Note 92.1 — RITUAL AND BELIEF

Thus what we generally call magic or witchcraft is primarily an application of orenda. By his orenda a man bewitches his enemy (or, for a consideration, someone else’s enemy), causes rain or sunshine, raises and protects the crops, gains success in hunting, divines the cause of sickness and cures it, raises the dead, spells out the future. His incantations, his gestures, his apparatus—whether of plants, stones, animal products, magical drawings, or whatever else it may be—would be of no avail without this. In Central Australia the Arunta magician arms his “pointing bone” with arungquiltha. In Central Africa the Murundi impregnates his magical implements with evil influence by means of his imprecations, his incantations, and his evocation of spirits. That is, he puts into them his orenda or the mana of the spirits: until then they are absolutely powerless and indifferent.92.1 This influence, this orenda, mana, or arungquiltha, is the nexus—the copula, as it has been called—which links the subject, the magician, to the object, the result.