Even in Western society today the need for these rites exists. It may not be ingrained in our everyday practices, but people still create their own ceremonies. She was at least as fascinated by what she beheld there as she is by witchcraft. It's very dreamlike. The water is silky smooth.
People just float there.
And so they do, aged, from the look of things, and almost mystically content. There are a lot of subconscious things going on. We are given only infinitely subtle clues to the answer. This they do by their unpredictability, their tendency to take on their own fictive and aesthetic life as the work progresses. For all of her expressive sincerity in the matter of painting life, Jennifer Young, like the Greeks, absolutely revels in it.