I. MAGIC AND PRIMITIVE MENTALITY
Few words of African origin have survived and found a permanent place in the popular speech of the English West Indies. One of these is “obeah.” Of this word, J. Graham Cruickshank, in a little pamphlet entitled Black Talk says:
Obeah—which is Negro witchcraft, and whose worst aspect was the poisonous idea put into the mind of the subject—has gone under to a great extent. Extraordinary cases of it crop up now and again in the newspapers. It is the most difficult of all anthropological data on which to “draw” the old Negro. Burton gives an Old Calabar proverb: “Ubio nkpo ono onya” (They plant Obeah for him) and adds this note: “‘Ubio’ means any medicine or charm put in the ground to cause sickness or death. It is manifestly the origin of the West Indian ‘obeah.’ We shall be the less surprised to hear that the word has traveled so far when told by Clarkson, in his History of the Slave Trade, that when the traffic was a legitimate branch of commerce as many slaves were annually exported from Bonny and the Old Calabar River as from all the rest of the West African Coast.”[[63]]
Obeah is Negro magic. The paper which follows was suggested by observation on Negro magic during a recent visit to the English Islands in the Caribbean.
During the past year two very important books have been published, in English, dealing with the subject of magic. The first is a translation of Lévy-Bruhl’s La Mentalité Primitive, and the other is Lynn Thorndyke’s A History of Magic and Experimental Science during the First Thirteen Centuries of the Christian Era.
In venturing to include two volumes so different in content and point of view in the same general category, I have justified myself by adopting Thorndyke’s broad definition, which includes under “magic” “all occult arts and sciences, superstition and folklore.”
Lévy-Bruhl’s book is an attempt, from a wide survey of anthropological literature, to define a mode of thought characteristic of primitive peoples.
Thorndyke, on the other hand, is interested mainly, as the title of his volume indicates, in the beginnings of empirical science. The points of view are different, but the subject matter is the same, namely, magical beliefs and practices, particularly in so far as they reflect and embody a specific type of thought.
Lévy-Bruhl has collected, mainly from the writings of missionaries and travelers, an imposing number of widely scattered observations. These have been classified and interpreted in a way that is intended to demonstrate that the mental life and habits of thought of primitive peoples differ fundamentally from those of civilized man.
Thorndyke, on the other hand, has described the circumstances under which, during the first thirteen centuries of our era, the forerunners of modern science were gradually discarding magical practices in favor of scientific experiment.
There is, of course, no historical connection between the culture of Europe in the thirteenth century and that of present-day savages, although the magical beliefs and practices of both are surprisingly similar and in many cases identical, a fact which is intelligible enough when we reflect that magic is a very ancient, widespread, characteristically human phenomenon, and that science is a very recent, exceptional, and possibly fortuitous manifestation of social life.
Lévy-Bruhl described the intelligence and habits of thought characteristic of savage peoples as a type of mentality. The civilized man has another and a different mentality. “Mentality,” used in this way, is an expression the precise significance of which is not at once clear. We use the expression “psychology” in a similar but somewhat different way when we say, for example, that the rural and urban populations “have a different ‘psychology,’” or that such and such a one has the “psychology” of his class—meaning that a given individual or the group will interpret an event or respond to a situation in a characteristic manner. But “mentality,” as ordinarily used, seems to refer to the form, rather than to the content, of thought. We frequently speak of the type or grade of mentality of an individual, or of a group. We would not, however, qualify the word “psychology” in any such way. We would not, for example, speak of the grade or degree of the bourgeoisie, or the proletarian “psychology.” The things are incommensurable and “psychology,” in this sense, is a character but not a quantity.
The term “mentality,” however, as Lévy-Bruhl uses it, seems to include both meanings. On the whole, however, “primitive mentality” is used here to indicate the form in which primitive peoples are predisposed to frame their thoughts. The ground pattern of primitive thought is, as Lévy-Bruhl expresses it, “pre-logical.”
As distinguished from Europeans and from some other peoples somewhat less sophisticated than ourselves, the primitive mind “manifests,” he says, “a decided distaste for reasoning and for what logicians call the discursive operations of thought. This distaste for rational thought does not arise out of any radical incapacity or any inherent defect in their understanding,” but is simply a method—one might almost say a tradition—prevalent among savage and simple-minded people of interpreting as wilful acts the incidents, accidents, and unsuspected changes of the world about them.
What is this pre-logical form of thought which characterizes the mentality of primitive people? Lévy-Bruhl describes it as “participation.” The primitive mind does not know things as we do, in a detached objective way. The uncivilized man enters, so to speak, into the world about him and interprets plants, animals, the changing seasons, and the weather in terms of his own impulses and conscious purposes. It is not that he is lacking in observation, but he has no mental patterns in which to think and describe the shifts and changes of the external world, except those offered by the mutations of his own inner life. His blunders of interpretation are due to what has been described as the “pathetic fallacy,” the mistake of attributing to other persons, in this case, to physical nature and to things alive and dead, the sentiments and the motives which they inspire in him. As his response to anything sudden and strange is more likely to be one of fear than of any other emotion, he interprets the strange and unfamiliar as menacing and malicious. To the civilized observer it seems as if the savage lived in a world peopled with devils.
One difference between the savage and the civilized man is that the savage is mainly concerned with incidents and accidents, the historical, rather than scientific, aspects of life. He is so actively engaged in warding off present evil and meeting his immediate needs that he has neither time nor inclination to observe routine. It is the discovery and explanation of this routine that enables natural science to predict future consequences of present action and so enable us to prepare today for the needs of tomorrow. It is the discovery and explanation, in terms of cause and effect, of this routine that constitutes, in the sense in which Lévy-Bruhl uses the term, rational thought.
What the author of primitive mentality means by “participation” is familiar enough, though the expression itself is unusual as description of a form of thought. Human beings may be said to know one another immediately and intuitively by “participation.” Knowledge of this kind is dependent, however, upon the ability of human beings to enter imaginatively into one another’s minds and to interpret overt acts in terms of intentions and purposes. What Lévy-Bruhl’s statement amounts to, then, is that savage people think, as poets have always done, in terms of wills rather than forces. The universe is a society of wilful personalities, not an irrefragable chain of cause and effect. For the savage, there are events, but neither hypotheses nor facts, since facts, in the strict sense of the word, are results of criticism and reflection and presuppose an amount of detachment that primitive man does not seem to possess. Because he thinks of his world as will rather than force, primitive man seeks to deal with it in terms of magic rather than of mechanism.