Note 107 — ROMAN PEOPLE (continued 2)

Thus Messrs. Hubert et Mauss (Mélanges d'histoire des religions, Preface, p. xxiv.) maintain that there is no real antinomy between "les faits du système magique et les faits du système religieux." There is in every rite, they insist, a magical as well as a religious element. Yet on the same page we find that they exclude magic from all organised cult, because it is not obligatory, and cannot (if I understand them rightly) be laid down in a code, like religious practice. I think it would have been simpler to consider the magical element in religious rites as surviving, with its original meaning lost, from an earlier stage of thought. M. van Gennep, in his interesting work Les Rites de passage, p. 17, goes so far as to call all religious ceremonies magical, as distinguished from the theories (e.g. animism) which constitute religion. This seems to me apt to bring confusion into the discussion; for all rites are the outward expression of thought, and it is by the thought (or, as he calls it, theories) that we must trace the sociological development of mankind, the rites being used as indexes only. I cannot but think that (as indeed in these days is quite natural) this French school lays too much stress upon the outward acts, and that this tendency has led them to find real living magic where it is present only in a fossil state.