Their interest in the cycles of time was practical, a life and death matter. A delay of as little as a few days in planting or harvesting could mean that a crop would fail and there would be nothing to eat through the winter, dooming most to die. Even in earlier times the hunters knew that the movements of the animals and the fruiting of the trees follow the celestial calendar.
The dramatic meat of these seasonal turning point festivals was the staging of an elaborate adventure, in which the king or the statues of the gods "disappeared," supposedly having been kidnapped, stolen away, or killed and dismembered by dark forces of chaos. The whole society pretended to mourn them, giving up the pleasures of life for a period of time in sympathy with the kidnapped or dead gods or king.
In some versions of seasonal festivals in ancient Babylon, the statues of the gods were actually removed from the temples and buried in the desert or destroyed. Later in the festival they would be returned to their rightful positions or replaced with new ones, triggering great relief and celebration by the people.
Sir James Frazer in The Golden Bough persuasively makes the case that many societies pass through an early stage where the office of king is a temporary job, held only for a set period of time, perhaps just one year. In the most primal of these societies the old king is either executed or must fight a ritual combat with the new candidate. The sacrificial death of the old king cleans the slate and pays for the mistakes of the past year. Gradually, popular or very powerful kings managed to extend their rule but the tradition of sacrificing the old king ran very deep and was often represented symbolically in the customs, traditions, and ritual pageants of the mound-building cultures. The literal sacrifice of the king and his replacement with a successor was replaced by a mythological death and rebirth, like that of Osiris. The king was identified with the god who had died and come back to life again, and acted out his death, dismemberment, and rebirth in dramatic rituals rather than by actually dying.
The scholar Theodore Gaster described four types of ritual in the ancient world of the Near East that followed one another in a seasonal sequence of Mortification, Purgation, Invigoration, and Jubilation, all related to the death and rebirth of the god or king. Sometimes all four elements could be combined in an elaborate ritual drama that involved all the members of society as actors in the play, whose stage was the whole city, and whose subject was the death and rebirth of the god-king. Gaster says ancient ritual drama was of two types, rituals of kenosis or emptying, and rituals of plerosis or filling. Mortification and Purgation emptied the body and mind, cleansing and purifying them while giving a taste of death, and Invigoration and Jubilation rituals filled and satisfied the people while re-invoking the principle of life.
Performing these rituals at the seasonal turning points was a symbolic but also practical way of allowing the whole society to cool down after a strenuous season of work. As we now grant ourselves frequent holidays to punctuate the year and break our work into manageable, bearable spans of time, so did our ancestors sensibly stop the drumbeat of the work routine from time to time, but very consciously and purposefully.
In the Mortification and Purgation phases they shut down as many of life's systems as possible, using mourning for the absent gods or king as a pretext to give a rest to all commerce, labor, lawsuits, etc. Shops, warehouses, and factories were closed. The hearth fires that burned in every home were put out, and the great fire that burned eternally in the temple was extinguished too. Even the processes of the body were shut down, and people fasted, stopped talking, and gave up life's pleasures to become more quiet and contemplative for a few hours. It was considered a time out, time outside of time, a grinding down of the giant clock, and in some calendars the festival days were not given numbers or names, signifying that this was sacred turning point time, not subject to the ordinary daily rhythms.
Mortification meant bringing the body near the point of death by fasting, but also denying oneself any of the little pleasures of the body. They believed the body needed to be humbled or mortified from time to time, so it knows the mind is the master. The absence of things that were normally taken for granted created a renewed appreciation for them. It also focused the minds of the people and reminded them of the possibility of death that was always near.
Lamentation was an important part of the ritual at this point. People were supposed to meditate sympathetically on the death of the hero-god-king until the tears ran down their faces. Special songs were composed with the aim of triggering the emotions of grief and sorrow. The dramatic form of tragedy was developed from the rituals, chants, and dances of mourning that tried to evoke sympathy for the suffering god or king. Tragedy comes from the word "tragos" or goat, because goats were often used as sacrificial stand-ins for the yearly sacrifice of the king.
The Purgation phase of seasonal rituals was marked by cleansing the body and the environment as much as possible. People would bathe and anoint themselves with oil to symbolize the shedding of an old skin from the previous season. Houses and temples would be cleansed with water and fumigated. Bells and gongs would be rung to chase out unclean spirits. Fireworks have been used in China for centuries for this purpose.
Purgation was both metaphorical and literal in these ancient societies. Mentally and metaphorically, people were supposed to purge themselves of sour feelings, resentments, jealousies, and so on. But they were also supposed to cleanse the body of impurities by fasting and even by inducing vomiting.
Catharsis was a medical term in Aristotle's time for the natural processes by which the body eliminates poisons and wastes. It comes from the word "katharos" which means pure, so a catharsis is a purification, but it can also be a purgation, a vomiting up or violent expelling of impurities. Sneezing is a cathartic reaction to rid the nasal passages of impurities.
In the Poetics, Aristotle used the term "catharsis of the emotions" as a metaphor, comparing the emotional effect of a drama with the way the body rids itself of toxins and impurities. The Greeks and other ancient peoples knew that life is hard, involving many unpleasant compromises and the eating of much crow. Emotional impurities and poisons build up in the body just as physical ones do, and can have catastrophic effects if not purged at regular intervals. They believed that people who get no emotional release from art, music, sports, dance, or drama inevitably will be overcome by poisonous feelings that will surface as aggression, hostility, perversion, or madness, all things dangerous to the society. Therefore they institutionalized purging and purification of mind and body with seasonal festivals that artificially induced catharsis on a quarterly schedule. Drama was a sacred thing, not available for daily consumption, and confined only to the important turning points of the year.
The fasting and purging created a condition of extreme dramatic suggestibility in the population. It was then that the whole society gathered in the squares and streets of the city-state to witness a spectacular dramatization of some great event in the mythic history of the culture. The people were not a passive audience, but took an active part in the dramatic presentation. The city itself with its gates, processional avenues, and towering temples became the stage set for an enormous collective re-enactment of creation, a great battle between gods of order and chaos, or the death and rebirth of the god-king.