d. Hubert and Mauss have made the most complete and systematic study

of magic which has yet appeared. They hold that, implicitly at any rate, magic is everywhere distinguished from other systems of social facts; in order to be magical an act or belief must be common to the whole of a society; the acts which the whole of a group does not regard as efficacious are not, for this school of thought, magical: consequently the practices of gamesters, &c., do not come under the head of magic. Magic is essentially traditional; a distinguishing characteristic of primitive thought is that the individual mind is markedly unoriginal; and this feature is as prominent, if not more so, in magic as in technology or any other important element in human life. The correspondence between magic and technology can be traced far; for the gestures of the craftsman are as strictly prescribed as the ritual acts of the magician or priest: but in magic the results of the gestures are not of the same order as the results of the craftsman's movements, and herein lies the distinction between magic and technic. The distinction between magic and religion is to be sought not in the sympathetic character of the former, nor in any supposed necessary sequence of cause and effect, nor yet in its maleficent character. Religion is prescribed, official, an organized cult. Magic is prohibited, secret; at most it is permitted, without being prescribed. Three important laws may be traced in the machinery of magical operations--magical power flows along channels determined by the contiguity, similarity or contrast of the object of the act and the object to be affected; but these laws do not suffice to explain magic: equally insufficient are the demonological theory and the theory of properties inherent in the objects used in magical operations. The underlying idea of magic is dynamical; to this power may be given the name of _mana_ (see below), of which sanctity is a special development. This _mana_ operates in a _milieu_ different from the ordinary material world; distance is no obstacle to contact; wishes are immediately realized; but law reigns in the milieu in question, necessary relations are conceived as existing. The notion of time as it is found in the world of magic is even more alien from European ideas; the notion of sanctity enters into it, but time in magic and religion is qualitative rather than quantitative. The homogeneity of periods of time not depending on their duration, conventional numbers are employed; successive periods of time apparently equal are not so for the primitive consciousness; and both in magic and religion periods are homogeneous by reason of occupying the same position in the calendar.

e. For A. Lehmann magic is the practice of superstitions, and his explanation of magic is purely psychological. Relying mainly on modern spiritualism for his examples, he traces magic back to illusions, prejudices and false precepts due to strained attention. This is ultimately also the view of Hubert and Mauss, who hold that "at the root of magic are states of consciousness which generate illusions; and that these states are not individual but collective and arise from the amalgamation of the ideas of a given person with those current in the society of which he forms a part." The reunion of a group supplies a soil in which illusions flourish readily, and it is important to note that in magic and religion attention is above all necessary for the success of a rite, witness the frequent rule imposing silence; but this concentration of attention is precisely calculated to favour illusions; it is indeed the ordinary condition of successful hypnotism; even in civilized countries collective hallucinations without verbal suggestion are not unknown.

f. R. R. Marett regards religion and magic as two forms of a social phenomenon originally one and indivisible; primitive man had an institution which dealt with the supernatural, and in this institution were the germs of both magic and religion, which were gradually differentiated; magic and religion differ in respectability; religion is always the higher, the accepted cult; but between what is definitely religious and what is definitely magical lies a mass of indeterminate elements, such as "white-magic," which do not attain to the public recognition of religion, nor suffer the condemnation meted out to the indisputably magical. For primitive man the abnormal was the supernormal, and the supernormal was the supernatural, the object of fear; this is especially evident when we consider the case of taboo; it may be regarded as a public scare for which no particular individual is responsible, which becomes traditional along fairly constant lines, growing as it goes. _Mana_ was attributed to taboo objects, among which were men in any way abnormal, whether as geniuses or idiots; and such men were expected to exercise their powers for the good of society; hence came into existence the professional medicine man; man originally argued from cause to effect and not vice versa. Priest and magician were originally one; but the former, learning humility in the face of might greater than his own, discarded the spell for the prayer and prostrated himself before a higher power.

_Definition of Magic._--To arrive at a definition of magic we may either follow the a priori road mapped out by Frazer and decline to recognize the distinction actually drawn by various societies between magical and religious practices; or we may ask what magic and corresponding terms actually connote. Frazer's method ignores the fact that magic, like religion, is an institution, i.e. a product of society, not of any single individual; there is no more reason to suppose that a child reared in isolation would develop any kind of magical practices than that it would invent for itself a religion; but if this is the case, the associationist account of magic cannot be true. It is therefore by an analysis of actually existing practices that we must define and limit the term magic. There is, however, a serious difficulty in the way of determining the attitude of non-European peoples towards religio-magical practices; general terms are things of slow growth; it is therefore prima facie improbable that peoples in the lower stages of culture will have anything corresponding to our terms "religion" and "magic"; moreover, if we are right in assuming the fundamental unity of the two, it is by no means certain that they have even the consciousness of any distinction. Even when this consciousness is present, it by no means follows that the whole of the field is mapped out according to our categories; there will be a large indeterminate area which is neither magical nor religious. This suggests that the consciousness of the educated Occidental, for which the spheres of magic and religion in civilized society are sharply defined and contrasted, should be the ultimate arbiter; but here again we are confronted by a difficulty, for, to the educated man, the characteristic of magic is its unreality, and this does not help us to distinguish primitive magic and religion.

We must, it appears, determine the relation of magic to religion by an analysis of the conceptions of those who believe in both; but in so doing we must consider that, like all other institutions, magic has a history. Even if we go back to the 16th century and take the view of magic then held by the average European, it is still a complex idea. When we ask what the most primitive races now on the earth regard as magic, we are applying to their ideas a touchstone made for a very different age and culture; as well might we ask what their theory of knowledge is. If, however, we reverse the process and ask what elements of primitive institutions correspond most nearly to later conceptions of magic, we can at once say that the forbidden and private arts are the prototypes of the magic of later times. Magic is therefore the practice of maleficent arts which involve the use of religio-magical power, with perhaps a secondary idea of the use of private arts, which are to benefit, not the community as a whole, but a single individual. Religion in the lower stages of culture is essentially the tribal creed which all practise and in which all believe; if therefore an individual has a cult of his own, even if otherwise indistinguishable from a public cult, it is for this very reason on a lower plane, and probably corresponds in a degree to what is later regarded as magic. But our information as to the attitude of the uncivilized towards magico-religious rites in general is seldom sufficiently clear; our terminology is influenced by the prepossession of alien observers whose accounts cannot be assumed to correspond to the native view of the case.

_Magico-religious Force._--The mere fact that we cannot draw an exact line between magic and religion suggests that they may have some fundamental feature in common. Both terms have greatly changed their connotation in the course of their existence; _religio_ seems to have meant originally [Greek: katadesmos] (magical spell), and Pliny says that [Greek: mageia] is a deceptive art compounded of medicine, religion and astrology. Among the Greeks, on the other hand, [Greek: mageia] occupied a respectable position. More important is the fact that taboo (q.v.) is both religious and magical. There is a universal tendency to regard as magical the religions of alien races, as well as national religions which have been superseded; Leland tells us that witchcraft in Italy is known as _la vecchia religione_. An examination of the ideas of primitive peoples shows that there is a widely found notion of a power which manifests itself both in religion and magic. Observers have often been content to describe ceremonies without attempting to penetrate to the fundamental ideas which underlie them; this is particularly the case with magic, and only recently have anthropologists realized that in many primitive societies exists a fairly well-defined idea of magico-religious power, to which the generic name of _mana_, from the Melanesian word, has been given.

a. _Mana_ in Melanesia is a force, a being, an action, a quality, or a state; it is transmissible and contagious, and is hence associated with taboo; it may be regarded as material and seen in the form of flames or heard; it is the power which is inherent in certain spirits, among which are included such of the dead as are denominated _tindalos_; it may also be a force inherent in some inanimate object, such as a stone which causes the yams to grow, but it is a spiritual force and does not act mechanically; it is the power of the magician and of the rite; the magic formula is itself _mana_. There seem to be a variety of _manas_, but probably the underlying idea is essentially one, though it does not follow that the Melanesians have arrived at the consciousness of this unity. Hubert and Mauss go even further and regard all force as _mana_; it is a quality added to objects without prejudice to their other qualities, one which supplements without destroying their mechanical action.

b. Similar ideas are found in other areas. (i) The continental Malays have a word _Kramât_ (_hrm_), which means sacred or magical; in Indo-China the Bahnars use the word _deng_; in Madagascar _hasina_ seems to embody in part the same notion. (ii) In Africa the idea is less apparent; perhaps the _ngai_ of the Tanganika tribes comes nearest to the notion of _mana_; on the Congo _nkici_ has a similar but more restricted sense. (iii) In Australia there are two, or perhaps three, kinds of magical power distinguished by the aborigines; all over the continent we find the maleficent power, _boolya_ in West Australia, _arungquiltha_ in the central tribes, _koochie_ in New South Wales; the central tribes have certain objects termed _churinga_, to which magical power (which we may term _churinga_) is attributed; the power of magicians is held to reside in certain stones, called _atnongara_, and in this we must, provisionally at any rate, see a third kind of magical power: _churinga_ is beneficent and seems to originate with the mythical ancestors, whereas _arungquiltha_ is of immediate origin, created by means of incantations or acquired by contact with certain objects; the power of the magicians seems to proceed from the ancestors in like manner. (iv) In America these ideas are widely found; the _orenda_ of the Hurons has been elaborately described by J. N. B. Hewitt; everything in nature, and particularly all animate objects, have their _orenda_; so have gods and spirits; and natural phenomena are the product of the _orenda_ of their spirits. _Orenda_ is distinct from the things to which it is attached; the cry of birds, the rustle of the trees, the soughing of the wind, are expressions of their _orenda_; the voice of the magician is _orenda_, so are the prayer and the spell, and in fact all rites; _orenda_ is above all the power of the medicine man. Among the Algonquins we find the word _manitu_, among the Sioux _wakanda_, _mahowa_, &c., among the Shoshones pokunt; all of which seem to carry, at least in part, the same signification. In Central America, according to Hubert and Mauss, _naual_ or _nagual_ is the corresponding term. (v) Traces of similar ideas may be found in more advanced nations; the Hindu _brahman_ is identified by Hubert and Mauss as the correlative of _mana_; in Greece [Greek: physis] is possibly the echo of a similar idea; but we are yet far from having adequately fathomed the dynamical theories of pre-scientific days.

_Origin of Magic._--The associationist theory of magic sets out with the assumption that primitive man began with general conceptions; he started with certain means at his disposal--the law of sympathy--by which he could, in his own belief, influence the outer world. But it is more probable that he argued from concrete instances and arrived little by little at abstract ideas of magical power.

a. Death and disease are universally regarded by uncivilized people as due to so-called "magic," i.e. to non-natural causes. Primitive man was familiar with the wounds and bruises caused by physical means; he would naturally attribute any pain not so caused to the operation of analogous but invisible weapons, and eventually attempt to discover how he himself could apply on his own behalf the forces thus used against him. Similarly he may have asked himself to what causes were to be attributed the superiority of one man over another; he may have decided the problem by referring it to the superior power of the one, and then inquired in what way this power could in individual instances be increased. In fact we may say generally that man probably explained the already existing and happening by reference to the supernormal, and then endeavoured to guide the supernormal for his own benefit, direct or indirect.

b. Ritual, however (the primitive magico-religious plasm), is negative as well as positive. The corpse is uncanny, and man's dread of the corpse may well have been an early development; this dread, become traditional, with accretions of various sorts, crystallized into _taboo_, the magico-religious prohibition. The notion of the uncanny, once arrived at, may have been exploited positively; psychical abnormalities are present among savage races in very different degrees; but if they were developed at an early stage in human history they doubtless suggested the possibility that man might exploit them for the collective advantage. But it by no means follows that beneficent rites were originally regarded as magical; and it should be noted that the initiator of the so-called magician in Australia is often the god of the tribe or nation. The limits of magic or its correlatives in the lower stages of culture are thus far undecided.