The title of this book may strike the reader as strange and even dissonant. What have art and ritual to do together? The ritualist is to the modern mind a man concerned perhaps unduly with fixed forms and ceremonies with carrying out the rigidly prescribed ordinances of a church or sect. The artist on the other hand we think of as free in thought and untrammelled by convention in practice; his tendency is towards licence. Art and ritual it is quite true have diverged to-day; but the title of this book is chosen advisedly. Its object is to show that these two divergent developments have a common root and that neither can be understood without the other. It is at the outset one and the same impulse that sends a man to church and to the theatre.
Such a statement may sound to-day paradoxical even irreverent. But to the Greek of the sixth fifth and even fourth century B.C. it would have been a simple truism. We shall see this best by following an Athenian to his theatre on the day of the great Spring Festival of Dionysos.