§ 3. The Beginnings of Magic
The quest of origins is fascinating, because, if successful, it will help us to frame that outline of the history of the world which the philosophic mind regards as a necessary of life. To discuss the beginnings of Magic must necessarily be, in some measure, a speculative undertaking; because the facts are lost. If Magic was practised in the Aurignacian culture (say) 20,000 years ago, how can we get to the back of it? But speculation is not guess-work, if we always keep in view such facts as we have; if we are careful to give notice whenever the facts fail us; if we guide ourselves by scientific principles; and if we make no assumptions merely to suit our case, but only such as are generally admitted in all departments. For example:
(1) We may reasonably assume that the simplest magical beliefs and practices are of the earliest type: and nothing can be simpler than the belief in charms, rites and spells. It is, indeed, difficult to find many of these practices—though some can be produced—in their simplest forms in our records of backward peoples; partly because they have not been enough observed; partly because Magic is apt everywhere to become saturated with Animism; partly because charms, rites and spells are generally, for greater efficacy, compounded with one another. But these considerations do not affect the simplicity of the idea involved in the magical beliefs; which is merely this, that a certain object by its presence, or that an action, or an utterance, by merely entering into the course of events, will serve our purpose. A bare uniformity of connexion—if A, then B—in accordance with the familiar ongoings of Nature and our common activities, is all that is assumed. Many kinds of obstacles stop an arrow or a dart; carrion collects the vultures: so a patterned comb in one’s hair stops the demon of disease; a patterned quiver, or a certain song, brings the monkeys down from the tree-tops.[102] A spell assumes merely that certain objects, or animals, or spirits, must always comply with a wish or command expressed in words, just as another human being often does. It is their supposed uniform coerciveness that makes the words magical. If any form of words ever seems to have been successful, it must be repeated; because to have the same effect the action must be the same. Immersed in an indefinite mass of experiences, the postulate that we call “cause and effect” (unformulated, of course) underlies every action, and therefore underlies Magic; it is the ground of all expectation and of all confidence.
(2) The types of Magic that are the most prevalent are probably the earliest; and these are charms, rites and spells. They are found not only amongst savages, but the world over: even in civilised countries most of the uneducated, many of the half-educated, and not a few of those who have “finished their education,” employ them; whereas more complicated magical practices, except such as have been taken up into religious celebrations, are apt to fall into desuetude. What is universal must be adapted to very simple conditions of existence; these beliefs, therefore, to mental wants and proclivities that are probably primitive; and what conditions can be more simple, or more primitive, or more universal than ignorance of our fate and eagerness to clutch at anything that may give us confidence.
And not only are charms, rites and spells in all ages and everywhere employed in their simplest forms; but analysis of the most elaborate ritual and of nominally animistic practices will discover the same beliefs at the bottom of them. The idea of the amulet or the talisman is found in fetiches, beads, praying-wheels, and equally in a long mimetic dance or a passion-play; whose central purpose always is to avert some evil or to secure some good—success in hunting, or war, or agriculture. Similarly, the spell is involved in all rites, so far as verbal formulæ are used in them; and in all curses or prayers, so far as their efficacy depends upon a sound form of words.
The persistence of magical beliefs amongst civilised people is, in some measure, due to tradition; though the tradition could not continue effective if there were not in every generation a predisposition to accept it; and how far it is due to tradition, how far to a spontaneous proclivity, in any one who is inclined to believe in charms, rites and spells, he himself must judge as best he can. Superstition having been at one time extremely useful socially, there is some presumption that tribes addicted to it (within limits) had an advantage, and that the disposition became hereditary. It is a recent acquisition compared with the love of climbing; but once ingrained, it must remain till disutility breeds it out. Meanwhile, it is a stain on the human soul. So much of one’s early life is always forgotten that no one can be sure that he was not inoculated with such notions in childhood; especially when we consider that religious practices, taught before they can be well understood, must often wear a magical habit to a child; and that medicines, whose operations nobody used to understand, were on the same foot with Magic. For my own part, bating the last considerations, I cannot remember ever to have heard in childhood any sort of Magic spoken of except with amusement; yet magical beliefs have always haunted me. With Animism it was otherwise. When six or seven years old, I was told by a nursemaid—a convinced adherent of one of the many little sects that have ramified out of Wesleyanism in Cornwall—the most appalling ghost-stories; and these stories, exciting no doubt an ancient disposition, and reinforced by a visualising faculty that nightly peopled the darkness with innumerable spectres, entirely overpowered the teachings of those whom there was better reason to trust, that ghosts are a superstition from which true religion has for ever set us free. The effects lasted into middle age. Andrew Lang said of ghosts that “he did not believe, but he trembled”; and that precisely describes my own state of mind for many years. Now, as to Magic, my impression is that had it been suggested to me in a serious way, and not merely by casual allusions to “luck,” the experience would have stuck in my memory. The first time that I can remember practising rites, I was between ten and eleven years old, living at a small boarding-school. To keep off a dreaded event, I used to go every morning to the pump, fill my mouth with water and spurt it out in a violent stream—three times. This went on for some weeks. To the best of my recollection, the impulse was spontaneous, and I cannot remember why the particular rite was adopted: to spout water out of the mouth may have been symbolic of a pushing away of what was feared; but I do not think I was conscious of that meaning. Nothing further of the kind recurs to me until about the age of fifteen, when, at another school, the master-passion of my life was cricket; and I always practised some rite before going on the field, and carried a charm in my pocket; but I cannot recall what they were. At present, a day rarely passes without my experiencing some impulse to practise Magic. In lighting my first pipe in the morning (for example), if I remember how I lit it, where I struck the match, etc., yesterday, and if no misfortune has happened since, I feel an unmistakable impulse to “light up” again in the same way. No reason is distinctly present to me for acting so, and therefore it is hazardous to analyse the attitude; but it is not merely incipient habit: to the best of my judgment it is this, that such a way of lighting my pipe was one amongst the antecedents of a quiet time, and that it will be well to reinstate as many of them as possible. It is more comfortable to do it than to alter it: one feels more confident.
Inquiry amongst my friends shows that some have similar experiences, and others (both men and women) have not. A questionnaire on such a point might be useful; but difficult to arrange without giving suggestion or exciting bias.[103]
(3) There are causes originating the belief in charms, rites and spells so simple that nothing could be more natural to the primitive human mind. What is more universally powerful in producing belief in the connexion of events, and consequent expectancy of repetition, than an interesting coincidence? If, says Sir E. F. im Thurn,[104] a Carib sees a rock in any way abnormal or curious, and if shortly afterwards any evil happens to him, he regards rock and evil as cause and effect, and perceives in the rock a spirit. This is animistic; but the same tendency to be impressed by coincidence underlies Magic. For example: A hunting party of Esquimos met with no game. One of them went back to the sledges and got the ham-bone of a dog to eat. Returning with this in his hand, he met and killed a seal. Ever afterwards he carried a ham-bone in his hand when hunting.[105] The ham-bone had become a talisman. Such a mental state as the Esquimo’s used to be ascribed to the association of ideas; but it is better to consider it as an empirical judgment. Other circumstances of the event may have been associated in his mind; but as to the ham-bone and the kill, he thinks of them together, and judges that they are connected. Then, having judged that the ham-bone influenced the kill, he carries it with him in future in order to repeat the conditions of success.
We may perhaps discern the moment when Magic first fastened upon the human mind by considering how the use of weapons and snares by the primitive hunter impaired his sense of the mechanical continuity of the work. In a struggle with prey body to body, success or failure was thoroughly understood; but with the use of weapons and snares it became conditional upon the quality of these aids and upon his skill with them: more and more conditional as the number of steps increased between the first preparation and the event; at any one of which unforeseen occurrences might frustrate his plans. Hence an irresistible desire to strengthen and insure every step of his task; and to gratify this desire Magic arose.
That Magic should depend upon the assumption that “things connected in thought are connected in fact” seems unintelligible, until we consider that the thought in which they are connected is a judgment concerning the facts. But how is it possible to judge so foolishly? Absurd association is intelligible; it cannot be helped; but judgment is not a passive process. Well: a logician might interpret the case as a fallacy in applying the inductive canons: the Esquimo had two instances: (a) no ham-bone, no seal; (b) ham-bone, seal: or, again, into the circumstances of his expedition he introduced a ham-bone, and the seal followed. Therefore, the carrying of a ham-bone was the cause of getting a seal. He had not read Mill, and did not know what precautions should be taken before adopting such conclusions. The mind must have begun in this way; and after many thousands of years, the opportunities of error in empirical judgment began to be appreciated, and the canons were formulated. The experience of every man at every stage of life, personal or social (probably evoking an inherited disposition), continually impresses him with the belief in some connexion of antecedent and consequent, that each event arises out of others. But what it is in the antecedent that determines the event can never, in practical affairs, be exactly known. In definite cases, where method is applicable, we may analyse the consequent into the tendencies of forces in amount and direction; or we may sometimes reproduce it by an experiment exactly controlled. But where these resources fail us, as they often do in practical affairs, we are little confident of grasping all, or even the chief conditions of any event that interests us. The savage knows nothing of method, and, therefore, feels less distrust. He learns something of the conditions of success in hunting; this is biologically necessary to him as it is to a tiger; only those survive that learn them. He knows that he must have weapons as efficient as possible, must go to the habitat of his prey, must not be heard, or seen, or smelt. But with all precautions he sometimes fails; therefore there must be some other condition which he does not understand. Hence anything observed, or any word or action, that happens to be followed by success, may have been a means to that success.