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 asreligious. 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.
All this is equally true of religion. The authors see therefore that magic is, like religion, a social phenomenon; it has parallel rites with those of religion; it has parallel postulates and beliefs. To distinguish it from religion they are driven to erect into a test the individualistic aims of its practitioners, or of those on whose behalf it is called in aid. Its true distinction is, according to this, that it tends to be isolated, to be furtive, to be put into motion on behalf of individuals and against the community; its methods become arbitrary; it ceases to be a common obligation. Individuals in magic have appropriated the ideas and the collective forces generated byreligion, and turned them to their own ends. Religion, in short, is social in its aims, magic is antisocial. That is the only difference between them. In this distinction Professor Durkheim agrees. Everywhere, he says, religious life has for its substratum a definite group; even what are called private cults are celebrated by the family or the corporation or society to which they are restricted. On the other hand, though magical beliefs are widely diffused and practised by large classes of a population, their effect is not to bind together those who adhere to them and unite them into a group having one common life: there is no magical Church. Between the magician and those who consult him there is no durable bond. He has clients, not a church. His relations with them are accidental, not permanent; and they may have no relations with one another; they may even be ignorant of one another’s existence.76.1
But this very charge of being antisocial is brought by many dominant religions against their rivals. It was substantially the charge brought against the early Christians by the Pagans. It is to-day the charge formulated by fanatical Russian Christians against the Jews. Here in the west of Europe it is, in a somewhat vaguer form, the reproach of orthodox Christians against Agnostics and all shades of Rationalists. To apply it as a test to distinguish religion from magic is to qualify the same practices as religious or as magical, according as they have social or antisocial ends. And how shall we define these ends? The act which at one stage of civilization is antisocial, at another is often a social duty. To attempt a change in this respect may be antisocial as regards the existing society, though it may result in ultimate benefit; and the attempt may be made from purely individualist motives, for purely individualist ends.Nay, the same act may be in the same society social or antisocial, according to circumstances. In Central Australia the man who kills an enemy by means ofarungquiltha, which may be renderedevil magic, commits an antisocial act; he does it in secret: it would be dangerous to let it become known. But if a woman run away from her husband and cannot be recovered, he may lawfully avenge himself with the aid ofarungquiltha. He is performing an act of social justice, and will be joined in doing it by the men of his local group. In the same way vengeance may be taken for a murder, real or supposed, by aKurdaitchaparty, which performs what we should designate as a magical ceremony to cause the victim to sicken and die. This is held to be a social, not an antisocial act, for it is fulfilling the social duty of revenge. It is done with the sanction of the council of elders.77.1In Melanesia, as we have seen, all religion consists in gettingmanafor oneself, not for the benefit of others; though doubtless themana, when obtained, is often used for the advantage of the community.77.2Often it is not. “A man will commonly have hiskeramo, atindalo[a ghost that is worshipped] of killing, who will help him in fighting or in slaying his private enemy.” Thetindalo, albeit the object of religious worship, has no prejudice against antisocial acts. His worshipper, before going out to commit what we should call murder, performs an elaborate ceremony, sacrificing to the ghost, and cursing his victim. If he succeed in killing him, thetindalogets as his share of the spoil the ghost of the deceased, and is invoked to givemanain return.77.3
The man who, in Europe or elsewhere, makes use ofspells to injure individuals, or even of the Evil Eye, is practising magic: he is doing an antisocial act. The man who defends himself with a gesture, with spells, or by loading his body with amulets, is not doing an antisocial act; he is simply protecting himself. But is he practising religion or magic? Be it remembered here that a man may have the Evil Eye without knowing it. Pius the Ninth, Vicar of Christ, was reputed to have the Evil Eye. Nothing was so fatal as his blessing; the faithful quailed at his glance and doubtless protected themselves with amulets. So the Boloki of the Congo hold that “one can have witchcraft without knowing it.”78.1In these cases there can be no antisocial intention. Among the Thonga of South-Eastern Africa a common procedure is to point at one’s enemy with the index-finger. This is antisocial: it is witchcraft. Before they go to war a ceremony is performed by an old woman, naked and in a state of ritual purity, over the warriors, and an incantation is muttered, to enable them to kill their foes.78.2This may not be antisocial; but is it anything else than magic? True, the men murmur prayers to their ancestral spirits for help; but then religion is penetrated with magic. Even Professor Durkheim admits that he cannot show a solution of continuity between them; the frontiers between their respective domains are often undefined, unfixed.78.3At all events he cannot say where the one ends and the other begins.
Perhaps, however, not the intention but the tendency, whether social or antisocial, is the test. In that case it is hard to conceive anything more antisocial than the operations of the Holy Inquisition. They were, it istrue, not performed by supernatural instrumentality, or for supernatural purposes. To that extent they are not directly parallel with the rites we have been considering. But they were carried on by persons consecrated to religion, as religious acts, surrounded by religious rites, by exorcisms, imprecations, conjurations, shielded by the Church with all her powers, and sanctioned, if not set in motion, by the highest ecclesiastical authorities. They desolated every society where the institution was introduced.79.1Secrecy has been already noted as a characteristic of magic as opposed to religion. Naturally antisocial acts are performed in secret. The deeds of the Holy Office were done in the deepest dens of the building, and surrounded by impervious precautions against discovery, except the last dread act. In that consummation of cruelty, that supreme Act of Faith, as it was called, its officials nominally took no part; though it was well known that they insisted upon it relentlessly and with every terror, ghostly or secular, which they knew so well how to wield. On the other hand, the African sorcerer, conjuring the rain or the sunshine so necessary for the crops, performs an eminently social work, and does it very often in the open eye of day and before the assembled people. When a fisher-boat was launched in the north-east of Scotland a bottle of whisky used to be broken on the prow or stern with the words:
“Frae rocks an’ saandsAn’ barren landsAn’ ill men’s handsKeep’s free.Weel oot, weel in,Wi’ a gueede shot.”
“Frae rocks an’ saands
An’ barren lands
An’ ill men’s hands
Keep’s free.
Weel oot, weel in,
Wi’ a gueede shot.”
“On the arrival of the boat at its new home the skipper’s wife, in some of the villages, took a lapful of corn or barley, and sowed it over the boat.”80.1These are not antisocial acts; they have no antisocial tendency; and they are not performed in secret. Must we account them religious, and the operations of the Inquisition magical?
Thus antisocial character is no sufficient test of magic as opposed to religion. Professor Doutté, dealing with magic as developed in Islam, adheres generally to the views of Messrs Hubert and Mauss. He proposes, however, another definition. Quoting with approval the late M. Marillier’s observation that magic is “the action on the without by the within,”80.2he remarks that the savage has not yet made a sufficient distinction between subject and object; he does not differentiate himself from the universe. And he concludes that magic, invented under the pressure of need, is only the objectivation of desire under the form of an extended force, singular, bound to gestures representative of the phenomenon desired and mechanically producing it. If the savage externalize this magical force so far that he ends by personifying it, we have the genesis of a god; the god, in fact, may be a personifiedmana. A god can only be anthropomorphic; he is the psycho-physical objectivation of man in phenomena.80.3This brings ProfessorDoutté much nearer to Dr Frazer’s position, and might form the basis of aneireniconbetween them. For though he is fully aware that much in magic is indistinguishable from religion, he holds it to be a subsequent development: magic has so far modelled itself on religion and borrowed its theistic methods of procedure. It presents itself as an anti-religion. Under Christianity it reaches its ultimate term with the Black Mass and the cult of the devil: Islam does not lend itself so well to hideous parody. Yet Professor Doutté, after flirting with Professor Frazer’s opinion, comes back to the orthodoxy of the French sociologists: the real distinction between religion and magic is that the one is social—it sustains the life of the society; the other applies its rites to strictly personal ends—it is antisocial. The one is magic lawful and even obligatory; the other is magic useless or injurious to society, and it is condemned and interdicted. Islam even recognizes white or religious magic; the Prophet himself recommended it. Ibn Khaldoûn, a great Mohammedan jurist, can find, indeed, no solid distinction between the miracle of the saint and the prodigy wrought by the sorcerer, save that of the morality of its aim. The test of morality is what is permitted by the Law. That which is permitted by the Law is moral; the rest is immoral. It comes to this, then, that a miracle is legitimate magic, and magic is a forbidden miracle.81.1
The same difficulty in severing magic from religion is experienced by one of the acutest writers who has considered the subject. “Magic and religion,” says Dr Marett, “according to the view I would support, belongto the same department of human experience.… Together they belong to the supernormal world, thex-region of experience, the region of mental twilight. Magic I take to include all bad ways, and religion all good ways, of dealing with the supernormal—bad and good, of course, not as we may happen to judge them, but as the society concerned judges them. Sometimes, indeed, the people themselves hardly know where to draw the line between the two; and in that case the anthropologist cannot well do it for them. But every society thinks witchcraft bad. Witchcraft consists in leaguing oneself with supernormal powers of evil in order to effect selfish and antisocial ends. Witchcraft then is genuine magic—black magic, of the devil’s colour.”82.1Presumably white magic—magic performed for good and social ends—is not magic; it is a part of religion, notwithstanding that precisely the same means may be employed as in witchcraft—black magic. For Dr Marett adds: “Every primitive society also distinguishes certain salutary ways of dealing with supernormal powers. All these ways taken together constitute religion.”82.2Coming more particularly to define religion, he says: “Savage life has few safeguards. Crisis is a frequent, if intermittent, element in it. Hunger, sickness and war are examples of crisis. Birth and death are crises. Marriage is usually regarded by humanity as a crisis. So is initiation—the turning-point in one’s career, when one steps out into the world of men. Now what in terms of mind does crisis mean? It means that one is at one’s wits’ end; that the ordinary and expected has been replaced by theextraordinary and unexpected; that we are projected into the world of the unknown.… Psychologically regarded, then, the function of religion is to restore men’s confidence when it is shaken by crisis.… Religion is the facing of the unknown. It is the courage in it that brings comfort.” Sociologically, “a religion is the effort to face crisis, so far as that effort is organized by society in some particular way. A religion is congregational—that is to say, serves the ends of a number of persons simultaneously. It is traditional—that is to say, has served the ends of successive generations of persons. Therefore inevitably it has standardized a method. It involves a routine, a ritual. Also, it involves some sort of conventional doctrine, which is, as it were, the inner side of the ritual—its lining.”83.1
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 ofarungquiltha. 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 second observation is that the definition ignores the whole of life not occupied by crises. When the Californian Hupa awakes in the morning and sees the dawn, it cannot be said that he is at his wits’ end, that the ordinary and expected has been replaced by the extraordinary and unexpected. What does he do? Hegreets the dawn with a silent prayer that he may see many dawns, for he regards it as a person who is benevolently inclined to him.84.1This surely is religion. The point is met by the further statement that “the religion of a savage is part of his custom; nay, rather it is his whole custom so far as it appears sacred—so far as it coerces him by way of his imagination. Between him and the unknown stands nothing but his custom. It is his all-in-all, his stand-by, his faith and his hope. Being thus the sole source of his confidence, his custom, so far as his imagination plays about it, becomes his ‘luck.’ We may say that any and every custom, in so far as it is regarded as lucky, is a religious rite.”84.2In that case religion is much more than the facing of the unknown, the organized effort to face crisis. It is custom coercing man by way of his imagination. A convenient custom coerces by way of their imagination weary women at Tlemcen in Algeria not to sweep out the house for three days at the New Year, so that they may not lose their luck.84.3Can we legitimately call this religion? Or take another case. There are people in England who will not utter a boast, or tell a small social fib, without taking the precaution to touch wood. I have known educated women drag a chair across the room to a visitor who had just boasted of immunity from a trifling ailment, in order that she might touch wood. Despite their education, they were coerced by way of their imagination to this little ceremony. There must be thousands of things done merely for luck, and done habitually, by peoples alike in barbarism and in civilization. Some of them probably are relics of a once living belief. About others there is no such presumption;yet they exercise the same constraint. Does that make them religious rites? Does it make even those that once were portions of some living belief, but are so no longer, religious rites now? Of course it is all a matter of definition of terms. But a definition of religion which would include all these would be catholic indeed.
The criticisms in this chapter involve no reflection on the perspicacity of scientific writers who are trying to obtain a clear vision of religion and magic and of their specific differences. But they do aim at illustrating the futility of the attempt absolutely to define anything so fluid and elusive as religion.85.1Both religion and magic owe their origin to society; they are born and nurtured in a social atmosphere. Both are concerned with forces mysterious, far-reaching, enveloping and constrainingmen and things. These forces are not always personal, though their evolution usually takes a personal direction. The means used by both are similar, because the forces are the same, or at least alike. Spell and prayer are very near akin; the one passes insensibly into the other. And the material means common to both are chosen arbitrarily or according to some fancied symbolism, and employed in closely parallel ways. There is, in short, no decided boundary between religion and magic.
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.
Now the word Magic, by the usage of centuries, is concerned not so much with aim or tendency as with method. It conveys the notion of power, by whatsoever means acquired, wielded by the magician as his own, and not as that of a higher being whose coöperation is only obtained by supplication and self-abasement. Supplication, self-abasement, flattery are the religious means of winning the help of divinities. Where higher beings, whether called gods or devils, or by the more ambiguous title of spirits, are invoked by spell, compliance with the call is not dependent on their goodwill; the command is irresistible; and the procedure is magical. Sacrifice is utilized in both procedures; but it has a very different value in the one and the other. In the one it operates as a communion with the divinity, as a gift towin favour which he is by no means bound to grant, or as an atonement for wrong. In the other it is a condition on the fulfilment of which the desire of him who offers it is accomplished, inevitably and by compulsion. In such a case he who offers the sacrifice is not a worshipper; he is a master of the beings to whom it is offered. True, they are sometimes gods. In the religion of the Hindus “prayers, penances, and sacrifices are supposed to possess an inherent and actual value, in no degree depending upon the disposition or motive of the person who performs them. They are drafts upon Heaven, for which the Gods cannot refuse payment. The worst men, bent upon the worst designs, have in this manner obtained power which has made them formidable to the Supreme Deities themselves.”87.1Thus has Southey succinctly stated the belief on which his poem ofThe Curse of Kehamais built. Here byprayersare meant liturgicalformulæ, which everywhere tend to degenerate into magical spells. Penances are in the nature of sacrifices. Or they are taboos that preserve and enhance the force and influence of the suppliant. Both alike are a magical process, in the sense in which the word Magic is generally employed. The constraining power of sacrifices was also a tenet of Egyptian religion, at all events in its last ages.87.2Have analogous beliefs in the magical powers of a rite even yet disappeared from Christianity?
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 concerningthe 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.
The discussion has led to some anticipation of the argument. We turn back again to the personal potentiality.
He for whom the world is full of personal beings and hardly anything else—a universe of objects interpreted in the terms of conscious personality and projected on a background of the Unknown with all its possibilities—he for whom each of those objects, human and non-human, living and not-living, is invested in a greater or less degree withorenda, will naturally and instinctively on the one hand avail himself of his ownorenda, and on the other hand will dread and endeavour to turn to account theorendaof others. But this very endeavour to turn others’orendato account is an exercise by prayer or compulsion of his own. I can see no satisfactory evidence that early man consciously entertained any great faith in the order and uniformity of nature. Automatically, no doubt, he assumed that night would follow day and day night, that the winter would follow the summer or the dry season the wet, that the trees would blossom in the spring or after the rains set in, as he had been accustomed to see them. But that was not the result of reflection; it was not an act of faith. So things had always been, and he could not conceive any different course. It was not part of his mental furniture; it was no acquisition of reasoning. It was the very framework of his mind. When he began to reflect he referred these phenomena to the same cause to which he referred his own acts, and the more uncertain and capricious acts of other living beings—to personal will andorenda. Even if he had risen to the large conception of the Siouanwakonda, that impersonal force must, as we have seen, clothe itself with personality in order to operate. Immediately and for practical purposes the personal will andorendaof himself or some other object were the fount of all causation. They impelled and directed all actions, all means, and were responsible for all effects. If he took aim at hisenemy and flung his spear, or whatever primitive weapon served the same purpose; if it hit the man, and he fell; he might witness the result, but the mere mechanical causation, however inevitable in its action, would be the last thing he would think about. Conscious of his own will, of his own effort, of the words, perhaps, with which he had accompanied and directed the spear, he would attribute the result to such causes as these. His ownorendafelt in his passion, his will, his effort, and displayed in his acts and words, theorendaof the spear, either inherent in itself, conceived as a personal being, or conferred by its maker, and manifested in the keenness of its point, the precision and the force with which it flies to its work and inflicts the deadly wound—these would be to him the true causes of his enemy’s fall. Hisorendais mightier than his enemy’s and overcomes it. So, when the enemy is absent and he cannot visibly reach him, hisorendamay yet suffice to accomplish the desired injury. By a psychological process which Dr Marett has subtly analysed,91.1he is led to perform in pantomime all the acts of a murder in the absence of the victim, either silently, or to the accompaniment of a chant, or of spoken words. His foe, who is as convinced as himself of the power of such a performance, if it come to his knowledge, falls a victim to the terror it inspires, unless he can call in the aid of some other person, objective or imaginary, whoseorendais more powerful still. Nor would the belief lack vindication even in the case of the victim’s ignorance; for any chance misfortune or sickness would be put down to a hostileorenda; and if he did escape, it would be due to his own superiororenda.
Thus what we generally call magic or witchcraft isprimarily an application oforenda. By hisorendaa man bewitches his enemy (or, for a consideration, someone else’s enemy), causes rain or sunshine, raises and protects the crops, gains success in hunting, divines the cause of sickness and cures it, raises the dead, spells out the future. His incantations, his gestures, his apparatus—whether of plants, stones, animal products, magical drawings, or whatever else it may be—would be of no avail without this. In Central Australia the Arunta magician arms his “pointing bone” witharungquiltha. In Central Africa the Murundi impregnates his magical implements with evil influence by means of his imprecations, his incantations, and his evocation of spirits. That is, he puts into them hisorendaor themanaof the spirits: until then they are absolutely powerless and indifferent.92.1This influence, thisorenda,mana, orarungquiltha, is the nexus—the copula, as it has been called—which links the subject, the magician, to the object, the result.
But man is not the only being who possessesorenda. Theorendaof his quarry sometimes foils his own. The cicada chirping in the fields ripens the maize for the Iroquois; theorendaof the rabbit controls the snow and fixes the depth to which it must fall. The awful mountain, the treacherous sea, those mighty beings who command the winds, who send forth the storm, who rule in the darkness and mystery of the forest, possess anorendasurpassing man’s. It is useless to pit hisorendaagainst theirs. Therefore he must adopt a different course. He must lay down hisorendaand submit it to theirs. This is the literal meaning of the Iroquoian phrase which signifies in modern usage “He habitually prays.”92.2He must take such a course as he would toobtain assistance from a human being (say, a powerful chief), or to conciliate an enemy. By gift, by abasement, by abstinence, by self-torture, by cajolery he must win this powerfulorendato his side. Of these efforts abstinence and abasement are negative forms of propitiation. They are perhaps the earliest forms. If our reports be complete (on which we may have our doubts), abstinence is the only form used among the Andaman Islanders, where belief is said to outrun active worship.93.1In any case a taboo for propitiatory purposes is very early and very persistent. Not without insight does the poet tell us that Caliban
“Will let those quails fly, will not eat this monthOne little mess of whelks, so he may ’scape.”
“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 theorendato those of mightier beings. On the other hand, gift, prayer, cajolery are, properly speaking, an active exercise oforenda. 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. Aceremony 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 whoseorendathe 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 theorendais 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 theorendaof 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.
If the view here taken be accurate, the essential opposition between magic and religion disappears. Nor am I greatly concerned to decide whether of the two developed the earlier. Their origin is the same; they grow from one root. Nay, I should hardly be wrong if I changed the metaphor and said: magic and religion are the two faces of one medal. From the lowest stage of culture to the highest we find them inseparable. Gods were not invented because man proved unequal to the strain of arranging the affairs of the universe by himself; nor has the age of religion been everywhere preceded by the age of magic. “By whatever name it is called,” says Dr Codrington, speaking of the Melanesianmana, “it is the belief in this supernatural power and in the efficacy of the various means by which spirits and ghosts can be induced to exercise it for the benefit of men that is the foundation of the rites and practices which can be called religious: and it is from the same belief that everythingwhich may be called magic and witchcraft draws its origin. Wizards, doctors, weather-mongers, prophets, diviners, dreamers, all alike, everywhere in the islands, work by this power. There are many of these who may be said to exercise their art as a profession; they get their property and influence in this way. Every considerable village or settlement is sure to have someone who can control the weather and the waves, someone who knows how to treat sickness, someone who can work mischief with various charms. There may be one whose skill extends to all these branches; but generally one man knows how to do one thing and one another. This various knowledge is handed down from father to son, from uncle to sister’s son [for in many of these islands descent is still reckoned exclusively through the mother], in the same way as is the knowledge of rites and methods of sacrifice and prayer; and very often the same man who knows the sacrifice knows also the making of the weather and of charms for many purposes besides. But as there is no order of priests, there is also no order of magicians or medicine-men. Almost every man of consideration knows how to approach some ghost or spirit, and has some secret of occult practices. Knowledge of either kind can be bought, if the possessor chooses to impart it to any other than the heirs of whatever he has besides.”95.1
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 powerfulorenda. Similarly, the professionalpriest 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 theirorenda. 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 wordshaman, 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 thosecharacterized as magical, by which their followers have striven to compass union with the objects of worship, to avail themselves of theorendaof these objects, to locate it in their own persons or in the images and implements of their cult, to intensify their ownorenda, and to exercise it for the benefit, spiritual, corporal or pecuniary, of themselves and others.
It may be well to illustrate the foregoing speculation from the customs and superstitions of the Arunta of Central Australia. The Arunta have been represented to be the lowest and least evolved of known humanity in their beliefs and institutions: they are, it is said, still in the stage of primitive absence of religion; magic alone is the object of their belief; magic alone they practise. Now none of the Australian tribes are, strictly speaking, in a primitive condition. The civilization of all of them has evolved to some extent. It has evolved, speaking in general terms, along similar lines; and these lines have been conditioned by the environment. It is admittedly significant that, in a land where so many archaic types of the lower animals have survived, we should find archaic types of human culture. Yet the most archaic types of Australian culture are far from being primitive. So far are they that the social organization is of the most complex character, the product of a succession of stages of development. The least archaic types exhibit the old social organization breaking down and new structures in course of formation. With the evolution of society an evolution of belief has also been going on. It has not been exactly concurrent. Culture rarely or never evolves equally in all directions. It is a mental process, partly conscious, partly unconscious. The collective mind of a given society, like the individual minds of which it is composed, is not exercised equallyon all subjects at the same time. Hence while, for example, we find among the Euahlayi tribe, in the north of New South Wales, an advanced theology and a more developed worship than have been recorded elsewhere in Australia, the social organization is still on the basis of female descent; and though the clansmen eat without scruple their hereditary totems, in other respects the totemic system seems to be in full force. In the same way the Arunta and their neighbours certainly preserve relics of a very archaic condition of thought and social organization. Though for certain purposes a son inherits from his mother’s husband, it is doubtful whether descent is counted through the father for social purposes; the physical relation between father and child, indeed, is but imperfectly recognized. On the other hand, they have developed a very elaborate theory of reincarnation, and their totemic system seems to be in course of transformation into a number of societies bearing in some respects remarkable resemblance to those of the tribes of British Columbia.98.1Magical practices (chiefly in connection with these societies or totemic groups) are more prominent than religious.
Yet a closer examination will lead us to the conclusion that something more than, on any definition of magic, we can call magical practices, something we must recognize as religion, albeit of a low type, is not wholly wanting to the natives of Central Australia. We may perhaps grant that Twanyirika, with whose name the women anduninitiate children are kept in awe, is a bugbear “to frighten babes withal,” and nothing more. The Kaitish and the Loritja, adjacent tribes sharing the general culture of the Arunta, at all events believe in the real existence of a superior being, who invented the initiation rites and is pleased when men perform them now.99.1Indeed, if Herr Strehlow’s investigations are to be trusted, the Arunta themselves are not destitute of belief in such a being, though we learn little about him, and he has no influence on the destinies of mankind.99.2Among the Warramunga, a tribe a little further to the north, the Wollunqua, a gigantic mythical snake, is the object of important rites, and one of the totem-clans is called by its name. It dwells in a certain water-hole in a lonely valley of the Murchison Range, “and there is always the fear that it may take it into its head to come out of its hiding-place and do some damage.” Hence propitiation is necessary. This is effected by building a mound of sandy earth and delineating on it a representation of the animal. “They say that when he sees the mound with his representation drawn upon it, he is gratified, and wriggles about underneath with pleasure.” On the evening of the day succeeding that on which the ceremonies in connection with this mound were witnessed by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, “the old men who had made the mound said that they had heard the Wollunqua talking, and that he was pleased with what had been done and was sending rain; the explanation of which doubtless was that they, like ourselves, had heard thunder in the distance. No rain fell, but a few days later the distant rumble of thunder was again heard at night-time; andthis, the old men now said, was the Wollunqua growling because the remains of the mound had been left uncovered. They also told the younger men that a heavy bank of clouds which lay on the western horizon had been placed there as a warning by the Wollunqua, and at once cut down boughs and hid the ruins of the mound from view, after which the Wollunqua ceased from growling, and all went on peacefully until the end of the series” of ceremonies.100.1There are, of course, myths associated with the Wollunqua. The mound recalled one of them. During its building and the ceremonies about it chants were sung referring to the deeds of the Wollunqua, breaking out from time to time into refrains of words, now at least meaningless, and said to belong to the language of the mythical past. The name Wollunqua is avoided in common parlance. A circumlocution is employed instead, “because, so they told us, if they were to call it too often by its real name, they would lose their control over it and it would come out and eat them all up.”100.2How does this differ from the familiar taboo of sacred names? When the explorers were taken to visit the Wollunqua’s dwelling-place (should we be wrong to call it his shrine?), the two chief men of the totemic group went down to the water’s edge and addressed him in whispers with bowed heads, praying him to remain quiet and do them no harm, for they were mates of his and had brought up two great white men to see where he lived and to tell them about him. “We could plainly see that it was all very real to them, and that they implicitly believed that the Wollunqua was indeed alive beneath the water, watching them, though they could not see him.”100.3In all these rites (the detailsof which were carried out with earnestness and frequently with excitement) it can hardly be denied that we have the elements of a true cult. The only one as to which any qualification could be admitted is “the savage attack,” described as being made on the mound when the ceremony relating to it was concluded. The result of it was that the figures delineated on the mound were destroyed, and all that remained was a rough heap of sandy earth. This is represented as an attempt to “coerce the mythic beast.” It is not quite certain that the interpretation is correct, for it does not rest on native statements, but is an inference of the explorers. The obliteration of sacred figures drawn on sand or earth for the purpose of a rite is not confined to the cult of the Wollunqua, nor even to Australia. It is equally found among the Pueblo tribes of North America and the Mongolian Buddhists of Central Asia.101.1Its object is to hide the sacred symbols from the eyes of the profane. But if the interpretation were correct (and it is not inconsistent with some of the expressions and traditions reported), it is no more than we might expect. If a savage deals with the mythic figures of his imagination as he deals with his fellowman, we must not be surprised that he should pass from cajolery to coercion, from prayer to defiance. Peoples on a much higher religious horizon (as we shall see hereafter) do not hesitate to threaten, and even to offer violence to, the objects of their worship, when they are unable to obtain otherwise what they want.
Nor are the rites of the Wollunqua alone among these tribes in bearing evidence of something more than magical ceremonies, namely, of rudimentary worship.When at the close of the initiation rites among the Arunta someone with a bundle ofchuringa, sacred stones or sticks in the shape of a bull-roarer, comes up to the newly initiated youth, saying: “Here is Twanyirika, of whom you have heard so much; they arechuringaand will help to heal you quickly,”102.1neither the neophyte nor his friend regards them as mere toys. The statement that they will help to heal the neophyte’s wounds is enough to show this. We must not be misled by the apparent anticlimax to forget that they are, throughout this group of tribes, mysterious objects, marked with the emblem of the totem, and in the closest association with it; to the Arunta and Loritja they are the outward and visible sign, if not the embodiment, of the ancestral souls or invisible portions, and as such are regarded with veneration.102.2They are kept cunningly concealed from the eyes of the profane, hidden in stores which are sanctuaries, places of refuge from the pursuit of enemies, for men and even for wild animals. Herr Strehlow relates that when he was trying to find a native word to translatechurch, two baptized Blackfellows in all seriousness suggested to him the use ofarknanaua, the name of these sacred storehouses in their tongue.102.3The very wordchuringameans, as nearly as can be rendered in a European tongue, hidden away, secret, appropriated, sacred. It is used as an adjective to describe objects employed in the sacred ceremonies, and the secret name bestowed on a child at birth. In this connection it isimportant to remember that the sacred ceremonies, and in fact everything sacred, are among these tribes secret also from the uninitiate. Though individuals may, at least among the Arunta and Loritja, have special property in theirchuringas, the latter are, as a whole, the collective property of the totemic clan; they are under the control of the ceremonial headman; their loss is the most serious evil that can befall a group; and even to lend them to another group, as is occasionally done for special purposes, is undertaken with the greatest solemnity and caution. When returned, they are received with every mark of veneration, with weeping and a low, mournful chant; and both parties must be strictly fasting.103.1
Thechuringaare, moreover, endowed with power, withmana, which not merely heals wounds, but when they are brought ceremonially in contact with the body produces other physical, mental, and even moral effects. In the Kaitish tribe the performance of some ceremonies, in the course of which thechuringaare handled, renders a man so full of thismana, or, as they call it,churinga, using the very word, that he becomes for the time taboo.103.2In addition, thechuringahave virtue to make the yams and the grass-seed grow; they frighten the game, or enable a man to secure it, and so forth. They are handled in a manner which it is no exaggeration to call devout. They are polished with red ochre to “soften” them, a term that, as Messrs Spencer and Gillen remark, “very evidently points to the fact that the [churinga] is regarded as something much more than a piece of wood or stone. It is intimately associated with the ancestor, and has ‘feelings,’ just as human beings have, which can be soothed by rubbing in the same way in which those of living men can be.” We gather that a man will singto hischuringa, that the subject of his song will be the mythical story of the ancestor (or the previous incarnation) to whom it belonged, and that as he sings and rubs it with his hand, “he gradually comes to feel that there is some special association between him and the sacred object—that a virtue of some kind passes from it to him, and also from him to it.” So from generation to generation it gathers more and more of what our authors describe as magical power—what would certainly be called in Melanesiamana—the mystic potentiality already discussed.104.1
Thus thechuringahave to the Blackfellow a more or less definitely personal aspect. It may be said that the songs chanted over them are after all merely magical spells. But the spell implies some more or less defined personality in the objects to which it is addressed. In these tribes rites are performed, called in the Arunta tongueIntichiuma, for the purpose of causing a manifestation of the power of the totem, of multiplying the totem-animal or plant, and generally of increasing the prosperity of the totem. In the course of these rites there is much singing. The members of the group invite the witchetty grubs to come from all directions and lay their eggs, or the hakea-trees to flower and their blossoms to fill with honey; they beg the rain to come and bring fish; they direct the kangaroos to go from one place to another; and so on. Even when the songs and the actions performed in the ceremonies recall the events of the mythical past, they are not necessarily more magical than the words of sacred dramas, which everywhere in the lower culture inseparably interweave what we generally speak of as magic and religion. The mighty ancestors (as elsewherethe gods) whose deeds they chant are present in the rite. “The totem, the ancestor, and the descendant (that is to say, the performer) appear in these songs as one. Without keeping in view the indivisible unity of the totem, the mythic ancestor and the offspring (ratapa), many of the songs are quite incomprehensible.”105.1Thus where invitation or command is not issued directly to the object, themanaof the ancestors seems to be evoked for the accomplishment of the end.
Again, so far from the Arunta medicine-men being practitioners of anything analogous to modern science, they are initiated by, and their power is derived from, the spirits. These spirits are believed to put the candidate to death, to carry him down into their abode, and there to take out his internal organs, replacing them with a new set, planting in his body a supply of magical crystals by which all his subsequent wonders will be performed, and then bringing him to life again. He remains, however, in a condition of insanity for some days. It is true that an imitation of this process can be performed by medicine-men of flesh and blood; but candidates thus initiated have a lower repute (save apparently among the Warramunga) than those initiated directly by the spirits. The crystals are in any case the home and symbol of the magician’s powers. They are in fact full ofmana. If they be lost, the magician ceases to be a magician, and the crystals themselves return to the spirits. All over Australia, so far as we know, the same influence is attributed to them.105.2On the eastern side of the continent, where something like a tribal All-Fatheris believed in, he is regarded, like Odin, as the mightiest of magicians, and the crystals are, as well as the bull-roarer, among his special attributes. Let me observe too in passing that it is not a little significant that, as in the witchcraft of Europe and Africa, portions of dead bodies are in great request in Australia for magical purposes. The “pointing bone,” to which I referred just now, is part of a dead man’s leg or arm. A portion of his personality inheres in it. Consequently, even before it is “sung,” it is endowed with hismana, which the singing only enhances and directs in its course.106.1For the same reason human fat and a dead man’s hair are important parts of the Australian native’s magical apparatus.
The initiation of the medicine-man or magician by spirits, often the spirits of the dead, is practically the universal belief in Australia. In this respect the Australian medicine-man is in line with many of his professional brethren elsewhere. In the island of Saghalien the Gilyak shamans are chosen vessels, to whom their tutelary gods reveal their high calling in vision or in trance. From the moment that this is done the gods install themselves as the new shaman’s assistants and perform his commands. Yet shamanhood is not regarded as a gift, but as a burden. To become a shaman, either a man must find favour with one of these assistant tutelary gods, or such a god must be bestowed upon him by his father or uncle. Conversion into a shaman forms a break in the life of the chosen, accompanied by many complicated psychical phenomena. The process in his own case was described by a shaman to a Russian anthropologist. For more than two months he was sick and lay without movement or consciousness. As soonas he revived from one attack he fell under another. “I should have died,” he said, “if I had not become a shaman.” He began to dream at night that he sang shaman songs. Visions appeared to him, and he was told to make a drum and the proper apparatus of a shaman, and to sing. If he were a simple man, the vision told him, nothing would happen; “but if thou art a shaman, be a real shaman.” When he awoke he found that it was thought the spirits had killed him, and preparations for his funeral rites had been made. But he got a drum and began to sing. This produced a feeling which hovered between intoxication and death. Then for the first time he saw his tutelary gods, and received from them instruction in his business as a shaman.107.1Among the Koryak on the adjacent continent, “nobody can become a shaman of his own free will. The spirits enter into any person they may choose and force him to become their servant.” Such persons are “usually nervous young men, subject to hysterical fits, by means of which the spirits express their demand” that the patient shall become a shaman. Fasting, paroxysms, exhaustion succeed one another. Finally, the spirits appear to the patient in visible form, endow him with power, inspire and instruct him.107.2In other words, they fill him with theirmana.
Here we have manifestly the wide-spread phenomena of Possession. In these tribes there are no professional priests. The magicians, though in a sense the intermediaries between men and the higher powers, are not charged with the duty of offering sacrifice and prayer. In South Africa, among the Bantu tribes, also, there areno professional priests. Ancestor-worship is the religion; and the only worship paid is paid to themanesof the dead. The proper person to offer sacrifices is the head of the family for the time being. But medicine-men or magicians form a regular profession, which is divided into a number of branches. For some of these branches initiation by the spirits of the dead is not necessary. For others it is indispensable. Frequently, however, the same man combines the practice of several branches of the art. All who practise openly are recognized as White Wizards, exercising their powers for the wellbeing of society, in defence of the established order. Yet these very men sometimes boast of beingbaloyi, a term by which evil wizards are generally known. They claim to be more powerful than ordinary wizards, able to discover and baffle their tricks, and to kill. Moreover, there are goodbaloyi, who use their power to bless. They are sometimes sent by ancestral spirits to increase the produce of the fields, and then they are said to have bewitched the fields to make them bring forth more fruit. Thus it is clear that a hard and fast line cannot be drawn between the social and the antisocial magicians, at least among some of the Bantu tribes. One of the chief branches of the profession is that of exorcist. Now no man can set up as an exorcist without having been himself possessed by the spirits and exorcised. This is indeed the regular method of initiation, for a man is not merely restored to ordinary life by exorcism; he is also aggregated to the society of magicians; he enters a new life; he becomes a neophyte among the practitioners, and must undergo further probation which may result in his becoming more than an exorcist—he may become clairvoyant or a diviner, a prophet or a worker of marvels; he may cure diseases or cause the rain to fall. Many practitionersprofess more than one of these accomplishments; the most distinguished profess several.109.1
How far the phenomena of possession are voluntary need not here be discussed. The Zulu or Xosa patient (if we may call him so) becomes sickly and abstinent; he distinguishes himself by dreams and visions, and begins to talk of his intercourse with spirits of the dead; he becomes “a house of dreams”; he is hysterical; he sings; he behaves as though he were out of his mind; he is possessed by anItongo, an ancestral spirit. Then he is admitted to the society of the magicians and receives instruction from them. Finally, he is accounted a new creature, whose intercourse with spirits and share in their supernatural powers is recognized by everyone.109.2
Among the Ngombe in the Northern Congo basin, we are told, “the ghosts call [to the man] from the bowels of the earth. He goes into the grave, underground, and stays there four months. When the four months are finished he comes forth, rubs himself with camwood and dances, contorting his body.” This seems to be the neophyte’s only preparation for the office ofnganga. After that, according to the same authority, “whenever a man is sick he is carried by others to thenganga. They accompany him to the man of ghosts. He looks at the body, then recites to the spirit. They lift up the man and go out. All the people dance, and he who is afflicted with sickness is brought to the doctor for medicine.”109.3
On the North American continent the medicine-man was not “possessed,” as among the Siberian tribes and the Bantu; but his mode of initiation was similar. TheOjibway sorcerer after prolonged fasting was initiated by the supernatural powers.110.1Among many of the Californian tribes “a spirit, be it that of an animal, a place, the sun or other natural object, a deceased relative or an entirely unembodied spirit, visits the future medicine-man in his dreams, and the connection thus established between them is the source and basis of the latter’s power. This spirit becomes his guardian spirit or ‘personal.’ From it he receives the song or rite or knowledge of the charm, and the understanding which enable him to cause or remove disease, and to do and endure what other men cannot.”110.2The Skidi Pawnee is allured to the abode of the mysterious animal-powers, and there taught their knowledge and gifted with their powers; or he is visited by a supernatural being in dreams for the same purpose.110.3
Among the Sea Dyaks of Borneo “there are two descriptions ofmanangs[shamans], the regular and the irregular. The regular are those who have been called to that vocation by dreams, and to whom the spirits have revealed themselves. The irregular are self-created and without a familiar spirit.” It is not enough for themanangsimply to say “that he feels himself called; he must prove to his friends that he is able to commune with the spirits; and in proof of this he will occasionally abstain from food and indulge in trances, from which he will awake with all the tokens of one possessed by a devil, foaming at the mouth and talking incoherently.”110.4One of the ways to “get magic” among the Malays is to meet the ghost of a murdered man. In order to do this aceremony must be performed at the grave on a Tuesday at full moon. The aspirant calls upon the deceased for help, and states his request. Ultimately an aged man appears, to whom the request is repeated; and it would seem that the suppliant gets what he wants.111.1
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.
Before passing away from the subject we may turn to a different type of shaman. Among the Veddas the shaman is in effect the priest. The spirits to whom offerings are made are those of the dead. It is the shaman who makes the offering, and performs the invocation; and he is in return possessed by them. But here the novice is chosen and trained by one who already exercises the profession. He does not become possessed in his capacity as novice. Possession only takes place at the public ceremonies; it is temporary; and it may affect others besides the shaman. The position of shaman is practically hereditary, for the novice trained is usually the shaman’s son, or his sister’s son, that is to say, his actual or potential son-in-law. The Veddas are on a level of civilization as low as the Arunta. Though they do not practise rites of such senseless and revolting cruelty, in their natural condition and apart from external influence they live entirely by hunting and the collection of honey; they build no huts, but take advantage of caves and rock-shelters; their pottery is of the roughest description;and the iron arrowheads, axes and other implements which they possess are obtained by barter from the Sinhalese, for they do not exercise the art of smithying. The lowest and wildest of them, however, know nothing of hostile magic. Even protective magic is hardly practised; and the charms they make use of appear to be derived from the neighbouring Sinhalese. It is true they have traditions that it used to be customary to seek strength and confidence to avenge insults by chewing a small dried piece of the liver of a man who had been killed for the purpose. This is an application of a well-known magical principle.113.1But, so far as our information goes, it is a solitary case. If therefore the Vedda shaman is not initiated by the spirits, it is not because the Veddas have not yet passed out of the age of magic. If there be an age of magic in which religion is unknown, for aught that appears they have not yet passed into it. At all events they cannot be said to confirm the generalization that magic precedes religion; for magical practices once adopted persist with remarkable tenacity into the highest planes of culture.