RITUAL AND BELIEF

LEARNING TO “THINK BLACK”

The fact is that on these subjects the majority of the human race, whether savage or civilized, think little. Their minds are seldom excited to the point of reasoning on their beliefs. They accept what they are told, and do not even know whether they believe it or not, because they have never reflected upon it. One has only to talk for a few minutes to a peasant at home to find out how narrow the border of his knowledge is, how misty and uncertain is everything beyond the routine of his daily life and the village gossip and amusements, unless where in the neighbourhood of a town the supreme interests of football open to him a prospect into another world. Gossip, amusements, his daily bread are subjects of importance; they fill his horizon; on them his views are perfectly definite. Nor does he differ in this respect from people who are looked upon as his social superiors. It would be making too strenuous a demand upon their intellectual life to expect them to rise above the markets, the newspaper, the latest novel, the county cricket-score, and the problems of golf and bridge. All the rest they are content to leave to their professional advisers, who in nine cases out of ten, if the truth must be told, have as little taste or capacity as themselves for metaphysical speculation, historical research or theological enquiry, and are bound as tightly in the cords of tradition as the far more imaginative Zulu medicine-man, or the Eskimo wizard. For the average man in civilization appraises the subjects of thought no otherwise than does his brother in savagery. Each alike is eminently practical. Something done, or to be done, by himself or others is what interests him. Some personal gain, some bodily pleasure—for this he will think and think hard; all other mental exertion must be easy and short. Nor could the human race exist on any other terms.

For it needs a considerable apprenticeship to enable the observer, in Miss Kingsley’s phrase, to “think black,” to understand the logic of “black” thought, and accurately, or at least approximately, to reproduce its process and aims. When we are told, therefore, by a writer whom I cited a few pages back that the relation of cause and effect in all but the most patent and mechanical cases is beyond the grasp of the West African Bantu, that statement must be taken with some qualification. It should be explained that it is the relation of cause and effect according to our ideas and our reasoning that is beyond the native grasp, because our axioms are unknown to him; he reasons from quite another set of logical presuppositions. To change the figure, he is a child, but a child familiar only with what we deem a topsy-turvy world, though it is the same world from which we ourselves emerged long ago. If we would comprehend him we must painfully climb down into that world again, breathe its air, familiarize ourselves with its scenes of wonder and of terror, and make intimate companions of all its strange inhabitants. Thus and thus only can we recover the clue that will lead us safely through the shadowy forests and haunted valleys and over the primeval mountain-tops of native thought. Then we shall find that the savage is not so irrational as we have thought him, and that in his wildest divergence from our methods of reasoning he has a method of his own—a method followed once upon a time by our own ancestors, a method from which the peasantry of many a European country is not yet wholly emancipated.

This is to “think black.” It is not everybody who can do it: it requires more sympathy and insight than are given to all men. Above all, it requires patience, long and close contact with the native, and the persistent and self-abandoning endeavour to penetrate his thoughts. Some missionaries have achieved it, some travellers, some traders, some colonists, some government officials. Too many of them, alas! have only skimmed the surface of the native mind. Even the latter, however, though they have failed to read the underlying meaning of what they saw, have sometimes taught us what to look for. To that extent the modern school of anthropology is founded on their observations. The training now given in anthropology at the universities and elsewhere utilizes and criticizes the reports of all observers, as well as the conclusions drawn from them by anthropologists at home. That training is of material assistance in fitting new labourers out for fresh fields of enquiry, or for working over again those fields which have been hitherto imperfectly reaped by ill-equipped enquirers. In some measure it supplies the place of longer preliminary intercourse with the man of lower culture; and it has the advantage that it teaches the student what kind of phenomenon to expect—an advantage perhaps not unaccompanied by dangers of its own.

Be that as it may, the information of all kinds, good, bad, and indifferent, already at our service on the subject of the religions of the lower culture has been and is still being subjected to ruthless comparison and criticism. The result of this constant sifting is to put us in possession of a considerable body of material for a sane judgement in regard to some of the beliefs of tribes in various parts of the world and to help us forward on the track of others. We no longer summarily deny the possession of religion to tribes whose practices we do not understand. We no longer attempt to docket beliefs imperfectly apprehended under headings applicable only to the highly developed and literary theology of Europe. We lie under a more insidious temptation—that of the too rapid generalization of the beliefs of the lower culture, for which the groundwork may not as yet exist. But we are learning the lesson that only by unwearied investigation, diligent observation, sympathetic enquiry without prepossession, can we attain to a real grasp of the protean ideas and half-formulated speculations of savage minds.

THE RELATIONS OF RELIGION AND MAGIC

I. The Common Root

Thus forewarned of the difficulties and dangers of our path, let us proceed to enquire whether there are any general ideas relating to religion disseminated among men in the lower stages of culture, that either are themselves primitive, or can have been derived from an earlier condition of thought discoverable by us.

Animism thus conceived is, it is obvious, too complex and elaborate to be really primitive. It appears to be itself derived from a simpler and earlier conception, whereby man attributes to all the objects of external nature life and personality. In other words, the external world is first interpreted by the savage thinker in the terms of his own consciousness; animism, or the distinction of soul and body, is a development necessitated by subsequent observation and the train of reasoning which that observation awakens.

Primitive man is so far away from us, not merely in time but in thought, that we find it difficult to imagine his attempts to grapple with the interpretation of external phenomena. What waves of desire, of curiosity, of wonder, of awe, of terror, of hope, of bewilderment must have rolled through the sluggish dawn of his intellect! As he struggled in his little communities (tiny by comparison with ours) with the evolution of speech, how did those various and perhaps ill-defined emotions come to utterance? He was not naturally speculative. Savage man even now is not, as a rule, speculative, though, as we have seen in the preceding essay, observers who have had opportunities of comparison have noted differences in this respect between one people and another. Everything primitive man saw, everything he heard or felt must have struck his mind primarily in relation to himself—or rather to the community (the food-group, as it has been called), of which the individual formed a part, to its dangers and its needs. The personal element would dominate his thoughts, and must have found expression in his words. As a matter of fact, it forms everywhere the basis of language. Hence it was impossible for man to interpret external phenomena in any other than personal terms. This necessity may have been an inheritance from a pre-human stage, since there is reason to think that the lower animals project their own sensations to other animals, and even to objects without life. Yet to fix the objective personalities that primitive man thought he saw and felt about him must have taken time and observation. Not all objects claimed his attention in the same degree or with the same insistence. Some would stand out aggressively, would fill him with a sense of power manifested in ways that seemed analogous with his own. Others would long remain comparatively unregarded, until something happened which aroused his interest. His attitude was first of all and intensely practical, not contemplative. His fellow-men, the animals he hunted, the trees whose branches he saw waving in the breeze, the sun and moon overhead going their daily rounds—to all these he would early attach significance: they would easily yield the personal quality. But what of the pools, the hills, the rocks, and so forth? There must have been many things that long abode in the twilight of perception—many things upon which reflection was not yet concentrated. The North American Indian lays a tribute of tobacco at the foot of any strange rock whose form strikes him as he goes by, or strews his gift upon the waters of the lake or stream that bears his canoe. On the top of every pass in the Cordilleras of South America and of every pass in the mountains of China the native leaves a token still more trivial. It may be that his earliest forefather, who set the example of such an offering, did so without any definite conception of a personality behind the phenomenon, but, smitten by fear or awe, simply sought, by the means familiar to him in the case of known personal beings, to conciliate whatever power might lurk beneath an unwonted form. And although a comparatively definite conception of a personality might in time crystallize, to be transformed later by the evolution of animism into the idea of a spirit, yet there must always have remained, after all these crystallizations, the vague and formless Unknown, confronted in all its more prominent manifestations through the medium of an undefined dread of power which might at any time be revealed from it.

In this relation of the personal and the impersonal lies, as it seems to me, the secret of primitive philosophy, if philosophy it may be called, all un-selfconscious as it must have been. There is no written record of man’s earliest guesses at the meaning of the universe. Whatever they were, they were limited to his immediate surroundings and the relation of these surroundings to himself. We must judge of them as they are represented in the beliefs and actions of modern, or at all events much later, savages and in those of great historic nations. For all scientific enquirers are agreed that the history of the human mind has been that of a slow evolution from something lower than the lowest savagery known to-day, that it has not everywhere evolved in the same way or to the same degree, and that the course it has taken has left traces, discoverable by close inspection, upon every mental product and in every civilization throughout the world. The testimony on which we have to rely in the investigation is of the most various value, and often most difficult of interpretation. Its difficulties and defects have already been touched upon; nor do I propose further to consider them now. The minute examination and relentless criticism to which it has been subjected have revealed its weakness; they have also revealed its strength. They have left a solid body of evidence from which we may cautiously but confidently reason. What can we learn from it on the point under discussion?

The first thing to be noticed is the fluidity of the savage concept of personality. It is not confined within the bounds of one stable and relatively unchangeable body. You may quite easily be transformed, like the hero of Apuleius’ tale, into an ass. Your next-door neighbour, for whom you have the profoundest respect as a prosperous man of business and a churchwarden of exemplary piety, may startle you some morning with a sudden change into a noisy little street-arab, not a tenth of his own portly dimensions, turning a wheel all down his garden path, or into a melancholy cow cropping a bare pittance of grass from his closely trimmed lawn. He and his magnificent wife may even become, like Philemon and Baucis, an oak and a lime-tree before your eyes, or a pair of standing stones upon the moor. None of these metamorphoses would be accounted impossible by peoples in the lower culture. To them the essential incident of the tale of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde would be mere commonplace. The personality which they have known running in one mould can, in their opinion, be directed into, and will run as freely in, another mould, and yet be the same. So hard do such archaic beliefs die, that in remote parts of our own country it is still firmly believed that a witch may assume the form of a hare, and if any bold sportsman succeed in wounding the animal, the injury will afterwards be found on the witch’s proper person, testifying beyond dispute to the preservation of her individuality under the temporary change of shape and species.

Some votive offerings may perhaps be interpreted as surrogates of human sacrifice. Others, made when the votary is suffering from sickness, may be intended to transfer the disease. These explanations are in many cases very questionable; and a large number of offerings remain that do not easily submit to be thus explained. The Greek women just mentioned had no disease to be returned to the custody of the goddess, ready for another victim. In view of future contingencies they placed in her care objects identified with themselves; they brought into physical touch with her a portion of their own personality. Convergence of more than one rite, similar in outward form but distinct in origin, has doubtless occurred very often in human history. But the ambiguity which would follow is not always to be traced on a careful analysis. It is obvious, at all events, that if an article of my clothing in a witch’s hands may cause me to suffer and die, the same article in contact with a beneficent power may relieve my pain, restore me to health, or promote my general prosperity. My shirt or stocking, or a shred from it, placed upon a sacred bush, or thrust into a sacred well—a lock of my hair laid upon a sacred image—my name written upon the walls of a temple—a stone from my hand cast upon a sacred cairn—a remnant of my food thrown into a sacred waterfall or suspended from a sacred tree—a nail driven by my hand into the trunk of a tree—is thenceforth in immediate contact with divinity. It is a portion of my personality enveloped with the sanctity of the divine being; and so long as it remains there I am myself in contact with the same divine being, whoever he may be, and derive all the advantages incident to the contact.

Such beliefs as these are world-wide; they are a commonplace of anthropology; and it would be waste of time to multiply examples. They exhibit a concept of personality imperfectly crystallized. It is still fluid and vague, only to become entirely definite under the influence of trained reason and larger and more scientific knowledge. But, such as it is, there is behind and around it the still vaguer, the unlimited territory of the Impersonal, because the Unknown. Every object on which the attention has been fixed, every object, therefore, that may be said to be known, has its own personality—every object, whether living, or, according to our ideas, not-living. What remains is the stuff out of which personalities are formed as it is gradually reduced into relations with the savage observer. These personalities do not necessarily correspond even to anything objective. They may be creations of the excited imagination. It is sufficient for the savage that they seem to be, and to have a relation to himself which he cannot otherwise interpret. His emancipation from this state of mind is slow, though among some peoples in the lower culture it is more perceptible than among others. But it leaves its traces everywhere—there, most of all, where emotion is most acute and permanent, where hopes and fears are most overwhelming, in the sphere of religion.

Now every personality is endowed with qualities which enable it to persist, to influence others, and even to overcome, subjugate, and destroy them for its own ends. No more than ourselves could the primeval savage avoid being influenced and often overmatched by the charm and wiles of woman, the wisdom of the elders of his horde, the dauntless might of the warrior. The non-human personalities with which he came in contact possessed qualities not less remarkable than those of the human. The strength, the fierceness, the agility of the lion, the speed of the antelope, the cunning of the fox, the lofty forms and endurance of the forest trees, their response to every breath of wind, and the kindly shelter they yielded to birds and beasts and men, the fantastic forms and stern patience of the rocks, the smooth and smiling treachery of the lake, the gentle murmur and benign largess of the river, the splendour, the burning heat of the sun, the changeableness and movement of the clouds are a few of the more obvious qualities attached to the myriad personalities with which men found themselves environed. These personalities and their qualities would impress them all the more because of the mystery that perpetually masked them. Mystery magnified them. Hence every non-human personality was apt to be conceived in larger than human terms, and its qualities were larger than human.

I do not pause here to adduce illustrations of this attitude towards the objects surrounding mankind. In any event it would of course be impossible to illustrate it from prehistoric, not to say primeval, ages. It is characteristic of modern savages wherever an intimate acquaintance enables the civilized observer to penetrate into their arcana. Some of them have got no further; others have advanced to the full stage of animism. Reference may be made to any work in which the life and ideas of a savage tribe are depicted.

Not merely was every personality, human and other, endowed with qualities, but by virtue of those qualities it possessed a potentiality and an atmosphere of its own. The successful warrior and huntsman by more than his successes, by his confidence and his brag, his readiness to quarrel and his vindictiveness, or the many-wintered elder, wise and slow to wrath, experienced in war and forestry, of far-reaching purpose and subtle in execution, would be enshrined in a belief in his powers, surrounded with a halo of which we still see a dim, a very dim, reflection in the touching regard entertained for a political leader or the worship paid to an ecclesiastical dignitary. Nor would this atmosphere surround only important or successful men. Everyone is conscious of powers of some sort, and everyone would attribute to others capabilities larger or smaller. Some would possess in their own consciousness and in the eyes of their fellows a very small modicum of power for good or evil. The mere glance or voice of others would inspire terror or confidence. This potentiality, this atmosphere would often cling with greater intensity to non-human beings, objective or imaginary. The snake, the bird, the elephant, the sun, the invisible wind, the unknown wielder of the lightning, would be richly endowed. None, human or non-human, would (in theory, at least) be wholly without it.

Among the Algonkian and Siouan tribes are found beliefs that seem to go behind this personal but mystic potentiality to its source in the Unknown, the Impersonal. The Algonkian word expressive of the idea is manitou. The early French missionaries, who were the first to make it known to us, interpreted it of a personal being—God or the Devil, they hardly knew which. They were reading into it their own more highly crystallized beliefs. As in the case of orenda, we are fortunate in having the term more accurately defined for us by a descendant of the native tribes, who may be presumed to have been better equipped by inheritance and early associations to understand Algonkian thought than the Jesuit Fathers were. “The Algonkin conception of the manitou,” he tells us, “is bound up with the manifold ideas that flow from an unconscious relation with the outside world.… The term manitou is a religious word; it carries with it the idea of solemnity; and whatever the association it always expresses a serious attitude, and kindles an emotional sense of mystery.… The essential character of Algonkin religion is a pure, naïve worship of nature. In one way or another associations cluster about an object and give it a certain potential value; and because of this supposed potentiality the object becomes the recipient of an adoration. The degree of the adoration depends in some measure upon the extent of confidence reposed in the object, and upon its supposed power of bringing pleasure or inflicting pain. The important thing with the individual is the emotional effect experienced while in the presence of the object, or with an interpreted manifestation of the object. The individual keeps watch for the effect, and it is the effect that fills the mind with a vague sense of something strange, something mysterious, something intangible. One feels it as the result of an active substance, and one’s attitude toward it is purely passive. To experience a thrill is authority enough of the existence of the substance. The sentiment of its reality is made known by the fact that something has happened. It is futile to ask an Algonkin for an articulate definition of the substance, partly because it would be something about which he does not concern himself, and partly because he is quite satisfied with only the sentiment of its existence. He feels that the property is everywhere, is omnipresent. The feeling that it is omnipresent leads naturally to the belief that it enters into everything in nature; and the notion that it is active causes the mind to look everywhere for its manifestations. These manifestations assume various forms; they vary with individuals and with reference to the same and different objects.

“Language affords means of approaching nearer to a definition of this religious sentiment. In the Algonkin dialects of the Sauk, Fox, and Kickapoo, a rigid distinction of gender is made between things with life and things without life.… Accordingly, when they refer to the manitou in the sense of a virtue, a property, an abstraction, they employ the form expressive of inanimate gender. When the manitou becomes associated with an object, then the gender becomes less definite.…

“When the property becomes the indwelling element of an object, then it is natural to identify the property with animate being. It is not necessary that the being shall be the tangible representative of a natural object.” This the writer illustrates from the account given by a Fox Indian of the sweat-lodge, in the course of which he observes: “The manitou comes from the place of his abode in the [heated] stone, … when the water is sprinkled on it. It comes out in the steam, and in the steam it enters the body wherever it finds entrance. It moves up and down and all over inside the body, driving out everything that inflicts pain. Before the manitou returns to the stone it imparts some of its nature to the body. That is why one feels so well after having been in the sweat-lodge.” The writer’s comment on this is instructive. “The sentiment,” he says, “behind the words rests upon the consciousness of a belief in an objective presence; it rests on the sense of an existing reality with the quality of self-dependence; it rests on the perception of a definite, localized personality. Yet at the same time there is the feeling that the apprehended reality is without form and without feature. This is the dominant notion in regard to the virtue abiding in the stone of the sweat-lodge; it takes on the character of conscious personality with some attributes of immanence and design.”

But further, as the manitou—this mystic, all-pervasive property or substance—on investing an object acquires conscious personality, so also “it is natural to confuse the property”—the manitou—“with an object containing,” or invested with, “the property.” “It is no trouble for an Algonkin to invest an object with the mystic substance, and then call the object by the name of the substance. The process suggests a possible explanation of how an Algonkin comes to people his world with manitou forces different in kind and degree; it explains in some measure the supernatural performances of mythological beings, the beings that move in the form of men, beasts, birds, fishes, and other objects of nature. All these are a collection of agencies. Each possesses a virtue in common with all the rest, and in so far do they all have certain marks of agreement. Where one differs from another is in the nature of its function, and in the degree of the possession of the cosmic substance. But the investment of a common mystic virtue gives them all a common name, and that name is manitou.”

Thus we have in these North American ideas two distinct conceptions—the possession of what I have called a potentiality or atmosphere of its own by the individual personality, whether human or non-human; and the impersonal, mysterious, undefined reservoir of power in the universe as conceived by the savage. These two conceptions are not mutually exclusive, for the impersonal power is often held to be the source of the personal power or potentiality. As among the American Indian tribes, so elsewhere they are differently emphasized by different peoples. The Bantu of the Lower Congo basin emphasize the impersonal conception. According to the Bafiote, the first ages of the world were ruled by Nzambi, though whether he made everything seems a matter of doubt. When he retired from active interference in the concerns of men, he left behind, or sent, or there remained in the earth, Something. Indeed, it seems to be believed that Nzambi himself, or his power, his vital and creative energy, is still in earth and water, in the air, in plants, animals and men. In any case, the Something remaining on earth since Nzambi’s outward and visible departure is or has Lunyēnsu. The concept of Lunyēnsu is that of natural force, vital energy, power of increase, in short, the All-ruling, the Highest, that penetrates every living thing. It is not life, but an activity bound up with life, its manifestation, its condition. A crippled limb does not possess it, and with death it ceases entirely, it is gone. The Something, however, which either is or has Lunyēnsu is even wider than this. It is represented by Bu-nssi (probably the older name) or Mkissi-nssi. The latter means the supernatural or magical power of the earth, and seems to be due to the later overgrowth of fetishism. The former conveys the idea of the force, the energy of earth. In any case it is not to be confounded with fetish-power, for it is revered as fetish-power is not, nor with the earth-spirit, for the Bafiote know no elemental spirits. It must be conceived as the terrestrial energy, the all-permeating creative force, the all-wielding, the fertility, the becoming. Hence there is a sacredness attaching to the earth; and connected as the earth is with the idea of fecundity and the operations of agriculture, and as it is an inseparable condition of life, these all form a foundation for the right to the soil, for hospitality and the relations of the sexes. The indefiniteness of Bu-nssi is shown by the fact that the natives themselves are not agreed whether it is one or many. In fact, in the use of its synonym, Mkissi, the plural form—and what is significant, the plural personal form—is often heard. Opinion wavers as the needs or the excitement of the moment may demand, or perhaps as tradition wavers with changing mental environment. But those who claim the older faith or the deeper insight adhere to the statement that there is but one Mkissi-nssi, even Bu-nssi.

In the foregoing passages it will be perceived that the missionary is doing something more than describing rites he had no doubt often witnessed; he is labouring also to translate into English and incorporate with his account the explanations he had extracted from his Polynesian friends. He seems to exhaust his spiritual vocabulary in speaking of “powers,” “influence,” “the communication of attributes,” of “the essence of the gods.” But when he recalls the words of the priest, they are even stronger and at the same time simpler than any of these expressions: the god is prayed to “abide in” the feathers; he is declared to “inhabit” them. If these be an accurate translation of the words employed, it would seem that not merely the power but a portion of the personality of the god passed into the feathers, and that while his chief residence was still at the great temple where his principal image dwelt, he was also present whithersoever the bunches of feathers which had been consecrated by deposition within or upon it were carried. He himself inhabited them; and it was this fact that “identified” the king, as the wearer of such feathers, with the gods.

It appears then that the concept of personality is inseparable from that of the potentiality with which a personality is endowed. Hence the ambiguity of the Tahitian rite. Whether the feathers which had been attached to an image retained and transmitted to the next wearer the mana, or a portion of the personality, of the god, the one effect was equivalent to the other: they are indistinguishable. But between mana and the potentiality that elsewhere invests a personality there is a difference. The latter may be, and frequently is, held to be drawn from the common source of power, the invisible and continuous life that permeates all things; whereas in Melanesia (and perhaps in Polynesia too) mana is definitely ascribed only to a personal origin, if Dr Codrington has rightly interpreted the belief. It is the special property of spirits—that is to say, of supernatural beings—and is communicated by them to whatsoever or whomsoever they will. An important step has thus been taken by the Melanesian mind towards separating the Personal from the Impersonal, and human from superhuman attributes and potentialities.

Thus we find in widely separated regions, among widely different races and in cultures the most diverse, the idea of mystic power or potentiality, often concentrated in individual persons or things, but in effect spread throughout the world. Some peoples have been more alive to the impersonal character of this power, and have ascribed to it, wherever manifested, a unity of origin akin to the scientific concept of force behind all phenomena. To others it has assumed a more individual character. It clings in any case to personality and tends to become inseparable from it; but the impersonal aspect is never wholly wanting.

The patient reader will have observed the difficulty experienced alike by scientific explorers and missionaries in expounding this idea in its varied forms and applications. The difficulty has not arisen wholly from its strangeness. It is due in large part to its want of clarity. The savage himself does not know; he has rarely had occasion, and still more rarely inclination, to reflect on his beliefs. He has had no schools of science or philosophy to think out his thoughts for him. Hence they are ill defined; like clouds in the sky, they take first one shape and then another. Yet those very clouds, by comparison with the formless vapour from whence they have been condensed, are continents of solidity and definiteness.

Finally, what foundation there may be for the modern psychological doctrine of Telepathy it is not my business to determine. But its resemblance to the Iroquoian doctrine of orenda may be pointed out here. Telepathic communication may result from conscious or unconscious exertion of will; it may occur at a supreme crisis of fate or at a casual moment. It is in either case the product of a potentiality which we call mystic for want of a better name, and which attaches to, or flows from, some personalities more strongly than others. We have all had the experience of occasionally meeting, or receiving a letter from, someone on whom our thoughts have been more or less insistently dwelling, and whom we did not expect immediately to see or hear from. Goethe is reported by his friend Eckermann as having told him: “I have often enough had the experience in my youthful years of a powerful longing for a beloved maiden taking possession of me during a lonely walk; and I thought about her and thought about her until she really came and met me.” We need, however, no such commonplace illustration to convince us of Goethe’s orenda.

Without multiplying illustrations which will spring to the mind of everyone, I venture to suggest that in man’s emotional response to his environment, in his interpretation in the terms of personality of the objects which encountered his attention, and in their investiture by him with potentiality, atmosphere, orenda, mana—call it by what name you will—we have the common root of magic and religion.

II. Theories and Definitions

At this point we are confronted with the difficult questions What is Religion? and What is Magic?

Religion is notoriously hard to define. Every man thinks he knows what it is; but when he comes to define it he never succeeds, clever as he may be, in framing a definition generally acceptable. The ordinary man, with a particular religion—the only one of which he has had any experience—in his eye, defines it to square with that religion: if others cannot be brought into the definition, so much the worse for them. The anthropologist, whatever his bias, fares no better than the ordinary man. He has his theories; and in expounding them he is frequently called upon to define religion. In practice his theories are hardly a safer guide than the other’s prejudices or ignorance. Hence a definition of religion usually begs the question.

We will confine our attention here to some of the recent attempts made by anthropologists to define religion.

This definition supplies the obvious deficiency in Tylor’s; but it does not touch the case of Buddhism. And there is one important respect in which all these definitions fail. None of them explicitly recognizes the social character of the religions of the lower culture. For aught that appears, religion might be the business of solitary men, founded on their speculations, hopes and fears, uncommunicated to and unshared by others, their own individual concern. But, in savage life at least, religion is pre-eminently social. Individual rites there may be; they are, however, parts of a whole, subordinate to the common observances and common beliefs on which they are founded. The individualist idea—the supreme necessity of saving one’s own soul—has no place in them. St Simeon Stylites and the Hindu fakir are equally the product of a much higher development.

I do not tarry now to give illustrations in detail of the various points in the argument I have here summarized. It is clear that Professor Frazer has overlooked something of importance, from one fact alone to which he alludes, but of which he fails to observe the vast implications. The commonest excuse made by the magician for the failure of his spells is that some other magician of greater power is thwarting him. There must therefore be degrees of power among magicians, however it be acquired, and whether temporary or permanent, inherent or due to the possession of greater knowledge or more powerful spells. But that is a factor that tumbles the whole edifice of the theory down. It introduces another element—the personal potentiality. The same causes do not always produce the same effects, apart from the personal element; the performance of the proper ceremony, accompanied by the appropriate spell, is not inevitably attended by the desired results; the magician has not reached the scientific conclusion “that in nature one event follows another necessarily and invariably, without the intervention of any spiritual or personal agency.” Nay, the intervention of the magician himself is proof to the contrary.

Destructive criticism is comparatively easy; anyone can make objections. Not everyone can substitute a sounder theory in place of that destroyed. It is when Messrs Hubert and Mauss come to construct their own theory of magic that they find themselves in difficulty. For they have to admit that in magic the same collective forces operate as in religion. Faith is as necessary to magic as to religion; it is as necessary to the magician as to the priest. Trickery no doubt there is; that has not always been excluded from religion. But there is much more than trickery. The magician believes in his own powers; and he believes all the more strongly because his public believes. The faith of society and his own faith act and react upon one another. But this is precisely the case with the priest and his religion.

If we examine the magician’s methods we can hardly distinguish them from those employed in religion. The attempt to bewitch an enemy by means of his clothing or a fragment of his body is precisely the same in principle as the proceedings already described at the inauguration of a Polynesian king or the communication of the virtues of mediæval saints by means of their relics. It is true that in the one case the object of the ceremony is maleficent, in the other cases it is beneficent. If that were a real distinction, the processes would still remain analogous. It is not real, however; for the sanctity of Polynesian kings has its maleficent side, and the relics of the saints have been often employed to the injury of an enemy, as well as to the healing of a friend. Nor can it be said that magic is purely an art, a technique, while religion is dependent upon higher and independent wills. The aid of spirits is often invoked in magic; spell passes easily into prayer, and prayer into spell. The accounts that have reached us of the Witches’ Sabbath may be the product of hallucination, or confessions extorted from victims who said what they were expected to say. But at least they bear witness to the general belief of the times, which regarded magic rather as a counter-religion than as a mere technique. Professor Frazer’s reply to this is of course that such a belief, such practices, were the result of a later fusion of religion and magic. That the fusion was not primitive is, however, incapable of proof. As we shall see by and by, in the lowest societies of which we have evidence practices usually regarded as magical are indistinguishable from those regarded as religious. The mutual hostility of religion and magic, where it exists, is, in truth, the result of a later development.

Like religion, the chief factor in magic—that by which it accomplishes its ends—is the mystic force that is released and set at work by the rite or the spell. Behind the sympathetic formula, behind the notions of property and of spirits, there is another notion still more mysterious, the notion of power, vague, impersonal, always operating, irresistible, or depending for its efficaciousness on conditions not altogether at command. The investigations of the last chapter have disclosed to us what this power is. By its very vagueness and impersonality it enshrines possibilities illimitable. It may be materialized, localized, personalized; but it ceases not to be spiritual, to act at a distance, and that by direct connection, if not by contact, to be mobile and to move without movement, to be impersonal though clothed in personal forms, to be divisible yet continuous. It is this notion that accounts in the last resort for the phenomena of magic. Without it, magic is incomprehensible; like a sentence without the copula, the action, the affirmation is wanting.

“Frae rocks an’ saands

An’ barren lands

An’ ill men’s hands

Keep’s free.

Weel oot, weel in,

Wi’ a gueede shot.”

On this definition two observations may be made. The first is that it does not exclude any rites performed for social ends, or for individual ends, so far as they are not definitely antisocial. The Australian husband meets the crisis of desertion by his wife by means of arungquiltha. He performs an act organized by society to meet this very crisis—on the definition, therefore, a religious act. But if by precisely the same process he attempt to slay his enemy, he is guilty of magic. Or is the wife’s desertion not a crisis in the sense attached to the word by Dr Marett? Perhaps it is a relief, a solution of a domestic crisis.

The task remains, notwithstanding, of defining the words for the purposes of the following pages. It is hopeless to attempt to harmonize the definitions we have considered. Whatever definition we adopt, it is clear that we cannot so express it as to confine religion within its own bounds, or to outlaw magic from the territory occupied by its rival. Yet a working definition is needed. In framing it regard ought to be paid to the ordinary meaning of the words: the definition must not be arbitrary.

This then is the sense in which I venture to think the words Magic and Magical should be employed. It is based upon their general, if somewhat vague, usage; and it is therefore intelligible to the ordinary reader without recourse to a special definition. It is substantially that of Professor Frazer, save that it affirms nothing concerning the origin of the power active in magical practices: it simply takes them as they are—again an undeniable convenience. It follows that for our purpose Religion will be confined to cultual systems, whose objects, so far as they are personal, are endowed with free will, are to be approached with true worship, and may or may not grant the prayers of their suppliants. Here also we have common usage on our side, with all its advantages. In this use of the word Religion, where the object is impersonal, or is but vaguely personal, it is none the less treated with reverence and submission, as something transcending man; it is the object of an emotional attitude, actively directed towards it. The object thus, even where it is not personal, tends to become so. Buddhism, in its original form, and similar religions are the product of comparatively high civilizations. The puritan severity of their primitive thought and practice was speedily relaxed; they acquired personal gods, and thus liberated themselves from a rule of life based upon philosophical considerations and the effort to escape without the aid of the higher personalities, of which they despaired, from the evils by which they felt themselves oppressed. In the lower civilizations, as we have seen, no sooner is an impersonal power conceived as acting than it assumes personal characteristics. When once the attention is concentrated upon any manifestation of it, these characteristics, originally vague, are likely to be emphasized, and may grow into true personalities. In magic, on the other hand, the impersonal power does not so readily become thus transformed, because the attention fastens on the personal agent, the magician, rather than on the power by which he operates.

When all is said, however, religion is (ideally, at least) social—that is to say, moral—in its aims and tendencies, whereas magic lends itself to individualist aims. Religion binds the society together by raising the individual above himself, and teaching him to subordinate his desires and actions to the general good; magic has no compunction in assisting to carry out the wishes of the individual, though they may be contrary to the interests of the society as a whole. To that extent it is disruptive, antisocial, immoral; and when thus applied it may be described as Black, or Evil, or Hostile Magic. Here perhaps we find the origin of the opposition between them. So far from religion and magic having been originally hostile, the further we go back into savage life, and presumably, therefore, towards primitive humanity, the more we find them interwoven, indistinguishable. It is only in the advance of civilization, and the consequent evolution of religion and of magic that they become conscious of mutual hostility. When once the separation had begun it would tend to widen. Certain methods and means would be regarded as proper to the one, certain other methods and means as proper to the other, albeit neither of them, not even the highest known and recognized form of religion, has hitherto been able to shake itself entirely free from the methods of the other. This is not incompatible with increasing hostility. The loftier the claims of religion become, the closer its relations with the profoundest thought of mankind, the more awful the sanctions it invokes, the more inevitable, the more irreconcilable the hostility becomes. Family quarrels are ever the bitterest.

III. Development

The discussion has led to some anticipation of the argument. We turn back again to the personal potentiality.

“Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month

One little mess of whelks, so he may ’scape.”

And the modern European has still his Lent, and his Ember Days and Fridays throughout the year. Such abstinence is the laying down and submission of the orenda to those of mightier beings. On the other hand, gift, prayer, cajolery are, properly speaking, an active exercise of orenda. The relation of spell and incantation to prayer has already been alluded to. They are often indistinguishable: they shade into one another by the finest gradations. Gifts are not mere self-deprivation. They must be accompanied by rites more or less elaborate, to render them acceptable to the lofty beings for whom they are intended. Or they are part of a bargain; they are the performance on the suppliant’s side which demands a corresponding return on the side of the god. More than one comparatively civilized people has held that sacrifices properly performed not merely incline but compel the gods to grant what their worshipper desires. Gesture-language plays a large part in savage life. A ceremony such as those familiar to us in sympathetic magic—to take only one instance, the sticking of pins into a waxen figure—frequently is, to a large extent, gesture-language: it helps to suggest to the supernatural personages of whose orenda the magician desires to make use exactly what is wanted. It is more than this, of course. It is in part the make-believe which is a relief to overcharged feelings; in part it is the means by which the orenda is conveyed to the object intended to be affected. The concomitant words that form part of the ceremony emphasize the desire. They fill and strengthen the instrument with the orenda of the performer, or of the supernatural personage invoked or compelled to assist; they direct the instrument, considered as a personal being, in the service it is required to fulfil; or they allure, entreat, or command the object at which the rite is aimed.

Here we see, as yet undistinguished, the beginnings of the professional magician and the professional priest. Roughly and provisionally it may be said that the professional magician is he who in the course of the evolution of society, by birth, by purchase, or by study and practice in the conventional methods, has acquired the most powerful orenda. Similarly, the professional priest is he who in these ways, or by prayer and fasting, has obtained the favour of the imaginary personages believed to influence or control the affairs of men—who has, in a word, possessed himself of their orenda. The union of these two professions in one person is not adventitious; it is probably fundamental; it is at least so general that in describing the society of savages and peoples in low stages of culture observers are often at a loss whether to call their functionaries priests or wizards, exorcists or medicine-men. Consequently, many anthropological writers use the word shaman, borrowed from the Tunguz, a tribe of South-Eastern Siberia, and including all four meanings. For in that condition of society the functions of priest and sorcerer and medicine-man are, as Professor Frazer says, “not yet differentiated from each other.” That could not be until, in the course of evolution, religion became severed from magic. Yet it has never become so wholly severed that the primitive connection may not be traced. Priests have become organized into a separate order. Triumphant religions have proscribed the conquered faiths, and have repudiated their practices as magical. Magic has thus become a term of opprobrium. The conquered faiths under repression have carried on their religious worship mixed with magical rites and tending more and more to be degraded, yet never losing all religious elements. Even the magic of the Middle Ages and later, in Europe, if we may trust the confessions of the judicial victims themselves, was mingled with the worship of a being in whom they recognized the devil, perhaps the last avatar of a heathen god; and witchcraft was one of the commonest charges against heretics. On the other hand, not even the highest religions have been able to free themselves wholly from rites strictly parallel to those characterized as magical, by which their followers have striven to compass union with the objects of worship, to avail themselves of the orenda of these objects, to locate it in their own persons or in the images and implements of their cult, to intensify their own orenda, and to exercise it for the benefit, spiritual, corporal or pecuniary, of themselves and others.

In Europe the dominant religion has proscribed witchcraft with terrors spiritual and physical, which have emphasized its separation and intensified its spiritual aspect. The judicial records are full of stories of initiation to the Black Art that begin by the formal renunciation of Christian worship and baptism. The novice tramples upon symbols of the Christian faith, or otherwise treats them with indignity. He utters incantations with appropriate rites to call up the devil. That gentleman then appears to receive his formal profession of allegiance, admit him ceremonially into his band of worshippers, and tutor him in the methods of his art. That the confessions of this procedure were not wholly imaginary, and dictated by the orthodox functionaries who examined the tortured victim, is rendered probable from the fact that down to the present day, in many continental countries, if not in the British Islands, the peasant witch enters upon her trade by a rite recalling its main features.

It would be easy to expand the list. Enough has, however, been said to show that over a wide area of the world and in the most various stages of civilization what we call supernatural beings are concerned with the preparation of the magician’s career, and that the Arunta beliefs do not differ in this respect from those current among many other peoples. In none of the foregoing cases does the shaman or magician as such exercise the functions of priest. He offers no sacrifices, he addresses no prayers on behalf of the community to the divinities. He performs wonders by the aid of the spirits; but the spirits who first invade and then help him are by no means everywhere those who are the object of worship. It is not my intention to discuss the psychological and physiological aspects of the phenomena. They recall the phenomena of “conversion” among ourselves. Occurring, as they usually do, at or shortly after the commencement of adult life, they display the effervescence of puberty, accentuated by the neurotic peculiarities of the individual, acted upon, directed and controlled by the social environment. As in the case of “conversion,” too, they are liable to become epidemic, particularly at times of social and political crisis, where feeling in the tribe is more than commonly excited.

The conclusion is that there is no solid and convincing proof of the development of magic prior to religion. If the Mincopies, the Veddas, and the tribes of Central Australia fail us, whither shall we turn for evidence?

To such an origin must be ascribed the rehearsal of a battle that takes place in many savage tribes before the warriors go forth on a raid, and the dances and other ceremonies accomplished by women left at home when their husbands are absent fighting or hunting. More obviously must it be held responsible for a variety of other performances, of which the common spell in this country and on the continent of Europe, to recover an article stolen or the waning affections of a lover, is a type. The love-lorn maiden takes some object, frequently a shoulder-bone of lamb, and sticks a knife or a pin into it, saying:

“’Tis not this bone I mean to stick,

But my lover’s heart I mean to prick,

Wishing him neither rest nor sleep

Till he comes with me to speak.”

Of spells like this the preparation of an effigy, and the assaults upon it representing acts done to the person for whom the effigy stands, are an elaboration. The overcharged emotion first of all finds a vent in an attack upon any convenient object. Then from various causes a special object is singled out as the appropriate vehicle of the performer’s wrath, hatred or jealousy, the act gradually becomes more solemn and deliberate, and a formal rite is evolved.

It should hardly be necessary to say that it is not claimed that the foregoing paragraphs explain the genesis of all rites. But that many do thus originate accords with all we know of human nature. In any case a rite was not instituted because men were previously convinced of its efficacy. The primitive savage may have been a man of preternatural stupidity; but even he would not have been equal to putting the cart before the horse in that fashion. The rite must have been an established habit before a conscious meaning filtered into it. Interpretation would be a gradual process. If the rite were shared by the social group, and by expansion or accretion attained sufficient importance, the interpretation might take the form of a myth. The myth in turn would contribute to the stability of the rite, by means of the sacred character it would affix to it, or the reminiscence of an ancient experience it would be supposed to embody.

Thus ritual, religious or magical, is evolved long before belief has become definite and cogent. It may emerge from what I may style the mere surface of human nature, from necessities mainly physical, from direct nervous reaction. It may, on the other hand, have roots in the social relations of mankind. The savage naturally, habitually—I might almost say instinctively—applies the forms of social life to his relations with his non-human surroundings. Presumably, as we have seen, primitive man in his rough way did likewise.

But this affords no argument for holding that magic preceded religion. Rites are not necessarily magical because they are not addressed to defined personalities. They may be yet inchoate. Not until reflection has begun to clarify in some degree man’s relation to his environment (a slow and tedious process, slowest and most tedious of all in the early stages) can we reckon them satisfactorily under the one head or the other. If I am right in contending that magic and religion flow from a common source, rites may remain for generations in an indecisive condition which is neither, but may crystallize in either shape according to the specific occasion, the environment, or the dominant mental and institutional tendency of the social group. Such a transformation will be gradual and piecemeal, and in large part, if not entirely, unconscious. Many things done “for luck,” even in the higher civilizations, are still in this indeterminate state. The intellectual atmosphere is unfavourable; their development is arrested, probably for ever. I suspect that an accurate appreciation of the Intichiuma rites practised by the Arunta and their neighbours would show that they too are not finally to be assigned to either category.

In these days and among civilized societies, when individualism is so strongly developed in thought and action, we are apt to forget to what an extent religion is an expression of the social organization. An eminent Oxford professor, not long ago deceased, used to say that religion was a social secretion. That may be an excellent way to phrase the relations between society and religion in modern Europe. It is a very incomplete account of them as they exist on the Australian steppe or in the forests of Brazil. In the lower culture religion is much more than a social secretion: it is one aspect of the social organization, inseparable from the rest. The organization cannot be understood without it—nay, it cannot exist apart from it. In these societies every member has his position and takes his share in religious rites. Whatever his place in the social scale, he is on the same level of knowledge, he shares in the same beliefs, with his fellows. The mental atmosphere of each is charged with the same electric fluid, which communicates itself to all alike. Especially on the occasions of reunion its action is intensified, frequently resulting in excitement, in vehement exaltation, translated into the wildest and most extravagant actions. But these reunions are not merely social, they are religious festivals. For religion pervades every thought and deed both of the individual and of the community. It binds the members together as no other force could do. The power of society over the individual is the power of religion. For religion is not as yet distinguished from politics, from law, from medicine, or from other forms of social activity that in our stage of culture have long vindicated their freedom.

Religion has therefore grown up with society. Its form has changed with the changing forms of society. It cannot be said to be generated by society, inasmuch as it is coeval with it. The very mould in which a society in the lower stages of culture is cast is religious. Church and State are of necessity coterminous, equivalent, one. But this evolution must of necessity have taken time. The inchoate society of half-human beings would have had a correspondingly vague and inchoate religion. As intelligence grew, the bonds of the horde would gather strength, what we may call public opinion would become more and more definite with the gradual acquisition of speech, until at last man emerged in something like a regularly ordered community. It is difficult for us to imagine the steps of this long process, by which, with society, what we call religion was evolved. I have tried in an earlier chapter to sketch the external conditions that would have impressed humanity in its dawn. These external conditions would have driven the individual more and more in upon the group, and thus would have materially contributed to the conscious formation of common interests founded upon the common need of material help, of sympathy, and of relief from anxiety and terror, whether of actual or imagined danger. The formation of common interests must have been accompanied by the increasing subordination of the individual to the group. In the extension of the authority of the group over the individual it is that M. Durkheim finds the origin of the idea of the impersonal force which the Omaha call wakonda. The idea, as I have shown, lies at the root of the religious conceptions of peoples in more than one vast cultural area. That such authority of the group, necessarily impersonal as it is, would operate to strengthen the concept of a general impersonal force, when once that concept had been formed, there can be no question. To ascribe to it the origin of the concept, however, seems to me an unwarranted inference. It is more probable that the conflict of the Personal and the Impersonal should arise in the awakening mind as the result of its outlook upon the world. The whole environment does not present a personal aspect at once. As personalities grow into relative definiteness one after another, there remains behind them the Unknown, full of vague possibilities, impersonal, but the source of personalities, which are for ever looming forth as the attention is concentrated on successive objects. Since it is the source of personalities, it is the source of power, mysterious and far-reaching, everywhere enveloping the beholder. It is true this power, in order to become effectual, must clothe itself with personal attributes. That, however, is not because it is formed on experience of the authority of the group acting by individuals, but because personalization is the inevitable tendency of the mind.

If the concept of the soul (which, it is needless to say, all these peoples possess) were coeval with humanity, and if it were only the totemic principle individualized, then totemism must have been coeval with humanity, and it must have been universal. If so, it is at least curious that the Veddas, the Andaman Islanders, and the forest-tribes of Brazil—all of them on the horizon of civilization on which totemism is found—should display no traces of it. If the concept of impersonal force, the substratum of religious and magical beliefs, be derived from the authority of society over the individual, and not merely strengthened and developed by it, it is odd that religious and magical beliefs should, so low down in culture, have issued in such widely divergent forms. The worship of the dead, the conciliation of hostile nature-spirits, the fear of an anthropomorphic being of enormous power, are all explicable as the result of the action of external conditions on human mentality and emotions. They are not explicable as the direct product of the authority of the group over the individual. And if totemism had originally held sway over the Veddas, the Mincopies and the Brazilian tribes, it is not easy to conceive how it could have evolved in directions so diverse,—and that without leaving any authentic witness to its past. It is quite another thing if the action of the group had been rather to combine and consolidate, to intensify and to organize the sensations and emotions awakened in its members by external nature, to give them a measure of definiteness in the process, and to habituate the individual to certain modes of reaction to the sensations, and to certain forms of expression of the beliefs engendered by the emotions thus awakened.

IV. Divergence

In the foregoing pages I have attempted to trace Magic and Religion to a common root. We have found them inextricably intertwined very low down in culture; we have seen the difficulty of distinguishing them by way of scientific definition, and have been forced back upon ordinary usage. Both alike are concerned with the supernatural and the uncanny; but the one deals with it by compulsion, by the direct exertion of human orenda upon the objects sought to be constrained, the other by the indirect method of appeal to mightier powers than human to exercise their orenda upon those objects, in order to obtain the result desired. And I have contended that the opposition of Magic and Religion, on which writers of authority like Professor Frazer and the late Sir Alfred Lyall have so much insisted, is so far from being essential that it is a result of their concurrent development and of the general advance of civilization, and is even yet imperfectly accomplished. The argument seems to require some further illustrations.

First, let me observe that the definition of magic here adopted does by no means coincide with that of Professor Frazer, though, like his, it rests upon the method of compulsion as the distinguishing characteristic. That, however, is not because of any faith by primeval man in the invariable order of nature or in the inevitable sequence of cause and effect. The compulsion of magic, as I understand it, is wielded by, and dependent upon, the personal orenda of the magician, either directly or through the medium of the powerful and uncanny beings whom he succeeds in bringing into play.

The idea of a god in our minds is associated with a reverential attitude that is very far from being universally adopted. In a later essay we shall see that threats of bodily injury, even (in the legends) actual hand-to-hand combats, and (in fact) chastisement of the material representatives of divinity, are often regarded as quite appropriate measures to be taken in dealing with beings who are ordinarily the objects of worship. I have already referred to the constraining power attributed to sacrifice and other rites in some of the more advanced religions. Where ritual has undergone a long term of development, where it has been subjected for many ages to continuous thought, and to elaboration in order to provide for new needs or against unforeseen contingencies, there it is apt to acquire a proportionate value of its own, independent of the merits of the performer. The sacrifice which is a gift to the gods imperiously demands its looked-for repayment, and will not be denied. The penance, whether it be in the nature of a sacrifice or a spell, carries with it, like the Hindu rite of dharna, an implied curse if not responded to. In either case the deity to whom it is directed has no choice but to comply.

Another illustration of adaptability is seen in the rites at wells or rocks common all over Europe. What may have been the original cause of the sacredness of a well or a rock, what may have been the original intention of the processions, the dances and the decorations we have of course no means of knowing. We may guess that some peculiarity in the shape of the rock, the sweet or healing waters of the fountain, or some sudden and unexplained or untoward incident first called and concentrated popular attention, and that a precise, intelligible meaning may hardly have been attached to the few and simple ceremonies first performed. In course of time, we may conjecture, ritual and belief were elaborated and defined. However this may be, we know that before the end of paganism—at least in those countries of the west where inscriptions have been preserved—a spirit or god was believed to haunt the place and to preside over the rites of which it was the scene. To him they were addressed, and it was his favour they sought to conciliate. Christianity came and diverted the rites to new objects, not altogether forbidding, but baptizing them, in accordance with the policy enunciated in Pope Gregory’s famous letter to the Abbot Mellitus. All these changes necessitate adaptations of practice. That which at first was formless receives a definite form. That which may have been an indeterminate expression of awe and reverence becomes distinctly worship, though not without elements, often retained to the last, that we should call magical. And the changes in the nominal objects of worship are accompanied by progressive changes in the details of the ritual. Lastly when, as in many cases, official recognition of the ritual is abandoned, and it is left to the unguided superstition of the peasant, it tends to slip back into its original indeterminate condition. Acts are performed or avoided, and ceremonies undertaken, not as worship of a power known and resident on the hallowed spot, but for benefits sometimes precise, more often for luck mysterious, impersonal, half-credited, or from fear of something equally mysterious, but for that reason all the more terrible. Beyond this, the practices linger into a stage, unknown to the savages who began them, where they are performed for pleasure, or else in the hope of monetary gain, by children and adolescents, and die away gradually under the stress of modern life and the influence of the schoolmaster.

The earlier stages of this round may, as we have seen, be observed occasionally in the rites of peoples still in the lower culture. Close observation, accurate analysis and comparison would probably result in finding them more frequently. Meanwhile let us turn to another question.

If I have been right in insisting throughout these essays on the fundamental organic unity of Magic and Religion, I have not denied their gradual separation and opposition at a later stage. They have their common root in the same attitude toward the environment, social and physical. Rite and belief have been elaborated and organized together. For ages during this process magic and religion must have been integral parts of one another, as they are now in many parts of the world. Except in regard to antisocial magic, they have not yet among many peoples begun to feel opposition. But this unity, as civilization progresses, becomes more and more unstable. Where, as is said to be the case in Morocco, civilization has recoiled, magic comes more and more to the front. Though it does so not without protests on the part of those who retain any consciousness of the higher development of religion, still on the whole it is successful in overlaying religion and pushing it into the background. Another people whose religion is in process of degeneration, if Dr Rivers’ opinion be correct, is the Todas. There the magic of the dairy ritual has thrust aside the worship of the gods. In this case, however, the opposition is not open and avowed. The history of the Todas is a blank. We cannot put our finger on one period and say: Here the gods were worshipped and the dairy magic was unknown. We have no records. We can only conclude from an examination of the internal evidence that the gods once played a more prominent part in the life of the community than they do now, but that Toda culture had not so far progressed that magic was not an inseparable part of religion, and that any growth of magic at the expense of religion would have been viewed without misgiving or even consciousness. Even religions where the opposition is most pronounced are themselves by no means pure from magic. All the subtlety, all the rhetoric of theologians may well be needed to rebut the charge of magic against the seven sacraments of the Church. I at least have no intention to risk the curse levelled by the Council of Trent at him who denies their efficacy ex opere operato, and whether or not the minister may be in a state of mortal sin.

Indeed, a comparison of the passages in which reference is made to various magical practices will suggest that the real reason of the hostility to them arose from their connection with heathenism. They were representative practices of a rival religion. They hindered the concentration of worship on Yahwè at his sole shrine on Mount Zion. On the other hand, the casting out of evil spirits continued unabated and unreproved into New Testament times, and the wearing of personal amulets in the shape of phylacteries persists among the uneducated classes of Jews to the present day and has full rabbinical sanction. Both these practices are uncontrovertibly magical.

Similar considerations inspired mediæval hostility to witchcraft, and continued it with little decrease of intensity into the eighteenth century. Witchcraft was rebellion against the established religion. It was identified with heresy. It involved contempt of the omnipotent priesthood, derogating thus not merely from its reputation, but also its gains. It was believed even to set up a rival god. This belief was an inheritance from primitive Christianity, which looked upon the heathen gods as devils. Every miracle which imposed on the credulity of those ages, if performed by a Christian, was attributed to divine interference; if performed, on the contrary, by a pagan, was with as little hesitation ascribed to Satan and his underlings. In either case nobody doubted the fact of the occurrence, or thought it worth while minutely to examine the evidence. The hostility of the Church to witchcraft had, however, the excuse that the heathen rites were in a large measure magical, and that magic, other than Black Magic, was avowedly practised during pagan times and regarded with toleration, if not complacency. Heathenism died a hard death. Somewhat changed in form it survived for centuries; and many of the heretical sects were more or less impregnated with it.

But all this does not fully account for the horror and hatred felt against magic alike by churchmen and the laity. What gave intensity to the opposition was the dread that magical powers would be used to the disadvantage, the injury, the death of all against whom the magician had a grudge. So persistently did this dread take hold of the imagination that the practice of magic was finally identified with Black Magic, and to be accused of witchcraft meant to be charged with the attempt to injure, and perhaps to slay, one’s neighbours by mysterious, and because mysterious, horrible means. Against proceedings of this kind there was no protection but in hunting out and putting an end to the magicians. This feeling had manifested itself even in pagan times. Both in Greece and at Rome the laws condemned magicians to death.

It is, in fact, the tendency to individualism rather than magic itself that has awakened hostility everywhere. But this tendency is inherent in magic. In the lower stages of civilization magic is undistinguished not only from religion but from medicine, from astronomy, from engineering, from literary learning, from the practice of industries other than the simplest and of art. Consequently everyone who possesses a little more skill than ordinary, or is credited with a knowledge surpassing that of the vulgar, faces the inevitable risk of being reputed a magician, and the suspicion of using his advantages to the detriment of others. Nor is the suspicion unfounded. Human nature being what it is, power, of whatever kind, is utilized for the benefit of its possessor, frequently without regard to the claims of others or the public good. The shaman or the wizard who is called in to the aid of the sick is often the depositary of knowledge of healing herbs and of poisons. The powers that are at the disposal of beneficence are equally applied to baleful ends. The healing of disease, whether it be effected by suggestion or by physical remedies, may be a social good: primarily and directly it is an individual benefit. To put the public foe under a spell excites the approval of the community. To lay a private enemy low is a very different matter. But the same expert by the exercise of the same skill performs both. Moreover, he subserves the ends of private gain and private revenge with equal indifference, and, it is believed, by the same mysterious means. In all these instances the professor of magic places his skill, knowledge, experience, and the terror of his name and incantations—in one word, his orenda—at the service of his clients without distinction. As civilization advances, and religion and religious ministers begin to be differentiated from the wizard or medicine-man, the latter is probably called on less and less to perform rites on behalf of the public, and more and more on behalf of individuals. The portions of magic that can be disposed for the purposes of the community are taken up into religion. What remains when this is done becomes specifically the method and practice of the magician. Small wonder then that the only magic recognized as such is antisocial magic.

This deplorable result is attributable to the suspicion of antisocial ends. It is this kind of magic which alone is reprobated in the lower culture. Death is very generally regarded as unnatural. If not caused by open violence, it must be due to spirits or to magic. Magic indeed is often deemed responsible for deaths by violence, or deaths credited to the immediate action of the spirits. Magic sets both causes in motion. Hence at a death, however occasioned, an inquest is commonly held to ascertain who is responsible; the accused is required to undergo an ordeal, and is punished if found guilty—as he usually is. But it is not the practice of magic that is condemned; it is the application of magic to the injury of the community. The chieftain of a tribe of Bantu “smells out” and puts to death the witch who has slain his father. The same chieftain will habitually practise magic on another chief before fighting with him. He will make rain, or employ a wizard for the purpose. His sacrifices and acts of worship are inextricably mingled with magic. Even when the schism between magic and religion has attained much wider dimensions than anywhere among the Bantu, it is rather magic in its antisocial aspect than in itself that is reprobated and punished. The departure from established custom and established belief involves a severance from the community and an imputation of antisocial ends. The pursuit of individual desires and hatreds at odds with the general interest is what arouses the anger of society. Practices essentially magical may be incorporated in religious rites and exercised for what is believed to be the public good; and they will continue to be exercised with general assent, even in the highest forms of religion.

THE BOLDNESS OF THE CELTS

In this case the kelpie was killed. More numerous are the tales in which he approaches a traveller in the shape of a horse and induces him to mount; then he rushes to the pool, carrying the unwary man to his death. Often, however, he can be caught and made to work, by throwing over his head a bridle on which had been made the sign of the cross. When this was done, the creature became quiet and might be employed in labour needing strength and endurance, like that of carrying stones to build a mill or a farm-steading. When set free again, he took his leave, repeating the words:

“Sehr back an’ sehr behns,

In Sweden the corresponding water-spirit—if that may be called a spirit which, as in all these cases, is regarded as essentially corporeal—is called the Neck, a word connected with Hnikarr, the Old Norse appellation of Odin regarded as a water-god, and with the Nicors, or water-monsters referred to in Beowulf. The Neck is said to appear in various forms. Sometimes he is a grown man, and then “particularly dangerous to haughty and pert damsels”; sometimes he is a comely youth with his lower extremities like those of a horse; sometimes he is an old man with a long beard; occasionally a handsome youth with yellow locks flowing over his shoulders and a red cap, sitting in a summer evening on the surface of the water with a golden harp in his hand. In return for a black lamb he is not unwilling to communicate his skill in music; and if the offering be accompanied by the expression of a hope of his salvation, he is rendered especially gracious. For above all things he longs for eternal happiness; nor can deeper distress be inflicted upon him than by denying this possibility. A Neck who takes up his abode under a bridge, or in a stream, is commonly called a Strömkarl. He usually plays not on the harp but on the viol. Near Hornborgabro in West Gothland a Strömkarl was once heard singing to a pleasant melody these words thrice repeated: “I know—and I know—and I know—that my Redeemer liveth.” He is acquainted with a measure which, if played, will cause even inanimate things, as trees and stones, to dance; so powerful is his music.

Without pausing to analyse the complex character assigned to the Neck, it will be abundantly clear that he belongs to the same category as the foregoing, and may be subdued by similar means. To fetch parallels to the spirit of the Jabbok from Scotland and Sweden may be thought going far afield. It is going no farther than Dr Frazer himself goes for examples of the custom of propitiating river-spirits. The protest often uttered by cautious anthropologists against those who would cast the net so widely has its reason. When we are dealing with customs it is well to remember that customs superficially alike may spring from quite different social organizations, and their real intentions may be divergent or even opposite: in short, they may have nothing in common but external resemblance. They cannot be understood without taking into account the sequences of which they are often part, and the social organization and cultural condition from which they spring. It is otherwise when those great products of human imagination that animate the world about us are concerned. The personalities believed to haunt mountain and stream, air and water, heaven and earth, are elemental conceptions, the inevitable offspring of the human mind in its intercourse with nature. Analogies discovered between them are real analogies; they are the proofs of the essential oneness of mankind in the snow-hut of an arctic winter and the tree-shelter of a tropical forest. And when we find the relations believed to exist between such personalities and human beings, the need of their conciliation or coercion in order to obtain benefits for their human worshipper or antagonist, and the means taken for this purpose, the same, with only such variations as may be accounted for by differences of environment, then we may with confidence appeal to them as mutually illustrative.

After comparing these cases there can be little doubt that the Celtic practice of fighting the waves reported by Ælian was not undertaken as a foolhardy piece of presumption, but literally as a combat with a foe susceptible to such attacks, or (as the Irish text suggests) a necessary proceeding in self-defence, lest otherwise the sea should encroach upon the land. The orenda of the land-dwellers was pitted against that of the waters.

“Son of the Thunder-cloud,

Thou brave loud-speaking Guru!

Talk softly, please,

For I have no guilt!

Leave me alone (Forgive me)!

For I have become quite weak (= I am quite stunned, perplexed).

Thou, O Guru,

Son of the Thunder-cloud!”

The other incantation is addressed to the lightning. It is a dramatic performance, the lightning being played by one person, the chorus representing the appeal of the inhabitants of the kraal.

Chorus.

“Thou, Thunder-cloud’s daughter, daughter-in-law of the Fire!

Thou who hast killed my brother!

Therefore thou liest now so nicely in a hole!

Solo.

(Yes) indeed, I have killed thy brother so well!

Chorus.

(Well) therefore thou liest (now) in a hole.

Thou who hast painted thy body red, like Goro!

Thou who dost not drop the menses,

‘We are conquered! We are conquered!

Almost all nations in the lower culture hold an eclipse to be the attempt on the part of some evil-disposed being to eat up or destroy the sun or moon. The custom of terrifying and driving him away is too well known to need illustration.

What is important to observe here is the entire respect paid by the criminal revenants to the formal and deliberate decision of the society against which they had sinned. They obeyed it as they would have obeyed it in their lifetime. In heathen times, out of which Iceland had scarcely emerged, the Thing was the lawful assembly of the whole community. Its doom outlawed those members who were convicted of antisocial conduct, and such was undoubtedly the conduct of the dead who returned to harm the living. Though dead they were still members of the society and subject to its laws. By those laws it was their duty to abide in the howe, or grave-mound, and thence watch over the well-being of the family, receiving in return a cult. The authority of the Thing extended to all matters interesting the community, religious as well as political, juridical and administrative. Under Christianity, and the advancing civilization of which it was a part, the religious authority was beginning to be separated from its control, of which perhaps we may see a hint in the narrative. But the religious officials were acting in unison with the rest, though hardly now as part of them. On the other hand, the cult of the dead was no longer officially recognized. It is improbable that it had ceased; and assuredly the defunct were still charged with the negative duty of remaining quietly in the howe and abstaining from all molestation of those whom they had left behind. There may be some doubt as to the technical status of the assembly which dealt with the case. If not a local and subordinate Thing, it seems at least to have been a properly constituted tribunal, proceeding in a perfectly regular manner, and carrying in its decisions the force of law. It had probably not yet become entirely divested of spiritual jurisdiction, or at least of spiritual prestige, which may indeed be taken to be sanctioned and supported by the countenance and assistance of the priest of the new religion. The ghostly transgressors recognized its authority, the propriety of its procedure, the justice and the binding character of its sentence; and however much they grudged it, they submitted.

It need not be said that more summary measures were often taken with those who “walked” after death to the inconvenience of the survivors. They consisted in digging out and destroying the corpse, or dealing with it in a way similar to that used with vampires, which are indeed one species of these troublesome visitors. Examples are not uncommon in the Norse sagas, and are plentiful in the folklore of the Scandinavian and other countries.

So and not otherwise the savage treats his gods. Where milder means avail not, and he can get his way by rough treatment of the idols or other tangible forms in which they are presented, he does not hesitate to use physical force. As little will he hesitate to use guile to eke out his inferior strength. It is but another manifestation of his orenda. Hence the tales of audacious heroes who have measured their strength or their cunning against more tremendous personages. Hence the threats and insults addressed to powers beyond immediate reach by peoples all over the world. Hence the punishment inflicted on the images of gods and saints. Hence the boldness of the Celts.

THE HAUNTED WIDOW

Cases like these suggest that Plutarch’s view of the crippled condition in which Harpocrates was born is not to be accepted. It does not necessarily follow that the interpretation of Osiris as a deity of vegetation, adumbrated by the philosopher and adopted by Professor Frazer, is wholly incorrect. We are in error if we suppose the myth of Osiris to be one and self-consistent. The myths of Osiris were innumerable. The realm of Egypt was formed by the union of a number of small independent states or communities. Each of these communities had its own customs, institutions, beliefs, märchen. Many stories told, whether for serious credence or by way of pastime, in every district were doubtless common to all Egypt. But probably even they had their local variants; and these variants must often have been irreconcilable. The phenomenon is familiar. It is abundantly exemplified in the tales of the Greek and Scandinavian mythologies. In Egypt, however, the formation of a strong central authority, and the consequent growth and maintenance during many ages of a powerful and educated priesthood, were among the influences that led to a persistent attempt to unify and explain the principal divine myths, to attach them to the various local and periodical solemnities already observed from time immemorial, and to educe from the jumble something like a system, a philosophy. Whether in this process an originally independent myth had become united with a series of agricultural rites, or whether a myth previously annexed to such rites had acquired an independent existence by virtue of a higher inspiration, matters not to us. The story of Osiris is found on the Egyptian monuments in a number of frequently disconnected texts, of which there is no authoritative canon. Among those texts the exact status and meaning of the Harpocratian episode is probably a subject on which the Egyptians themselves would have been unable to agree. We can hardly be wrong in indulging our scepticism at the expense of Plutarch’s interpretation, though he may simply have reported it as it was given to him. The parallel tales, whether of Europe or America, at least are purely human. They yield no trace of vegetable symbolism. They are founded upon impulses and beliefs that have all over the world influenced the conduct of men towards the supernatural.

This narrative is not an ordinary saga, located indeed at a specified place, but the events of which are told of an indefinite past, or are clustered in a manner known to all students of folklore round a celebrated name. It is quite distinguishable in character from the Icelandic tale I have mentioned on a previous page. It was soberly reported in the year 1606 by persons of credit, if also of credulity, according to our standard, while most of the actors and a number of persons who had more or less acquaintance with the facts were yet living; it was related as something which had occurred not within their recollections at some distant date, but quite recently. The ghostlayer whose services were called in survived until the year 1647, and was well known in the island. The account therefore discloses the kind of horrors that in that age, as in earlier ages, witness the Heimskringla and various sagas, enlivened the long gloom of an arctic winter. Foremost among those horrors may be reckoned the belief that dead men still, in some circumstances at any rate, retained their sexual instincts, and attempted, not in vain, to gratify those instincts upon living women.

Meanwhile let us cross the continent to Delagoa Bay. The neighbourhood of Delagoa Bay, together with a large extent of country to the north in Portuguese and across the border in British territory, is occupied by various branches of a Bantu people frequently known as Shangaans, but which it is convenient to call the Thonga, a name proposed by M. Henri Junod, a Swiss Protestant missionary. The tribe more immediately around the Bay is called the Baronga. The rites of purification practised by the Thonga on different occasions—among others, notably after a death—are very remarkable, and indicate a considerable preoccupation with sexual matters. These rites have been carefully described by M. Junod, but they have not yet been sufficiently studied to enable us to pronounce on the meaning of them all. I shall therefore only refer to one or two.

At all events I have shown that among the Negroes on the northern shore of the Gulf of Guinea, among the Bantu about the Lower Congo, and among the Indians of the Thompson River in British Columbia, the fear is seriously entertained that the deceased will seek a renewal of conjugal intercourse, and the utmost precautions are taken to prevent it. The precautions taken by the Baronga (also a Bantu tribe) in South-East Africa, and by some Melanesian peoples of the Torres Straits Islands and the mainland of New Guinea, strongly suggest the same fear. The ancient inhabitants of Hispaniola attributed sexual desires to the dead, though they do not seem to have believed in the possibility of their accomplishment; and the Tarahumare husband or wife is afraid to marry again until the deceased spouse has been finally driven away from the society of the living to herd with the other dead at the end of the world. It is very striking that the populations of areas so widely different in race and culture, as well as so far apart in space, as some of these, should display the identical terror exhibited in the tales and superstitions cited from ancient and modern Europe and from China. The story of the generation of Harpocrates, though related of a god, points to similar ideas in ancient Egypt; and it has its analogues in India and the East Indian Archipelago.

The Kikuyu, Anyanja and Kamtchadal customs are evidently the same. The penalty for non-observance, though not expressed in our account of the Kikuyu custom, is, it will hardly be questioned, the same as in the other two; it is the death of the second husband. What I venture to suggest, in view of the other Bantu customs already laid before the reader, is that the risk actually run by marrying or cohabiting with the widow is that of death from the posthumous jealousy of the deceased. The fact that the deceased is still supposed to desire a continuance of conjugal relations renders it natural to think that, even where the extreme terrors that torture the widow in some places are not shown, the belief may linger in his jealousy of other men, who do what he perhaps is no longer conceived capable of. The suggestion derives support from the rites performed about the Lower Congo. There, it will be remembered, the terror of a dead husband is excessive. The elaborate purification of the widow, every incident of which points to the desire to rid her of his attentions, culminates in his brother stepping over her outstretched legs.

Jealousy is a passion by no means confined to the male sex. In the lower culture it is believed to continue to inspire women as well as men, even after death. If not so prominent a superstition as the belief in masculine jealousy, this is perhaps to be accounted for partly by the generally dominant position in the household and in society of the man, partly to the widespread habit of polygamy, and partly to the physiological rule that the decay of sexual impulse makes its appearance earlier in women than in men. We have already found examples of customs pointing to posthumous feminine jealousy among various races in both hemispheres. One or two other examples may be given.

It need hardly be said that the rites and tales here discussed involve something more than the belief in the survival of death by a bare human personality. They could not have come into existence without the belief that what remained after the catastrophe was still in some degree a sentient and powerful being. It is difficult for mankind to acquiesce in the reality of death. The imagination refuses to harbour the thought of the cessation of conscious existence. The dead, although they appear to respond no longer to the physical and social stimuli hitherto effective, must still be. Vanished from our ordinary ken, they must be living somewhere, somehow; they cannot have been annihilated. If they still live, they must live under conditions analogous to those we know, and with affections, desires, appetites, aversions, similar to those they had in this life, though the objects may conceivably be changed. Hence every sort of activity known to man is ascribed to them. In dreams, in trances, and in the phenomena of possession they are observed to carry on these activities. But because they are observed to carry them on only under such mysterious conditions they repel the survivors and fill them with an undefinable horror and awe. Among the affections and appetites of mankind those connected with the sexual life are almost the strongest. It is natural therefore to imagine that the dead will still endeavour, by social and even by fleshly intercourse with the survivors, to gratify them. For if the belief in their activity in other directions be conceded, this cannot be denied; and perhaps the very horror that would be inspired by the ultimate stages of such a possibility serves to attract the thoughts, and therefore the belief, of peoples on the lower planes of civilization.