IV. Magic and Religion.
For the sake of simplicity, in the Introduction I included in the term Religion the relation of man to unseen powers. These have always been recognised, and man has everywhere attempted to put himself into sympathetic relation with them. It is, however, preferable to distinguish between Sympathetic Magic and Religion proper, as the former is impersonal and the latter is essentially personal in its operation.
Sympathetic magic is, so to speak, the primitive protoplasm out of which natural science has been evolved, in much the same way as, together with ancestor-worship and totemism, it lies at the base of most religious systems.
1. Sympathetic Magic.
As Mr. J. G. Frazer has pointed out,[141] primitive man has the germ of the modern notion of natural law, or the view of nature as a series of events occurring in an invariable order without the intervention of personal agency. This germ is involved in that sympathetic magic which plays a large part in most systems of superstition.
One of the principles of sympathetic magic, or signature lore as it is sometimes called, is that any effect may be produced by imitating it. If it is wished to kill a person, an image of him is made and then destroyed; and it is believed that through a certain physical sympathy between the person and his image, the man feels the injuries done to the image as if they were done to his own body, and when it is destroyed he must simultaneously perish.
Sometimes the magic sympathy takes effect, not so much through an act as through a supposed resemblance of qualities. Some Bechuana warriors wear the hair of an ox among their own hair and the skin of a frog on their mantle, because a frog is slippery and the ox from which the hair has been taken has no horns and is therefore hard to catch; so the warrior who is provided with these charms believes that he will be as hard to hold as the ox and the frog.
“Thus we see,” continues Mr. Frazer, “that in sympathetic magic one event is supposed to be followed necessarily and invariably by another, without the intervention of any spiritual or personal agency. This is, in fact, the modern conception of physical causation; the conception, indeed, is misapplied, but it is there none the less. Here, then, we have another mode in which primitive man seeks to bend nature to his wishes. There is, perhaps, hardly a savage who does not fancy himself possessed of this power of influencing the course of nature by sympathetic magic.... Of all natural phenomena there are perhaps none which civilised man feels himself more powerless to influence than the rain, the sun, and the wind. Yet all these are commonly supposed by savages to be in some degree under their control.”
Magic practices are, as a rule, primarily a kind of mimetic representation combined with crude symbolism, or the latter alone may be employed, as in the previously mentioned Bechuana custom.
We may regard pictorial representation of magic as probably indicating a higher stage of culture.