[884]. But belief in such agencies would be useless to man unless he also believed that he could somehow determine their actions, and belief in the possibility of determining these appears to have come to him through his theory of natural law. The reasoning of savages on this point has not been recorded by them, but the character of their known procedures leads us to suppose that they have a sense of a law governing the actions of superhuman Powers. Being conscious that they themselves are governed by law, they may naturally in imagination transfer this order of things to the whole invisible world; spirits, gods, and the mana-power, it is assumed, work on lines similar to those followed by man, only with superhuman breadth and force. The task before the originators of society was to discover these modes of procedure in order to act in accordance with them. The discovery was made gradually by observation, and there grew up thus in process of time a science of supernatural procedure which is the basis of the practice of magic.
This science does not necessarily regard the superhuman power as purposely antagonistic to man. Rather its native attitude appears to have been conceived of as one of indifference (as nature is now regarded as careless of man); it was and is thought of as a force to be guarded against and utilized by available means, which, of course, were and are such as are proper to an undeveloped stage of social growth.
[885]. Magic is a science of sequences, but only of sequences supposed not to be explicable from ordinary experience. When the savage puts his hand into the fire or receives a spear-thrust in his body he recognizes visible and familiar causes of pain, and accepts the situation as a fact of life, calling for no further explanation. But when the pain comes from no familiar tangible source he is driven to seek a different sort of source. A cause there must be, and this cause, though superhuman, must follow definite methods—it must have the will to act, and it must have knowledge and skill to carry out its designs. To discover its methods man must observe the processes of nature and imitate them, and must at the same time have in mind familiar human modes of action. The savage scientific explanation of mysterious facts is that superhuman Powers are intellectually akin to human beings; the question of motive in such Powers (except in the case of developed gods) seems not to be considered. The basis of magical procedure is imitation of nature and of man. This principle is supplemented by the conception of the unity of the world, a feeling at first vague, that all things have the same nature and are bound together in a cosmos; animals and men, trees, stones and waters, and fragments of all these are parts of one great whole, and each feels, so to speak, what is done to or by one of the others. This feeling, derived from observation and reflection, is not formulated, but is influential in the construction of the unconscious philosophy of the savage.
[886]. The methods of man's magical procedure follow these principles; they are as various as the sequences that savage man thinks he observes.[1537] Many of them are suggested by natural phenomena. Since rain was observed to fall from the sky, it was held that in time of drought it might be obtained by casting water into the air and letting it fall, or by dipping a stone in water and letting it drip; in general, by any process in which water falls on the ground. The wind might be raised by ejecting air from the mouth (as by whistling). Or ordinary human actions might be imitated: a stick thrown or pointed toward an enemy, it was believed, would cause a spear to enter his body;[1538] a hostile glance of the eye, indicating desire to inflict injury, might carry ill luck.[1539] In such cases the fundamental conceptions are the sympathy that comes from unity and the activity of the pervasive mana. These conceptions are visible in procedures in which action on a part of the human body, or on an image or picture of it, was supposed to reach the body itself. The possession of a piece of the bone, skin, hair, or nail of a man might enable one who had knowledge of superhuman laws and processes to affect the man with sickness or even to cause his death. Contact of objects naturally suggests their unity, but the sympathy between them was not held to be dependent on contact; a man's bone remained a part of him, however far it might be separated from him. A dead body did not lose its virtues; the qualities of a dead warrior might be acquired by eating his flesh. The mysterious unity of things seems to have resided, in savage thought, in the omnipresent mana, a force independent of human limitations. Not that there was a definite theory on the subject, but something of this sort seems to be assumed in the ideas and usages of many low tribes.[1540]
On the other hand, a magical effect may be set aside by magic. A sick man, believing his sickness to be the work of a magician (the usual savage theory of the cause of bodily ills), sends for another magician to counteract the evil work; and a magician, failing to cure his patient, ascribes his failure to the machinations of a powerful rival. In all such cases the theory and the methods are the same; the magic that cures is not different in principle (though it may differ in details) from the magic that kills.
[887]. The facts observed by practicers of magic probably contributed to the collections of material that furnished the starting-point for the scientific study of physical phenomena. The interest in the facts arose at first simply from their relation to magical procedure—it was from them that certain laws of supernatural action were learned, and men thus got control of this action. Magic is essentially a directive or coercive procedure and differs in this respect from fully formed religion, which is essentially submissive and obedient.
[888]. It is true that coercion of divine beings appears in well-developed religions. A Babylonian goddess (Nana) was carried off by the Elamites to their land that she might there do duty as divine protector; restored to her proper home 1635 years later, she resumed her old functions.[1541] The Egyptians are said by Plutarch to have slain their divine animals if these failed to avert or remove calamity.[1542] Prometheus and certain Homeric heroes are victorious over gods. In some savage tribes divine kings are put to death if they fail to do what is expected of them. A god was sometimes chained or confined in his temple to prevent his voluntary or constrained departure. A recusant deity was sometimes taunted or insulted by his disappointed worshipers.[1543] There is, however, a difference between the two sets of coercive acts. The force used by developed religion is physical, that employed in magic is psychological and logical. When a god is chained or carried off, it is only his body that is controlled—he is left to his own thoughts, or it is assumed that he will be friendly to his enforced locus. Magic brings the supernatural Power under the dominion of law against which his nature is powerless. Religion, even when it employs force, recognizes the protective function of the deity; magic is without such acknowledgment, without emotion or worship. While it has, on one side, a profounder conception of cosmic force than appears in early religion, it is, on the social side, vastly inferior to the latter, to which it has necessarily yielded in the course of human progress. Nevertheless, if religion in the broadest sense includes all means of bringing man into helpful relations with the supernatural world, then magic is a form of religion.
[889]. The much-discussed question whether magic was the earliest form of religion is not susceptible of a definite answer for the reason that we have no account of man's earliest conceptions of his relations with the world of invisible forces. There is some reason to hold, as is remarked above,[1544] that in the lowest stage of life known to us men were logically indifferent spectators of the world, but in general stood in awe of phenomena, so that fear was their prevailing feeling. It may be surmised that this feeling would engender a sense of antagonism to such superhuman Powers as came to be conceived of, on which would naturally follow a desire to get control of them. Yet it is impossible to say at what stage of social development the necessity would be felt of establishing friendly relations with the Powers. The two lines of effort may have begun and gone on side by side, the two springing from the same utilitarian impulse, but each independent of the other—a coexistence that actually appears in many tribes; finally the coercive effort tends to yield to the kindly influences of organized society. There is no ground for calling magic a "disease of religion." The presumption, from the general law of progress, is that, when there is a chronological difference, the socially lower precedes the socially higher. Religion and magic come to be mutually antagonistic, except in cases where religious authorities adopt magical procedures, giving them a theistic and socially useful coloring. Magic has been a natural, if not a necessary, step in the religious organization of society.[1545]
[890]. Since religion and magic have in common the purpose to establish relations with extrahuman Powers the dividing line between the two is in some cases not easily fixed—the same procedure may be held to belong in the one category or the other, according as it invokes or does not invoke the aid of a god in friendly and submissive fashion. We may thus be carried back to a time when a sharp distinction between the two did not exist, as there was a time when such a distinction is not visible between "gods" (friendly divine members of the human community) and "demons" (unfriendly outside beings), both classes being regarded simply as agents affecting human life. Even when some fairly good form of organization has been reached it is often hard to say to which class a particular figure belongs. The Hawaiian Pele (the "goddess" of the great and dangerous volcano) is often vindictive, and then differs little or not at all from a demon that sends sickness and death.[1546] The Babylonians gave the same name (shedu) to a class of demons proper and to the divine or half-divine winged beings (to which, apparently, the Hebrew cherubs are allied) that guarded the entrances to temples, sacred gardens, and palaces.[1547] The Navaho beings called yei and anaye seem to hover on the border line between the divine and the demonic classes.[1548] The difference between the two seems to be merely that the one class (the gods) has been adopted (for reasons not originally ethical) into the human community, while the other has not received such adoption.[1549] In such a case a given figure may easily pass from one class into the other. According to the Thompson River folk-lore the sun was once a cannibal but became beneficent.[1550] The early Christians converted the Græco-Roman gods (daimonia) into "demons."[1551] There being this fluid relation between supernatural beings, it is not strange that such a relation should exist between procedures intended to act on them.[1552]
[891]. Magic, as we have seen, is based on the observation of sequences, and before the development of reflection and the acquisition of a knowledge of natural law the disposition of human beings is to regard all sequences as exhibiting the relation of cause and effect. A typical example is that of the anchor driven ashore, a piece of which was broken off by a man who died soon after; the conclusion was that the anchor caused his death and therefore was divine, and accordingly it received religious worship.[1553] In the course of ages thousands of such sequences must have been observed, and these, handed down from one generation to another, would shape themselves into a handbook of magic. They would, however, be constantly reëxamined and sifted under the guidance of wider experience and a better acquaintance with natural causes, and this process, carried on by experts, would give rise to the science of magic as we find it among lower tribes.