The Anathemata
Rite and Fore-time (continued)
The mimes deploy:
anthropoid
anthropoi.
Who knows at what precise phase, or from what floriate green-room, the Master of Harlequinade, himself not made, maker of sequence and permutation in all things made, called us from our co-laterals out, to dance the Funeral Games of the Great Mammalia, as, long, long, long before, these danced out the Dinosaur?
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This paragraph pcks up the ‘all the world’s a stage’ metaphor and the ‘transformed scenes’ (of a pantomime) from the previous page and addresses the question ‘When did creatures reognisably human first begin to play their part against this geological background?... But with the scene set for the Ice Age man steps well on to the stage and begins the play in which we ourselves are acting.’ (Jacquetta and Christopher Hawkes, Prehistoric Britain, 1948, p. 8; quoted in Hague p. 52). And when, too, will men finish playing their part?