بخش ۱۰: بازی و سرنوشت
Chapter Ten
GAME AND DESTINY
There is no chance; And what seems hazard in our eyes Arises from the deepest source.
SCHILLER (Wallenstein)
It is only after this vast detour through humanity’s macrocosmic world-picture — which has shown us art as not a copy of nature, but a replica of a cosmos created on a microcosmic scale — that we can return to the problem of play: not in order to discuss esthetic pleasure resulting from the play-impulse, but to come nearer to the comprehension of that impulse itself. Here, too, it is not sufficient to explain matters on the basis of individual psychology without having regard to the spiritual-collective intentions which originally led to the activity of play. Already in the esthetic discussion of the playimpulse we have had to refer to the difference, so important for art, between the psychological attitudes of the creator and the receiver, which does not exist in games — unless it is that the defeated party in games is somehow forced into the passive role of receptivity. The pleasure experienced by the creative artist may approach the pleasure of play to this extent, that in both cases the activity is one which in the artist is at least potentially a motor activity * and in play really does take effect in action. On the other hand, art as it is in the primal practice, the ritual dances and ceremonies of primitive peoples, and in the cult actions of higher cultures,’ has, from the psychological point of view, an affinity to play in that, when the whole community participates, there is no rigid distinction between creative and receptive.
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1Cf. A. Winterstein: ‘' Motorisches Erleben im schépferischen Vorgang”’ (Die psychoanalytische Bewegung, 1, 4; November—December 1929).
2 Cf. Jane Harrison: Ancient Art and Ritual.
But as against this psychological resemblance between primitive art-activity and the play-condition we have the significant difference that the original ceremonial, even if it seems to us to be play, is for the participant something filled with the deepest and most serious meaning; in a word, that his destiny was at stake. Play has at first a very definite meaning and object, even though this is not concerned with an immediate practical purpose but (as in art) with an ideological (magical) one. When we pass from the communal customs of primitive peoples, in which every individual —at least as part of a group —has a definite rdle, to the games of higher civilizations, we find, even when they exist only for amusement and excitement, that an old idea is living on in a symbolic or metaphorical form. This is, usually, the rules of the game, which are based on tradition and which the participants no longer understand, but to which, therefore, they all the more closely conform. The macrocosmic world-pictures of the older civilizations have thrown a useful light on the original cult significance of these play-ideologies and proved their connexion with the general collective world-view. We cannot here deal with the whole material, though in this sphere, more than in others, there is a relative dearth of literature; and, above all, the work of arriving at a comprehensive history of folk-games has not yet passed beyond the stage of fragmentary preliminaries. There are, indeed, since Winckler’s studies in the cosmologies of the ancient East were written, many valuable references in the literature of religious and cultural history to the macrocosmic aspect of human play, which had previously been treated from the pure point of view of individual psychology.* Since we are concerned here with only a single (though, in our view, an essential) character of play, we shall have to be contented with a cursory sketch of the macrocosmic interaction, the more so as we shall construct our own view of play on the basis of what we have already arrived at concerning the significance of macrocosmic symbolism.
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1Cf. Carl Hagemann: S piele der Volker. Eindriécke und Studien auf einer Weltfahrt nach Afrika und Ostasien (Berlin, 1921). There is a valuable specialist study of Hans Damm: Die Gymnastischen Spiele der Indonesier und Sidseevélker (Leipzig, 1922). And Y. Hirn’s fundamental work, Les Jewx d' enfant (Paris, 1917), discusses folk-lore material from the collectivist standpoint of the author (cf. Origins in Art. A psychological and sociological Inquiry (1900). See also the splendidly illustrated book: Kinderspielzeug aus alter Zeit by Karl Grober (Berlin, 1928). * See references in the chapter on ‘*The Play-impulse.”’
In the first, and still the best, summary of this sort, which Winckler gives us in the chapter “ Myth, Legend, and Play” of his popular atcount of the intellectual culture of ancient Babylon, the fundamental fact is established that the festivals connected with various games had all a seasonal character, with a definite calendar as their basis. In these festivals and the associated games, “the events in heaven which the festival represents — for example, the death and rebirth of the deity, the victory over the powers of darkness, the dragon —are represented and played before the people” (op. cit., p. 122). Let us add, before we produce further examples, that these festivals, representing, say, the death and rebirth of a deity, are nothing else than the return to earth, after projection heavenwards, of the human immortality-ideologies which attain their true force precisely through this macrocosmization. As a matter of fact, most children’s games that have survived into the present are really “ seasonal” games, not only in the sense that they are favoured by the pleasant weather of spring, but in the cosmic sense, as many of their names, etc., show: for example, the game of Tempelhiipfen,” where we have to hop on one foot from “ heaven ” to “ hell.” The same is seen in skittles and other ball-games. This brings us from what is a representation, religious or profane, of the calendar myths in processions or shows, to what is a real doing in the competitive games alike of children and grown-ups, who—in contrast to the actor —are no longer conscious of the mythical part they are playing. The competitive character of games, too, seems to be primitive, though playing to win a prize is a very late development. The original victor in the competition, long before the days of the palm, did not content himself with honour alone: what he won was life, which the defeated rival usually forfeited. Nor is this only the case with the fighting-game; it survives into such late traditions as the legend of the “ Singers’ contest on the Wartburg,” which according to Winckler ‘is a typical New Year legend. “ Five singers — whom he interprets as being the five planets — vie with each other, and the defeated are to fall to the executioner. Heinrich von Ofterdingen sings best, but, by a trick, is declared beaten.” In the same way, in the Arabian account of the race of the five horses, the winner is cheated of the prize. This ineradicable cheating in a game, this “corriger la fortune,” seems deeply rooted in the instinct of self-preservation — as are all those strong feelings and emotions which games can produce in otherwise cold-blooded people. The game is originally neither a pastime nor a means of enrichment, but a matter of destiny; and that is why it is deeply rooted in cosmological and astral symbols, so that even comparatively recent inventions like card-games are entangled with them. Thus the game of tarot, a passionate favourite in many parts of Europe, is only intelligible — as a very learned work of Ernst Kurtzahn shows — from the “cabbalistic method of forecasting the future.” * A considerable part is played, too, by magic alphabets, which originated in Egypt, but were known in Italy and Africa as well: “ Magic powers are attributed to the alphabet, and it is employed to produce mystic formule for the curing of pains, etc.” (op. cit. p. 128). The letters, generally twenty-two as in the Pheenician alphabet, “ are arranged according to the phases of the moon to which they correspond and to which their names allude. So here too we have a magic which is a transferred astrology.” Even this brief account, which in many cases has to omit the very convincing details, shows us the development from the real representation of death in games of fighting and sacrifice (especially among the Mexicans) to the symbolically threatened death which is still prophesied for us when we have our fortune told by cards.”
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1 Ernst Kurtzahn: Tarot; Die Kabbalistische Methode der Zukunftserforschung als Schlussel zum Okkultismus (Leipzig, 1920).
2 The much older game of dice, with its 3x6 as the highest throw, reminds Winckler (p. 127) of the origin of “the number of man” (216 = 6°), especially when we add that in Pythagorean doctrine the cube is the picture of perfection.
But I have succeeded, further, in finding a link in the chain which connects even our purely intellectual games (like chess) with that primitive symbolism of death and resurrection which, in contrast to its more spiritual form, we have called the animalunderworld symbolism. In a work on “The old Egyptian Snake-game ” by H. Ranke," based on a publication of Quibell,’ there is described and discussed a favourite board-game of the Egyptians, which is of peculiar interest for us. This is not that chief favourite of the Egyptians, the game with the square fields which alone outlasted the Old Kingdom, but an older vanished form which is preserved for us in a wall-painting of a Third Dynasty grave published by Quibell. Ranke describes it as follows:
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1 Report of the Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wiss., 1920-4.
2 Excavations at Saqqara (1913).
“The picture in Quibell shows us a board of circular form with trapezoidal, handle-like additions. The board itself has an inner drawing, representing a black and yellow spotted snake, coiled in seven leftward spirals. Near the head, in the centre of the board, a small circle is left free. The board is divided into four sectors by two red lines intersecting at right angles. The windings of the snake’s body are crossed by red lines set fairly close and all radially directed to the centre. The ebony box’ which belonged to the board contained small figures of three lions and three recumbent dogs, apparently of ivory, and six times six balls of various colours. It looks as if as many as six people could play the game simultaneously.” A relief of the Fifth Dynasty, also from Saqqara, shows two men, one at each side of such a board, in the act of putting the animal figures on the snake, in whose coils a number of balls already lie. “Two other men with peculiar attitudes of arm and hand are sitting apparently inactive at the players’ sides. Of how the game proceeded, what its object and the thought at the back of it were, we know nothing” (op. cit., p. 5). The idea of a symbolical representation of a lion-hunt is rejected by Ranke himself in view of the queer hunting-ground of a snake’s body.’
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1The handle and interior are painted bright yellow; that is, they were probably imagined the maid of cedar-wood, with the exception of the snake’s head and tail, which are black.
2 A description given by Champollion of the players, whose one hand is open while the fist of the other is clenched, is referred by Ranke to the beginning of the game, not the game itself, as though a guess at the contents of the closed fist was about to settle which pairs should begin.
Before we continue with Ranke’s careful research into the meaning and origin of this game, we may show briefly how it interests us in connexion with our general problem. If we think away the head and tail of the snake (which are hardly recognizable on other “snake-game” boards reproduced by Ranke), we have a clear picture of one of those labyrinth spirals which we found described in Babylonian inscriptions as “palaces of the entrails,” and this would also explain the animals like the Minotaur that lived there. And in fact Ranke, working from mythological considerations, which he connects with mhn, the name of the game or its board, comes to the conclusion that the same name is given to a snake in “ Amduat, in whose coils certain gods dwell, in one of those dark chambers which the sun-god’s ship passes in the night; and also to that great snake which at the beginning of the seventh hour of the night (at midnight) appears with Isis in the ship of the sun as it passes through the underworld . . . coiling protectively round the flesh of Osiris, and rearing up threateningly against his enemies.” The fact that the serpent of the Amduat —mbhn—which is always imagined as masculine, is written mbhn.t in the feminine, after the Twenty-second Dynasty, seems to corroborate its obvious identification with the “simultaneously appearing Isis, since these protective entrails — the underworld — must have originally had maternal symbolism. Over and above all that, a painting on a mummiform coffin of the later New Kingdom shows a snake goddess mhn.t as protectress in the kingdom of the dead — parallel to the male serpent god mhn who guards the sun-god on his path through the kingdom of the dead” (op. cit., p. 21). If we add that “the female termination, mhn.t, is handed down as one of the numerous names of the urzus snake,” whose body in its many coils girds the brow-fillet of the sun-god and his earthly son, the king, the symbol of the snake confirms once more our principle of religious, cultural, and artistic development. The development of this symbol not only runs from the chthonian to the solar —the solar spiral arising from the picture of the entrails and being thus transferred from the lower body (the kingdom of the dead) to the brow (the heavens above) — but affords a further typical instance of the reversal of artistic symbolism, which abstracts from the ugly mortal entrails the beautiful and permanent external as its form. The encoiled serpent, which may be taken as the representation of the labyrinthine entrails, the inward parts, thus appears in the end as free of all animal significance, in its specific spiral form (biting its own tail) as a symbol of the higher resurrection-idea symbolized in the heavenly form of the sun’s course. And this general ideological explanation suffices of itself to give us the meaning of the snake-game. It only remains to bring Ranke’s purely Egyptological conclusions in the scope of this general explanation; but in doing this it will not suffice merely to quote his conclusion, not only because it emphasizes only one —the religious — aspect, but because it is just the detailed steps of his gradual process of thought which are of value to us. The identification of the “sun king” with the urzus snake coiled round his brows, which we have discovered to be the cultural symbol of this process of elevation, seems to be confirmed by two passages of the pyramid texts which Ranke quotes. “In the passage,” says Ranke (p. 23), “ where it is said of the dead king that he ‘ comes forth as mAn (or in the mhn ? or from the mhn ?)’ we may perhaps have the identification of the king with the snake. And if in the pyramid text No. 1866 “these white teeth, which the king is to ‘receive’ should be amplified: ‘they are (those of?) m&n,’ it may well be that serpents’ teeth are meant.” Ranke then quotes, from amongst a number of other texts which mention a serpent mf in association with a game, the 172nd saying of the Book of the Dead, which is to permit to the dead the use of every one of his limbs in the Beyond. After giving a list of the parts of the head of the dead man — forehead, nose, eyes —it says: “ Thy teeth are the ¢pj.w [?] of the mhn, with [?] which Horus and Seth have played.” The word left untranslated is, according to Ranke, a name for the teeth (of the dead), whence, by association with the “tooth” passages of the pyramid texts, we have the conclusion that “the teeth of a coiled serpent called mhn have significance of some sort for the dead Egyptian.” Further Ranke declares that in the Egyptian view some game was played with (?) the teeth of the mn snake, and finally from the Book of the Dead argues that the divine pair of brothers, Horus and Seth, once played together at the snakegame; either with the teeth of the snake or, as Ranke interprets it, for the teeth, which are a protection, as of an amulet, against the bite of the poison teeth. Without entering into these subtle questions of interpretation it is enough to have established that this very ancient game, to which we have devoted so much notice as being the prototype of all games, was an actual fight for life and death, and only later mere victory or defeat in a game. We may also pass over the difference, important from the point of religious history, between upper and lower world, and may assume that not only was the dead man to be protected against the bite of poisonous snakes by magic amulets, but that it was vital for the living to guard against the bite of poisonous snakes, even snakes in human form. That the whole circle of ideas refers in the first place to the living, and was only later transferred to the dead,. not only is psychologically obvious, but may also, as a matter of religious history, be deduced from the Egyptian belief in the continued material existence of the dead, who are threatened in the underworld by the same dangers as on earth and who must thus have the same protection in the grave. This is true also of the board-game, by which the dead were given the chance to guard against the fearful serpent mAn in the hereafter. “ Here, it is true, the mn is not only defeated, but killed, and there is no further question of its teeth.” But Ranke himself cannot help thinking it strange that the mhn is killed by drowning: since in point of fact snakes do not drown. “ Here, therefore, the basic idea is obviously that of a humanist deity, not a snake.” * But, remembering that the two mythological opponents in the game were the enemies and brothers, Horus and Seth—of whom a bitter life-and-death duel is related, ending in the tearing-out of Horus’ eye —we need have no doubt about the human character of this duel, which is emphasized in the hatred of the brothers, nor as to the meaning of the teeth or other important parts of the body, whose absence would make a continued life in the underworld impossibie; and this is why the Book of the Dead guarantees the dead man the use of all his bodily parts though they gradually fall away. Whether the conjunction of the Horus eye, which dies first, with the teeth, which endure comparatively long, was meant to include the whole process of decay, I leave as an open conjecture (compare the biblical “eye for eye and tooth for tooth”’).? But this study, as already indicated, leads far beyond the interest of the game and even beyond the religious symbolizationprocess (the snake), to an insight into the deepest motives of Egyptian belief in the dead and therefore those of man’s immortality-ideologies themselves. When we realize that the gift of the snake-game set, as an offering for the dead, is intended to serve the dead man in the underworld as a weapon against that death which robs him of one member after another in the process of decay,* such a method of protection as this which is displayed in the gifts to the dead shows us how unreliable was the foundation on which the whole grandiose edifice of the religious immortality-ideology of the Egyptians was built (and hence how Moses, brought up as he was in the Egyptian spirit, adopted the only concretely tenable alternative when he opposed to it the earthly immortality of sexual procreation).
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1 The assumption of Ranke that the original winning of the dangerous teeth of the snake only later changed to the killing of it (because the teeth could grow again) seems in spite of its improbability to contain a sound idea (see next note).
2Actually the teeth do appear in individual dreams, and their significance is confirmed by the ceremony of knocking out a tooth in puberty ceremonies among savages as a symbol of rebirth. For we know that teeth do really grow a second time and this knowledge is then applied symbolically to the whole body (man as a whole). The rebirth significance of the teeth in their transitory form is shown in the sowing of the pate teeth by Jason, from which armed warriors are born who themselves bring eath.
3 Ranke also concludes from his material that the mbn snake itself appears as the opponent of the dead and is defeated by him after a lengthy struggle.
The Egyptian, though he had immortalized himself in a lofty sun and star religion and also clung, in his earthly animal-cult and transmigration of souls, to the pre-animistic immortality of materialism, had yet, with all this, to protect himself against decay into nothingness, against the undeniably real terror of the underworld. This is the aim of the gifts in the tombs and at the same time the reason for the material continuation of existence in the underworld—and in particular for the snake-game, by which the dead man in the last stages of decay, when he loses even his teeth, the flesh having already fallen from him, is enabled to win back this symbol of a rebirth by gambling with his teeth against death.’ But even in life man guards himself by the symbolic game — which is in this sense really a preparation — against the dangers of the underworld, and even of his own death, since he offers in his place another, his vanquished opponent, to the hungry jaws of the underworld. Though these perspectives of cultural history bring us to the edge of studying the great fighting- or gambling-games of the civilized peoples, which found their most brutal expression in the games of the Roman circus with their mutilation of men by wild beasts, we will turn first to those games which have intellectual victory as their object, and note how they developed out of the snake-game. But before we come to their most spiritualized representative, the royal game of chess, we will, at least briefly, recall the purely intellectual “ guessing-games 7 which betray their originally serious nature in the games of fateful question and answer, in the Edda, the Persian Turandot story, and many other legends.
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1 Cf. death as the consumer of flesh, sarkophagos. Perhaps in this connexion we may explain the lion and dog figures in the snake game as tearers of flesh, whereas the snake, despite its dangerousness, only kills and does not destroy — in fact, leaves the body unconsumed. Then, if it is deprived also of the poison fangs, it comes to represent the ideal rebirth symbol—which again fits it to take the place.
Even the common cheating of the victor of this prize, which we have already met with in connexion with contest-games—and which still has its reflection in legends of cheating the devil —receives a peculiar illumination from these riddling-games. The typical triad of questions which the hero has to answer if he would avoid death is perhaps to be compared with this trickery, the hero being subjected to a fresh test again and again until he has really to die — though the fairy-story ends at the third solution and so.achieves a wish-fulfilment.* Besides, games may in actual fact be continued indefinitely, since the loser always hopes for his revenge; it was the belief of the German mercenaries that the fallen soldier played cards in the underworld with the “innkeeper ” there, and this is perhaps no chance reminiscence of the ancient warriors who continued their battle in the clouds. This old Egyptian snake-game that Ranke’s most valuable investigation has reconstructed for us, vanishes with the end of the Old Kingdom — before 2000 3.c.—but some texts of the later New Kingdom show us a modern board-game, with thirty squares, which the dead man plays with the mn snake. “The dead man thus succeeds in occupying one square after another, and after making use of the opponent ‘ removes’ one after another of his pieces and finally casts the mAn himself into the water and thus kills him. It is possible that the old game, which was played on the round board, had the same idea, and that a later stage transferred the game to the board with square fields.” At this point, where he comes to the verge of hypothesis, Ranke closes his comprehensive study without drawing the obvious analogy with chess. Chess itself we know, not from Egypt, but from the Asiatic group of cultures.
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1In this context belongs the postponement of death by the prolonged stories of Scheherazade in the Thousand and One Nights; and this may indicate the difference between a prose story which is ornamentally extended into infinity, and the drama which usually Tepresents the end of the hero in a completed action. Lyric extends the present mood metaphorically until it becomes cosmic (‘Uber allen Gipfeln ist Rub’... Warte nur, balde rubest auch du’’),
2 W. Jones: ‘*On the Indian Game of Chess”” (Asiatic Researches, IL, PP. 159 et seq.).
” In the Bhavidja Purana King Judhishtira gives the following instructions: “Divide the board into eight squares each way. Then place the red army in the east, the yellow in the west, the green in the south, and the black in the north. To the left of the king place the elephant (that is, the bishop), then the horse (the knight), then the boat (the rook), and in front of all four of them foot-soldiers. Yet the boat must stand in the corner.” F. Borck,’ to whom we owe the latest summary of the history of chess, concludes that the colours are connected with an old world- and planet-game, and regards the original four of the chess-board as a cosmogram; this original cosmic significance he sees also in the old “boat” (which takes the place of our rook), indicating that “it is not four armies which fight, but the four worlds separated by the broad oceans, which are distinguished by the four colours and can only fight on shipboard.” Without doubting in the least the cosmic significance of the old Egyptian snake-game, we yet must inquire here into its earthly and human relations, or at least into the motives of such a world- and planet-game. It is psychologically obvious that this cannot be a mere parody of heavenly or cosmic processes — at lowest there must have been something of “ fateful ” application of this battle of the planets to earthly processes and to the men, who played the game so passionately. If we may, at least hypothetically, regard the newer form of the Egyptian snake-game, with its thirty squares, as a primitive (or at least a parallel) form of Asiatic chess, then the chthonian circular form (underworld, womb), with its division into four equal sectors, would not only be the original of the four-part chess, but the original form of the game would be the duel, as we have it in the mythic tradition of Horus and Seth.
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1See appendix in op. cit.: Dé Geschichte des Weltbildes (Leipzig, 1930). Other fondamental literature on the subject: H. Cox: “On the Burmah Game of Chess compared with the Indian, Chinese, and Persian Game of the same Denomination"’ (Asiatic Researches, VII, 480); A. von Ocfele: Schachspiel der Bataker (Leipzig, 1904); H. F. Massmann: Geschichte des mittelalterlichen, vorzugsweise des deutschen Schachspiels (Leipzig, 1889).
Borck in fact comes to the conclusion, by the comparative method, that two-part chess is older than the four-part. While he admits the possibility of a passage from the quadruple to the dual form in Iran, which is the home of ethical dualism (good and evil = white and black), he would like to maintain the earlier origin of dual chess in the Chinese dualistic doctrine of Yang and Yin. In any case this ethical form of chess, which like the Egyptian judge of the dead assigns life to the good (the white) and death to the evil (black), hardly comes further into our consideration. We will therefore turn to the object of the game, which is the same as in the newer Egyptian one: namely, to occupy one square after another and rob the opponent of all his pieces. But if these pieces originally represented, as in Egypt, amulets for various important parts of the body, the esoteric purpose of the game seems to be to rob one’s opponent of his vital organs until finally with the king, who is the head, comes mate — and death. This view, apart from the evidence of the material adduced by Ranke, receives further confirmation in the fact that the snake, which is divided into fields by red cross-lines, gave him the impression of being cut in pieces; but this snake was originally the opponent, from whom the teeth, as vital “pieces,” are drawn. We cannot do more than suggest an association between this and the cosmologies of dismemberment and must pass on to another and historical view of Asiatic chess, which again we can only indicate. Borck explains the chess tradition with reference to the Indian migration of the second millennium s.c., echoed in the old Indian epos of the Mahabharata, as the Greek colonization struggles survive in the Iliad, and the inroad of the Huns into Europe in the Nibelungenlied.* That is, in the originally dual chess, which was a fight of man against man (Horus and Seth), these folk-struggles of almost a thousand years’ duration left their precipitate exactly as the Homeric battles did in our so-called Troy-games.’
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1 Cf. my afore-mentioned study: Zur Psychologie des Volksepos.
2 Krause: Die Trojaburgen Nordeuropas, etc. (Glogau, 1893).
Thus the single combat, which remains characteristic for the Indian traditions of the Mahabharata, turned, in the chess of the transitional period, into a fight of opposing forces, whereas in the epic the leaders still fight out the battle personally in single combat before their soldiers. But in chess the king is covered by his foot-soldiers, his elephants, runners, and boats, even by the dominant queen, and only as a rule comes into action at the last crisis. We shall not try to decide whether this arrangement was a wish-fantasy of the king or an actual change in the art of war demanded by the mass-movements of the Migrations. It is more important for us at the moment that the originally chthonian significance of the ideologies which survive representatively in the labyrinthine snake-game and the similar role of the boat as the vessel of the underworld (especially in Egypt) is preserved, in a religious and perhaps even a social form, in the cultural relationship that Borck assumes to have existed between eastern Asia and Elam (the home of Iranian chess). As F. W. Konig has shown in his brilliant study: Mutterrecht und Thronfolge im alten Elam (Vienna, 1926), the people of Elam were organized on a matriarchal system, and therefore familiar with the idea of a female divinity ruling over the pantheon. It was only later, after the eastward movement of south Elamite culture—put by Borck between 1250 and 1150 B.c.—that a god (Humban Jupiter) took the first place. Chess also, then —in the form in which it has survived —is the product of a transformation of the mother world-view, with its chthonian immortality-ideology, into the spiritual immortality, not of the father, but of the creative ego, of which the head (the king) became the representative. Hence in chess the king is physically almost powerless, while the domination of the mother is still retained in the dominant rdle of the queen —which she had to surrender to the king in the much later card-games.’
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1 The Ace which beats—i.c., kills everything is death, and in this case, as a wishfulfilment, is denoted by the first instead of the last letter of the alphabet.
This degradation of the bodily faculties, the footsoldier, peasant, runner, in favour of the head and king, who is more spiritual, finally gave the game its wholly intellectual character; and it is probably connected, as we saw in regard to Egypt, with the decay of the body and its parts, which are now survived only by the spirit in its immortal works. After this sweep over world-history, it remains for us to cast an eye over the primitive duel-games, before we turn finally to the higher spiritual or intellectual games. The duel-game, which we have seen to be fundamental for all play-ideology and the fateful significance of games, has been helpfully studied by Hans Damm; * from whom, for our own purposes, we borrow the general conclusion that the duel was probably the original form of war, and that fighting in groups or in mass was a later development, in which the intellectual leadership comes into its own. Further we will mention Damm’s view that the original battle—not duel— may, because of the primitiveness of the weapons, have been carried on by ambuscade, whereas the naturally open form of battle, which is also characteristic of the war-games, depends on the invention of long-range weapons, even if these were of a more or less primitive kind. More important than these general conclusions about the primacy of the single combat, which we also have deduced from what are seemingly games of entertainment, is the conclusion of Damm that most primitive games are really questions set to fate—an idea to which Berkusky first gave expression in the case of the tug of war, a ceremonial rain-magic.” He assumes that the tug originally set destiny the question whether the rain-bearing monsoon would come soon or not. “ But as all such questions of the future which man himself has to answer, because external factors are beyond his influence, tend to develop into a magic activity, it looks as if here also we have an attempt at forecasting the future, preceded by rainmagic.”
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1 Die gymnastischen Spiele der Indonesier und Sidseevilker, Part 1: “Die Zweikampfspiele”’ (Leipzig, 1922).
2** Regenzauber’’ (Mitteilungen der anthrop. Gesellschaft; Vienna; Vol. XLIII.
The same is true of a ceremonial wrestling-match which the Batak in Sumatra carry through each year with reference to the sacrifice to the “common father of their race”: a bull is killed, and according to the manner of his fall, whether with the wound above or below, so will the tribe’s fate be; and the wrestlers belonging to the various tribes try to influence the fall of the beast in accordance with their wishes and by their own strength — which really amounts to “correcting fortune” in connexion with the question put to destiny. The tug of war, however, besides being used for rain-magic, has another cult meaning as an agricultural rite. In one group of islands we find it in spring at the time of seeding, the object being furthered, moreover, by obscene rites. Hoevell explains the tug in this case, in which the pull is less important than the rhythmic back and forward movement of the upper body, as an imitation of cult coitus.’ The fact that in this case the two parties are represented by the male and female, and are not simply two groups as in the tug proper, seems an argument in his favour. But perhaps this rite will throw light on the ceremonial agricultural coitus itself, which is usually interpreted as a mimic encouragement of the vegetation processes. But the conflict in the tug of war between the masculine and feminine principles would seem to show that there is a deeper meaning underlying the sexual vegetation rite. For even in its most primitive form agriculture is a human invention, which presupposes both the knowledge of the human sexual process and its exploitation in nature — for cattle-breeding as well as for agriculture. The female may well represent spontaneous growth, the male what is consciously willed; and the question asked in the tug of war would be whether the plants are to bloom as they will—spontaneously, in the feminine sense—or consciously and in the masculine sense, as we will them to do. Vegetation rites are also seen in certain fighting-games which have sunk from the actual shedding of blood to a mere sham fight. Blood, too, is often made to flow, simply by beating, which would represent an earlier scourging which had itself originally been a sacrifice. Such vegetation sacrifices, of which, however, we hear only incidentally in myths of higher cultures (for example, the sacrifice of the spring-gods), would then correspond to the type of the building-sacrifice: the field must receive a living gift.
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1 Detailed references in Damm.
It seems to me that the afore-mentioned superiority of the spiritual over the natural principle may also explain ritual circumcision, which, as is well known, is an essential part of puberty initiation rites. Here also blood flows (the bloodbond); and the whipping, whose purpose is similar, derives (as Preuss has shown) from purely magical motives, to give the boy, now arrived at manhood, the magical power which distinguishes men from women. If we may apply this idea to bloody mutilation also, our conclusion would be that some form of mutilation represents a real attainment of manhood in the spiritual sense, though not in the sexual. The young man who has reached manhood is symbolically deprived of his genital organs (for circumcision is equivalent to castration, as we see in the sacrificing of spring-gods like Attis, Adonis, and Osiris in the higher civilizations) and only then becomes, spiritually, man. In the case of the tug of war, which is supposed to represent an imitation of coitus, this would mean that man needs no longer to work for the fruits of the field in the “ natural” way, but that he can produce them by his intelligence and thus make himself to a very considerable extent independent of nature. So far as this is not possible, he tries to influence sun or rain by his (magic) will. This realization by the inventive intelligence, of its independence of nature may perhaps explain also why these significant and solemn ceremonies “ sank,” as we say, to be the mere shams which are now games. Man, who at first did not feel himself sure of his superior intellectual powers and yet tried to influence the unreliable weather for his own purposes, gradually realized by virtue of this same intelligence that the second was impossible and the first superfluous. Instead of real shedding of blood, which neither promotes growth nor causes rain, we have a sham fight as a sort of deception of nature, which is here the real opponent and vanquished by deceit. spring-god, wherein the young god (puberty), represented in human form or idea, symbolizes also the punishment of this human pretension. And here too we have a source, as is obvious, of another form of play which in time has lost its serious cultcharacter and has sunk to a sort of game, though it is the sublimest form of art. I refer, of course, to tragedy, the goatsong which developed out of Dionysiac mystery-cults and deals with the killing of a typically sexual animal. Tragedy is thus rightly included among the higher art-forms which have already passed so far beyond the chthonian mother-soil of art that the overweening creative power of the self-conscious individual, as displayed in the Greek hero type, can be represented by it in its rise and fall. Originally this representation was purely ritual, so that the part was not only played but lived and the hero was actually killed. The festival play which was performed by actors with a specially composed text belongs to a much later time, in which the poet, as the heir of the hero, interprets the whole business humanly. He puts before us in metaphorical form the vanished ages of man’s first ascent above nature and reminds the present of it by admonitory examples. The poet (especially the Greek) must not therefore identify himself wholly with the hero and his destiny, but only with the spirit of the old myth, regardless of the particular hero who exemplifies it. Greek tragedy, whose heroes are types and not individuals, deals with man’s pride and its fall; a theme which concerned not only the individual Greek or his poetic representative, but the whole Hellenic people, which had risen from trivial and obscure beginnings to a spiritual height at which no pause was possible — and also no progress, but only a tragic collapse. Connected with this, probably, is the fact that the great nature, which is here the real opponent and vanquished by deceit. This gradually achieved victory over nature has its highest triumph among the cultured peoples in the sacrifice of the athletic festivals of the Greeks, like Greek art itself, attained their highest significance and perfection with the rise of the city-state, the Polis, and decayed under the petty jealousies of the various cities and races and their general political collapse.* For the Greeks made even their games and sports a national concern in which everyone took active part, whereas the sensation-loving Romans found more pleasure in watching professional gladiators.
The Greek games therefore had far more the character of sport and competition, and therefore of chance, than the Roman shows, in which the end could be foreseen and only the desperate death-struggle fascinated. This was no longer a game, nor competition, but mass-slaughtering. The circus games, on the other hand, which were to be seen in the great /udi (based on an Etruscan model), still give indication of old macrocosmic linkages. The wooden tower in the circus, the “ fala,’ with the seven egg-shaped figures, “ ova,” is connected with the course of the planets (E. Hommel), which was symbolically copied in the circus, and which is still definitely expressed, according to Winckler (op. cit., p. 125), even in Byzantium. Further, Krause called in the /udi to help explain the labyrinthine Troy-game. The horse-racing in the circus (racecourse) probably conserves an earlier form, in which many traditions prove that the first arrival home meant much more than a mere sporting victory. Thus also with the Incas in Peru, where the royal dignity was raced for by a difficult course of over nine kilometres (Fuhrmann: Peru, I, 33); and so also the right of asylum, which survives in a degenerate form in those modern games which turn on one’s timely arrival at a definite spot, meant of old the saving of a life? Just as chariot-racing appears in macrocosmic form in the chariot of Helios, so ball-games have their symbolical meaning. Danzel regards them (Mexiko, I, 31) as typical examples of the idea of parallelism on earth and in heaven, of the projection of human conditions, relations, and actions into the cosmic ; for we shall not be far wrong in assuming that the flight of the ball symbolized for the Mexican the course of sun or moon — and, indeed, the Indians of central Brazil say the sun and moon are shuttlecocks.’
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1E.N. Gardiner: Greek Athletic S ports and Festivals (London, 1910). 7 E. von Kunsberg: Rechtsbrauch und Kinderspiel (Heidelberg, 1920).
“The ground-plan of the ball-play court (which is specific to a wide area of Central America) was that of a double T. From the side walls of the enclosure stone rings projected, through which it was one of the main objects to hurl a rubber ball. The courts were orientated exactly northsouth. The game was played from one of the wider T-shaped ends to the other, and in order to count, the ball had to hit the side wall and pass the centre line. Anyone who succeeded in sending the ball through one of the two projecting stone rings was entitled to take the cloaks of all the spectators. The spectators then cried: ‘ He is a great adulterer, and prophesied an early death and poured water through the ring — and this was called the spring.” Danzel recognizes in this custom, besides an astronomic symbolism, some element of a sexual cult operating as fertility magic; especially since the ball-game was played at the seventh festival of the year, at which masked men in the guise of the deities of the young maize-god and the old goddess opposed each other. “ But the real divinity of the ball-game is the double figure of the god Xolotl, who in his two forms represents the players who oppose each other at the festival of the eating of water cakes. Even the cult usage shows that we are concerned with a decision which of the two players is to die and which to live; and this is further supported by the general significance of the god Xolotl, who was the patron of the ball-game. “ The name of Xolotl, who is in a sense a twin brother of the in some ways cognate Quetzalcoatl, means “he that appears in pairs, the twinned.’ Hence Xolotl is also the god of twins and of the ball-game because the players are always a pair.” But he is regarded also as the god who leads the sun and the dead into the underworld, though also as the leader upward —in a word, the god of life and death.
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1 F, Borck had already discussed ball-games and the heavens: ** Bin Himmelsbild der Pakontshi’’ (Orientalistische Literatur Zeitung, 1915, PP. 142 et seq.).
He is thus also the first sacrificer of older days, who alone dared to leap into the fire and thus became, by this self-sacrifice, the sun. This double character he shares with almost all Mexican gods, who are generally intermediate forms, made up apparently of two contrasting halves.’ If the ball-game is essentially a decision of destiny between life and death, its obvious macrocosmic character not only indicates a surmounting of this primal conflict by a mythological “die and become”; but also illustrates another quality of games—the wishful conquest of the external world and especially of the cosmic influences which ultimately decide man’s destiny. In the game this wish is fulfilled by willing, whether by diverting and guiding the planets in the racecourse or prescribing definite rules in a ball-game.
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1Cf, the reproduction on Plate go in T. Danzel: Symbole, Damonen und heilige Turme. Bildtafeln zur ethnologischen Religionskunde und Mythologie (Hamburg, 1930). This double figure, which is typical in Mexico, gives on the one side the wind-god, on the other the skeleton-headed death-god, thus representing “‘life and death.'’ The following plates of the bipartite and double-coloured figures from all parts of the world, including the Roman Janus, seem to show that the primal dualism was the life-and-death principle. Here too we have a development passing from the duality of the whole man, even of the universe, to one of the head, which may be connected with man’s orientation in the universe on the basis of his sense organs. Cf. also Karutz: Das Rétsel des Janus. Von Wirklichkeit in Kunst und Mythus (Basel, 1927). Danzel's illustrated work appeared too late for me to use it in detail. I can therefore refer only summarily to the section on sacral step-buildings (Tower of Babel, etc.), Magic anatomy, world-picture and cosmic caverns, head trophies and skull symbols.
This explains also the frequent confusion of cosmic and sexual symbolism, whether this was original or only developed later. For man, even primitive man, is, by virtue of his sex, already in a way the controller of nature-forces, as we can see, for example, by continence of Indians or Australians before important undertakings. As we have already shown with reference to various fertility rites, the immediate object is a cheating of nature of her tribute, for that is what death ultimately is; though he is manifested also sexually as partial death and thereafter transformed into sacrifice. Though this cheating of the original opponent has left a strong tendency to “ corriger la fortune” in games, yet in its higher development it represents a transition from deception to domination, a raising of the cosmic phenomena from the realm of necessity into that of freedom. In this sense play is no instinct, and the games of animals which are adduced as evidence (for instance by Groos) cannot, in my opinion, be compared at all with human games, because the motive of the original deception, and the later domination, of nature are entirely absent. Even children’s games cannot really be brought into evidence, because the toys which children (even among primitives) receive are given by grown-ups and thus represent an early education of the impulse and capacity for control. The first step in that control seems to be the conquest of fear, for when an Indian child is given a totem-doll to play with or a Negro child some primitive demon-carving, the purpose is probably to make them familiar with the object of religious faith and lose their fear of these “black men” (see Hirn: Kinderspielzeug). Play is thus rather a prelude to art, as Freud regards it, than a prelude to life, as Groos thought. Only, at a primitive stage there was no difference between the two worlds of reality and super-reality, so that the control of the one in play at the same time guaranteed control of the other by magic. Both, however, primitive magic and later art, have the same impulse at bottom, the element of control which developed out of the original deception of nature. This process of development appears in the gradual transformation of the cult or sacral festival game, with its purpose of influencing nature, into a mere sham activity with the purpose of deceiving nature. The sham manceuvre which we call play appears to us then as the survival of a once very important and serious cult-activity, which also exhibits the increasing sphere of human influence in man’s passage from deception to control of nature: a process which seems to be repeated in children’s games, wherein we were formerly disposed to see only an occupation imposed by grown-ups, or a means to distract children, whereas in reality play is as serious for a child as cult was for primitive man. In every case play, by diminishing fear, liberates an energy which can ultimately express itself creatively. Not every child that plays becomes an artist —a fact which makes play as useless for the explanation of creative art as the other infantile experiences which all children share in common. Through dominating his toys a child does gain confidence, and play does liberate stored energy, but whether it is to express itself in art or not depends on the particular use made of it. Domination may easily lead to destruction, as we see in the way that many children treat their toys; and whether this is followed by the creation of a new or the destruction of another seems to depend on general conditions over which we have little control. The “ young scientist” who must needs examine the inside of his toy, its mechanism and its works, by “analysis” is very early differentiated from the artist who makes himself a splendid doll out of a chip of wood. In one case, clearly, the destructive, in the other the constructive, predominates; and closer study would probably show that in the artist-type the impulse to create is subjectively attached to the ego, while the other appears to exhibit a stronger objectivity of relations.
