Part 7

In a powerful criticism of this theory Messrs Hubert and Mauss, two French anthropologists, have pointed {71} out that Professor Frazer has omitted one essential item. The effect of a magical rite is not attained merely by sympathy. All magic is not sympathetic magic, whether that sympathy be expressed by the Law of Similarity or the Law of Contact. Moreover, even in sympathetic magic the sympathetic formula is insufficient to account for the facts. Sympathy is only the means by which the magical force passes from the magician to the object at which it is aimed; it is not the magical force itself. That still remains to be explained. It cannot be wholly explained by the properties attributed to the materials used in the magical rite, and that for three reasons. In the first place, the notion of property is normally not the only one present. The employment of substances having magical properties is ritually conditioned. They must be collected according to rule, at certain times, in certain places, with certain means, and after certain ritual preparations. When collected, they must be employed according to certain rules and with the accompaniment of rites, often exceedingly elaborate, which permit the utilization of their qualities. In the second place, the magical property is not conceived as naturally, absolutely, and specifically inherent in the thing to which it is attached, but always as relatively extrinsic and conferred. Sometimes it is conferred by a rite. At other times it is explained by a myth; and in this case it is clearly regarded as accidental and acquired. It often resides in secondary characters, such as form, colour, rarity, and so forth. In the third place, the notion of magical property suffices so little that it is always confounded with a very generalized idea of force and nature. The idea of the effect to be produced may indeed be precise; but that of the special qualities of the substance used to produce it, and their immediate action, is always obscure. {72} In fact, the idea of things having undefined virtues is always prominent in magic. Salt, blood, saliva, coral, iron, crystals, precious metals, the mountain ash, the birch, the sacred fig-tree, camphor, incense, tobacco are among the many objects which embody general magical powers, capable of all sorts of applications. Corresponding with this is the extreme vagueness of the designations applied to magical properties, such as divine, sacred, mysterious, lucky, unlucky, and equivalent expressions. The notion of property passes over easily into power and spirit. Property and power are inseparable terms; property and spirit are often confounded. The virtues or properties of a thing often belong to it as the abode of a spirit. Spirits are indeed often the agents of magic. It is hardly too much to say that there is no magical rite in which their presence is not in some degree possible, though not expressly mentioned. Magic works in a special atmosphere, if not in the world of demons, at least in conditions in which their presence is possible. Beyond doubt, one of the essential characteristics of magical causality is that it is spiritual. Yet the idea of spiritual personalities ill represents the general anonymous forces which constitute the power of magicians. It gives no account of the virtue of words or gestures, the power of a look or of the intention, the influence or the mode of action of a rite. It does not explain why the magical rite controls and directs spiritual existences, any more than the sympathetic formula explains why the rite acts directly on the object.[72.1]

{73}

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; {74} 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 {75} 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.

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 by {76} religion, 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. {77} 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 of _arungquiltha_, which may be rendered _evil 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 of _arungquiltha_. 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 a _Kurdaitcha_ party, 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.[77.1] In Melanesia, as we have seen, all religion consists in getting _mana_ for oneself, not for the benefit of others; though doubtless the _mana_, when obtained, is often used for the advantage of the community.[77.2] Often it is not. “A man will commonly have his _keramo_, a _tindalo_ [a ghost that is worshipped] of killing, who will help him in fighting or in slaying his private enemy.” The _tindalo_, 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, the _tindalo_ gets as his share of the spoil the ghost of the deceased, and is invoked to give _mana_ in return.[77.3]

The man who, in Europe or elsewhere, makes use of {78} spells 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.”[78.1] In 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.[78.2] This 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.[78.3] At 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 is {79} true, 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.[79.1] Secrecy 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’ saands An’ barren lands An’ ill men’s hands Keep’s free. Weel oot, weel in, Wi’ a gueede shot.”

{80}

“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.”[80.1] These 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,”[80.2] he 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 personified _mana_. A god can only be anthropomorphic; he is the psycho-physical objectivation of man in phenomena.[80.3] This brings Professor {81} Doutté much nearer to Dr Frazer’s position, and might form the basis of an _eirenicon_ between 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, belong {82} to the same department of human experience.… Together they belong to the supernormal world, the _x_-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.”[82.1] Presumably 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.”[82.2] Coming 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 the {83} extraordinary 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 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.