The indirectness of a rite makes it more mysterious and magical, and that is a recommendation. Moreover, its dramatic character gives an imaginative satisfaction, which must suffice to initiate such pantomime again and again. Amongst ourselves many people are prone to dramatise every situation of their lives; to act in imagination their loves, their revenges, their opportunities of self-display, and to derive satisfaction from such imaginations even to the weakening of their will—satisfaction without effort or danger. But although this impulse may initiate pantomimic magic, it can hardly maintain it in the absence of any deeper satisfaction. The belief in its efficacy, again, once established, the effect of suggestion upon a victim of black Magic (who by some means is acquainted with what has been done against him) may have consequences that seem to verify the rites; but this can only happen when a belief in the efficacy of such practices already prevails. The power of suggestion depends upon the belief; it cannot create the belief. We must fall back upon coincidence. If, indeed, immediate and complete coincidence were requisite, if, when one practised on an enemy’s life, nothing less than his speedy death would do, coincidences might be too rare to give the requisite confirmation. But if some less injury will be acceptable, and if it need not follow immediately; if a delay of not merely two or three days, but two or three months will bring the event within the limits of satisfaction; and if the degree of injury may vary from death to a bad fall, or some failure in hunting on the victim’s part, or a quarrel with his wife; if even (as often happens) a misfortune to any one of his family may suffice—the confirmatory coincidences will be tolerably frequent. There must, of course, be many disappointments; but these count for little, because the particular practice is supported by a general belief in Magic; because men desire to believe and are afraid to disbelieve; because failures are explained by some error in performing the rites, or by the counteraction of superior Magic, or by the intervention of hostile spirits.
Special reasons for practising and believing in indirect operations of black Magic are their greater secrecy and, therefore, greater safety, and greater gratification of the love of cunning: which last (I think) explains much of the elaboration that marks these performances.
In the development of indirect Magic, very many of its practices seem to involve one or other of the assumptions often called the principles of sympathetic Magic, namely, Mimesis and Participation: (1) that to operate upon a likeness or representation, or by analogy, affects the person, or object, or process imitated or represented as if it were directly assailed; and (2) that a part or appurtenance of any one may, in any magical undertaking, be substituted for the whole. Among savages these principles (as has already been said) are only latent forms of procedure, tacitly assumed, not formulated, and cannot have been the source of the practices, but must gradually have been established by them; but when notions of scientific arrangement came into vogue, they were discovered and explicitly stated by the early physicians and alchemists, in whose thoughts Magic and Science were not clearly differentiated.
It has been supposed that these principles are natural consequences of the laws of the association (or reproduction) of ideas. According to the “law of similarity,” an idea of one thing often makes us think of another that resembles it: hence the thought of an enemy is supposed to make me think of an image of him, or the sight of his image makes me think of him. According to the law “of contiguity,” any two things having been seen or thought of together, thereafter the thought or sight of one of them makes me think of the other: hence the thought of an enemy makes me think of his footprint, or his footprint reminds me of him. Possibly. But must there not have been a long preparation of ideas before the thought of an enemy awakens in me these particular associations rather than many others? And if they should occur to me, how do the laws of association explain my astonishing belief that to put his image in the fire, or to thrust a thorn into his footprint, or to dig it up, carry it home and put it in the oven, will make him lame or afflict him with some wasting disease? There must be some system of ideas to determine these particular judgments.
Some, again, suppose that savages cannot distinguish similarity from identity, part from whole; so that an image appears to them to be in earnest the same thing as a man, or his nail-parings the same as himself. Yet it is certain that in their work-a-day life they do make these distinctions, and that otherwise they could not get on at all. If, then, in certain cases, and in Magic (which is all that concerns us now), they act or speak as if unable to draw such distinctions, it must be from an acquired incapacity in that connection; just as in some cases they suffer from an acquired incapacity to recognise that their beliefs are contradicted by experience; that is to say, some fixed idea or dissociation prevents them from comparing the facts; though sometimes it may be merely that customary forms of speech hinder the expression of distinctions that really exist among their ideas.
It has been suggested that the supposed force of mimetic Magic rests upon the belief that as a man’s shadow or reflection implies his presence, so does his image. And we shall see that, in some cases, this explanation is not far from the mark, though it cannot serve for all cases; inasmuch as the image operated upon in any rite need not be a likeness (of course it never is)—a stick will serve, if declared to stand for the victim; and, moreover, his presence is not needed in carrying out rites that act at a distance. What truth there is in this view has been better expressed by Prof. Yrjö Hirn:[143] namely, that a unity or solidarity exists between all persons and things that stand to one another in a relationship of contact or similarity, on account of a certain magical virtue; and that this solidarity is not destroyed by any breach of physical continuity. To take away a man’s cloak, or a lock of his hair, or a remnant of his food, does not interrupt the magical continuity which contact has established with the man: something of him, his virtue, remains with it. And in the same way an image of him contains something of his virtue; for to the immature mind, images or pictures are nothing but radiations or decortications of the thing itself, an efflux, like the Epicurean εἴδωλα. Hence the bones of a saint and his picture convey his virtue to a devotee by the same process: both are conductors of some emanation from himself. There is much truth in this theory.
When Animism is called in to explain Magic, this virtue or emanation of a man is apt to be explained as his soul, or part of it. A savage dislikes being photographed, lest you should take away his soul. M. Jounod says the Bantu regard a photograph as “an unsheathing of soul”;[144] Mr. Dorsey says no Dakota would have his portrait taken lest one of his souls [out of four] should remain in the picture, instead of going after death to spirit-land;[145] Mr. Carl Lumholtz says the Papagoes refused to be photographed, lest part of themselves should be taken away, and remain behind after death.[146] And it is a trick with some sorcerers to keep a looking-glass, in which they pretend to catch the souls of their dupes; and, of course, shadows and reflections are frequently confounded with the soul. So if the use of an image in Magic does not imply the presence of the man himself, generally it does imply the presence of a very important part of him. And this explanation is strengthened by an apparent exception; for some Malays, when they make an image of an enemy to compass his destruction, think it necessary before operating to coax his soul into it by a potent spell.
“Hither, Soul, come hither!
Hither, little one, come hither!
Hither, bird, come hither!
Hither, filmy one, come hither!”[147]
Must we not infer that these Malays have in some way lost the common belief, and so are put to this extra trouble?
If it be asked how this account of the matter can justify the use of a stick or stone instead of a man’s image, merely assigning it to represent him, the reply (I think) is that the stick is a symbol. Since images are never much like the man, and may be unlike in all degrees, the stick is a sort of limiting case. A symbol is always the remainder, or reminder, of something that once had intrinsic value, as an image, shadow, or reflection has by being or participating in the man’s soul. Besides, it is perhaps a tacit assumption of Magic (as in other departments of life—including Philosophy), “that whatever for one’s purpose it is necessary to assume, is real or true”: the situation demands it.