as "conventional fictions" and to let it go at that. This misses the essential point. It is the most essential characteristic of fictions of every kind that they seem to be true. Ceremonial gains and losses of potency by virtue of which the status relations of all members of the community to each other are established seem to be effected by a series of causally effective acts. These magic rites and ceremonial investitures in every case simulate the materially effective causal sequences of the world of tools and materials. They are not merely non­technological; they are pseudo­technological. In his chapter on the "musical banks," in Erewhon, Samuel Butler described two currencies both of which were used in every business transaction, one the work­a-day currency in terms of which Erewhonians did business and the other the musical bank currency some of which was always exchanged in connection with every transaction and which the people pretended was the real and effective medium of exchange. The difference is one of primacy. It is not a case of distinguishing between distinct entities, a and b, but of identifying the a with respect to which the other entity is a' . When this issue is raised, there can be no question about the answer. No one supposes that tool­using is effective because it simulates the goings­on of the spirit­world. On the contrary it is the spirit­ world in which the causal nexus of tool and material is simulated. It is not the examinations for the Ph.D. degree which pretend to the effectiveness of the commencement ceremony; it is the ceremony which pretends to the effectiveness of the examinations.

This issue is fundamental to an understanding of economic process. It is the one posed by Professor Knight, that of "some..absolute and inscrutable type of 'causality' by which technology drags behind it and 'determines' other phases of social change." The study of technology has already exhibited the "absolute and inscrutable character" of technology to be a function of tools, and the analysis of ceremonial behavior patterns clearly shows not that technology "drags" ceremonial behavior along in its wake but that ceremonial behavior of its own character invariably simulates, and in this sense follows, technological activity. In the process of social change a "drag" of some sort is a matter of common observation. Sociologists quite commonly employ the word "lag" to refer to this phenomenon. Far from being inscrutable, this also is an objectively verifiable feature of ceremonial behavior, quite as objective as a tool. Not only does ceremonial behavior determine status by the ritualistic transfer of mystic potencies; it does so by virtue of a set of beliefs of which all "ceremonial adequacy" is an expression, or in which the whole power­system of status and mores finds its supposed justification. The universally observed "archaism" of the ceremonial behavior function is an inevitable consequence of this third aspect of ceremonialism.

It is precisely because myths, legends, and beliefs are objective social phenomena that their existence has seemed enigmatic. Since they are objective phenomena, students of ancient cultures and simple peoples have been able to collect them, to arrange and classify and publish them much as anthropologists collect and arrange and exhibit primitive artifacts in museums. Moreover these legends have a sort of nostalgic charm, since they are after all relics of our own more or less distant past. In many cases their perpetuation has enlisted the most distinguished literary talent, so that they have thundered down the ages in the epic hexameters of the classic bards. Consequently they challenge explanation as a phenomenon in their own right.

But the attempts to explain the growth of legend as a distinct phenomenon have been embarrassingly fatuous. Since the legends themselves purport to be accounts of the creation of the universe and of the origin and history of the people whose legends they are, we have quite generally made the mistake of accepting them at face value as the genuinely intellectual attempts of simple peoples to "explain" themselves and the universe around them. In this we have been greatly aided by the condescension with which we have regarded "primitive mentality." By assuming that our ancestors were utter fools, we have been able to explain at the same time both the fantastic flights of imagination which these supposed attempts at explanation exemplify and also the stupid indifference of these peoples to the intellectual challenge of their own recent history and of the physical phenomena with which they are most closely surrounded. Thus we say that their mythology exhibits their intellectual curiosity with regard to the creation of the heavens and the earth, while their failure to ascertain whether putting fish in a bucket of water makes it heavier or not by weighing both procedures is due to their complete lack of intellectual curiosity.

Meantime all explanations of the "mythopoeic" faculty in terms of restless intellectuality overlook what is after all the most striking feature of all superstitious lore: its indissociability from the current ceremonial practices of the community. Myths, legends, and superstitious beliefs of every kind are invariably tied up with "mores" of which they are the purported explanation. So impressed was Sumner with this organic relationship that he made the existence of supporting legend one of the stigmata of the "mores" by which they are to be distinguished from mere "folkways." Unfortunately this also involved him in an enigma. If the "mores" be regarded as the primary phenomenon, beginning as community habits which eventually achieve the character of "mores" as a result of embodiment in legend, the question then arises, How and when are legends invented for the sanctification of habits? Sumner left this question unanswered (and it is one of the major confusions of Folkways ) , for of course it is unanswerable. Neither mores nor legends be explained in isolation. Both are aspects of one behavior function. Ceremonial behavior implies the existence of a legend and a legend implies the existence of ceremonial behavior patterns.

This is what Emile Durkheim saw and expounded in his great book, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Human behavior is collective behavior, and the whole conceptuology of legend and belief is "collective representation." Neither precedes and actuates the other or can possibly do so, since each is a function of the other. This functional relationship is one which the present generation is far better prepared to understand than that for which Durkheim wrote, thanks to the great advances which have been made during the past generation in the field of psychopathology. As we now appreciate, the psychopath is a mythmaker on his own account, and the mythopoeia of primitive peoples is a phenomenon of psychopathology in the most literal sense. Primitive communities frighten themselves into paroxysms; they warp and distort their conduct of life in the most fantastic fashion; and all the while they invent for themselves a conception of life and the world in terms of which their utmost extravagances seem to be a reasonable and efficacious organization of the affairs of life.

The temptation is strong to speculate on the physical basis of ceremonial behavior, and especially on the role of emotion in status, mores, and mythology. Human beings are uniquely sensitive to each other's presence and emotional attitudes, so much so as to seem frequently to be in the grip of outside forces in the presence of which their own "wills" are virtually powerless. We still speak of emotional "seizures," and this sense of being overpowered by an outside force which it is futile to oppose is an accompaniment not only of rage and fear but also of love. The romantic novels of the present day talk about love very much as primitive peoples do, with only this important difference, that the savages act on their beliefs with philtres and incantations. Moreover they have this justification: strangely enough these emotional "seizures" can indeed be produced by the action of drugs and also by the mass­suggestion and autointoxication and hypnosis of dance and chant. We know that both drugs and incantation produce their effect by their action on the autonomic nervous and endocrine systems; but since the savages do not know this, it is after all small wonder that they should have conceptualized this whole complex of experiences quite universally in terms of an etiology of occult forces and a therapeutics of magic rite. In doing so they are only applying their intelligence to disturbances to which all human flesh is heir.

It is even possible to conjecture that the whole ceremonial behavior function by which human beings have made so much trouble for themselves throughout the ages is an organically inevitable joint­product of the same evolutionary process, the same refinement of the nervous (and perhaps endocrine) system which made speech and tool­using possible; that we could not have this without at the same time becoming more susceptible to emotional disturbances (which, we must note, the lower animals also share in lessor degree). And at the same time the development of speech made it inevitable that we should give tongue to our emotions­­ an activity from which the lower animals are saved by their speechlessness, which also however excludes them from tool­using. In such an interpretation technological and ceremonial behavior would stand as in the most literal sense obverse and reverse of each other, both equally a consequence of the evolutionary refinement of nervous organization, and both equally attributable to articulacy and so to intelligence, memory, imagination, and all the other most distinctively human "faculties." But this still does not mean that the two are one. As constructs­­ organized behavior systems­­ they are nevertheless distinct and opposed.

It is this opposition which is our primary concern, and especially as it affects the development and conduct of the industrial economy. In that process the ceremonial behavior system is opposed to technological activity in this sense, that whereas technology is of its own character developmental the ceremonial function is static, resistant to and inhibitory of change. We still know very little of the origin either of speech and tool­use or of legend, ritual, and status; but we know a great deal about their history. In particular, we know that they have a history, and this is most especially true of the mythopoeic aspect of the ceremonial function. The very objectivity of legend, which has so confused our attempts to understand the nature of this activity as such, has greatly assisted our study of its history. Because legends have an objective existence and can be collected and arranged, students of folklore have been able to learn a great deal about their history.

All legends derive from the past. The arts of the poet and the dramatist embellish them, but their narrative and ideational content is given and inalterable. This what makes it possible to trace folk history through legend, and this is what makes the ceremonial behavior system, of which legend is an indissociable part, of its own character "archaic," backward looking, static, change­resting. Legend recounts the drama of the ancestors, and the ancestors are dead­and­gone and therefore inalterably fixed. What the ancestors did and said, what was done and said in the creation of the heavens and the earth, is not subject to tinkering; and since it is the legends which motivate the mores and the mores which define all the roles of rank and status, it follows inevitably that the whole ceremonial behavior­complex is essentially static. It is so not because any single ceremonial act is soul­freezing­cataleptic­ in any absolute and inscrutable fashion, but because the behavior­system of which any such act is a derivative is­­ as a system­­ past­preserving.

This does not mean that ceremonial behavior­systems do not change. We know they do. But the changes which occur do not originate in or derive from the legend­mores­status complex itself. The "Argonauts" of the Pacific sailed great distances from island group to island­group because of the technological perfection of their outrigger canoes, on each occasion, probably, against the direst imprecations of the medicine men. Not being ideological revolutionaries, they took their ceremonial system with them. But their adoration of the Banyan tree (or whatever it may have been) would necessarily suffer some modification in a habitat where there were no banyan trees. At the same time contact with other peoples would lead to partial assimilation of their ancestors and ceremonial system. Children of American immigrants form southeastern Europe learn Mrs. Hemens' poems in school and assimilate the "Pilgrim fathers" as their ancestors. This does not mean that the legends of southeastern Europe are in evolution in the direction of British Puritanism, nor that the latter is developing an affinity for the mores of southeast European peasantry. Both legendary backgrounds are rigid and stiff­kneed. But people move with technology, and ceremonial practices are changed by changing circumstances which are quite external to them. Of themselves they do not change. Whatever the complexion of the ceremonial system may be, following a technology­induced change of physical habitat, it is reminiscent of some status quo ante; and it is as resistant to further change, however ineffectively, as was the original from which, however fragmentarily, it was derived. The most tragic feature of American democracy today is the widespread determination of its adherents that it shall continue throughout an indefinite future to be precisely what it was to the "founding fathers."

The history of the human race is that of a perpetual opposition of these forces, the dynamic force of technology continually making for change, and the static force of ceremony­­ status, mores, and legendary belief­­ opposing change. Most of the time and in most parts of the world status has prevailed. In the whole history of the race there have been only a few world technological revolutions. One of these, perhaps, was the spread of neolithic culture. Another was the spread of agricultural civilization. The industrial revolution may be another, though its success and permanence are by no means assured. As Veblen remarked in a celebrated passage, it still remains to be proved whether machine technology will prevail or whether our civilization will provide another tragic instance of "the triumph of imbecile institutions over life and culture."

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