He for whom the world is full of personal beings and hardly anything else—a universe of objects interpreted in the terms of conscious personality and projected on a background of the Unknown with all its possibilities—he for whom each of those objects, human and non-human, living and not-living, is invested in a greater or less degree with orenda, will naturally and instinctively on the one hand avail himself of his own orenda, and on the other hand will dread and endeavour to turn to account the orenda of others. But this very endeavour to turn others’ orenda to account is an exercise by prayer or compulsion of his own. I can see no satisfactory evidence that early man consciously entertained any great faith in the order and uniformity of nature. Automatically, no doubt, he assumed that night would follow day and day night, that the winter would follow the summer or the dry season the wet, that the trees would blossom in the spring or after the rains set in, as he had been accustomed to see them. But that was not the result of reflection; it was not an act of faith. So things had always been, and he could not conceive any different course. It was not part of his mental furniture; it was no acquisition of reasoning. It was the very framework of his mind. When he began to reflect he referred these phenomena to the same cause to which he referred his own acts, and the more uncertain and capricious acts of other living beings—to personal will and orenda. Even if he had risen to the large conception of the Siouan wakonda, that impersonal force must, as we have seen, clothe itself with personality in order to operate. Immediately and for practical purposes the personal will and orenda of himself or some other object were the fount of all causation. They impelled and directed all actions, all means, and were responsible for all effects. If he took aim at his enemy and flung his spear, or whatever primitive weapon served the same purpose; if it hit the man, and he fell; he might witness the result, but the mere mechanical causation, however inevitable in its action, would be the last thing he would think about. Conscious of his own will, of his own effort, of the words, perhaps, with which he had accompanied and directed the spear, he would attribute the result to such causes as these. His own orenda felt in his passion, his will, his effort, and displayed in his acts and words, the orenda of the spear, either inherent in itself, conceived as a personal being, or conferred by its maker, and manifested in the keenness of its point, the precision and the force with which it flies to its work and inflicts the deadly wound—these would be to him the true causes of his enemy’s fall. His orenda is mightier than his enemy’s and overcomes it. So, when the enemy is absent and he cannot visibly reach him, his orenda may yet suffice to accomplish the desired injury. By a psychological process which Dr Marett has subtly analysed,[91.1] he is led to perform in pantomime all the acts of a murder in the absence of the victim, either silently, or to the accompaniment of a chant, or of spoken words. His foe, who is as convinced as himself of the power of such a performance, if it come to his knowledge, falls a victim to the terror it inspires, unless he can call in the aid of some other person, objective or imaginary, whose orenda is more powerful still. Nor would the belief lack vindication even in the case of the victim’s ignorance; for any chance misfortune or sickness would be put down to a hostile orenda; and if he did escape, it would be due to his own superior orenda.
Thus what we generally call magic or witchcraft is primarily an application of orenda. By his orenda a man bewitches his enemy (or, for a consideration, someone else’s enemy), causes rain or sunshine, raises and protects the crops, gains success in hunting, divines the cause of sickness and cures it, raises the dead, spells out the future. His incantations, his gestures, his apparatus—whether of plants, stones, animal products, magical drawings, or whatever else it may be—would be of no avail without this. In Central Australia the Arunta magician arms his “pointing bone” with arungquiltha. In Central Africa the Murundi impregnates his magical implements with evil influence by means of his imprecations, his incantations, and his evocation of spirits. That is, he puts into them his orenda or the mana of the spirits: until then they are absolutely powerless and indifferent.[92.1] This influence, this orenda, mana, or arungquiltha, is the nexus—the copula, as it has been called—which links the subject, the magician, to the object, the result.
But man is not the only being who possesses orenda. The orenda of his quarry sometimes foils his own. The cicada chirping in the fields ripens the maize for the Iroquois; the orenda of the rabbit controls the snow and fixes the depth to which it must fall. The awful mountain, the treacherous sea, those mighty beings who command the winds, who send forth the storm, who rule in the darkness and mystery of the forest, possess an orenda surpassing man’s. It is useless to pit his orenda against theirs. Therefore he must adopt a different course. He must lay down his orenda and submit it to theirs. This is the literal meaning of the Iroquoian phrase which signifies in modern usage “He habitually prays.”[92.2] He must take such a course as he would to obtain assistance from a human being (say, a powerful chief), or to conciliate an enemy. By gift, by abasement, by abstinence, by self-torture, by cajolery he must win this powerful orenda to his side. Of these efforts abstinence and abasement are negative forms of propitiation. They are perhaps the earliest forms. If our reports be complete (on which we may have our doubts), abstinence is the only form used among the Andaman Islanders, where belief is said to outrun active worship.[93.1] In any case a taboo for propitiatory purposes is very early and very persistent. Not without insight does the poet tell us that Caliban
“Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month
One little mess of whelks, so he may ’scape.”
And the modern European has still his Lent, and his Ember Days and Fridays throughout the year. Such abstinence is the laying down and submission of the orenda to those of mightier beings. On the other hand, gift, prayer, cajolery are, properly speaking, an active exercise of orenda. The relation of spell and incantation to prayer has already been alluded to. They are often indistinguishable: they shade into one another by the finest gradations. Gifts are not mere self-deprivation. They must be accompanied by rites more or less elaborate, to render them acceptable to the lofty beings for whom they are intended. Or they are part of a bargain; they are the performance on the suppliant’s side which demands a corresponding return on the side of the god. More than one comparatively civilized people has held that sacrifices properly performed not merely incline but compel the gods to grant what their worshipper desires. Gesture-language plays a large part in savage life. A ceremony such as those familiar to us in sympathetic magic—to take only one instance, the sticking of pins into a waxen figure—frequently is, to a large extent, gesture-language: it helps to suggest to the supernatural personages of whose orenda the magician desires to make use exactly what is wanted. It is more than this, of course. It is in part the make-believe which is a relief to overcharged feelings; in part it is the means by which the orenda is conveyed to the object intended to be affected. The concomitant words that form part of the ceremony emphasize the desire. They fill and strengthen the instrument with the orenda of the performer, or of the supernatural personage invoked or compelled to assist; they direct the instrument, considered as a personal being, in the service it is required to fulfil; or they allure, entreat, or command the object at which the rite is aimed.
If the view here taken be accurate, the essential opposition between magic and religion disappears. Nor am I greatly concerned to decide whether of the two developed the earlier. Their origin is the same; they grow from one root. Nay, I should hardly be wrong if I changed the metaphor and said: magic and religion are the two faces of one medal. From the lowest stage of culture to the highest we find them inseparable. Gods were not invented because man proved unequal to the strain of arranging the affairs of the universe by himself; nor has the age of religion been everywhere preceded by the age of magic. “By whatever name it is called,” says Dr Codrington, speaking of the Melanesian mana, “it is the belief in this supernatural power and in the efficacy of the various means by which spirits and ghosts can be induced to exercise it for the benefit of men that is the foundation of the rites and practices which can be called religious: and it is from the same belief that everything which may be called magic and witchcraft draws its origin. Wizards, doctors, weather-mongers, prophets, diviners, dreamers, all alike, everywhere in the islands, work by this power. There are many of these who may be said to exercise their art as a profession; they get their property and influence in this way. Every considerable village or settlement is sure to have someone who can control the weather and the waves, someone who knows how to treat sickness, someone who can work mischief with various charms. There may be one whose skill extends to all these branches; but generally one man knows how to do one thing and one another. This various knowledge is handed down from father to son, from uncle to sister’s son [for in many of these islands descent is still reckoned exclusively through the mother], in the same way as is the knowledge of rites and methods of sacrifice and prayer; and very often the same man who knows the sacrifice knows also the making of the weather and of charms for many purposes besides. But as there is no order of priests, there is also no order of magicians or medicine-men. Almost every man of consideration knows how to approach some ghost or spirit, and has some secret of occult practices. Knowledge of either kind can be bought, if the possessor chooses to impart it to any other than the heirs of whatever he has besides.”[95.1]
Here we see, as yet undistinguished, the beginnings of the professional magician and the professional priest. Roughly and provisionally it may be said that the professional magician is he who in the course of the evolution of society, by birth, by purchase, or by study and practice in the conventional methods, has acquired the most powerful orenda. Similarly, the professional priest is he who in these ways, or by prayer and fasting, has obtained the favour of the imaginary personages believed to influence or control the affairs of men—who has, in a word, possessed himself of their orenda. The union of these two professions in one person is not adventitious; it is probably fundamental; it is at least so general that in describing the society of savages and peoples in low stages of culture observers are often at a loss whether to call their functionaries priests or wizards, exorcists or medicine-men. Consequently, many anthropological writers use the word shaman, borrowed from the Tunguz, a tribe of South-Eastern Siberia, and including all four meanings. For in that condition of society the functions of priest and sorcerer and medicine-man are, as Professor Frazer says, “not yet differentiated from each other.” That could not be until, in the course of evolution, religion became severed from magic. Yet it has never become so wholly severed that the primitive connection may not be traced. Priests have become organized into a separate order. Triumphant religions have proscribed the conquered faiths, and have repudiated their practices as magical. Magic has thus become a term of opprobrium. The conquered faiths under repression have carried on their religious worship mixed with magical rites and tending more and more to be degraded, yet never losing all religious elements. Even the magic of the Middle Ages and later, in Europe, if we may trust the confessions of the judicial victims themselves, was mingled with the worship of a being in whom they recognized the devil, perhaps the last avatar of a heathen god; and witchcraft was one of the commonest charges against heretics. On the other hand, not even the highest religions have been able to free themselves wholly from rites strictly parallel to those characterized as magical, by which their followers have striven to compass union with the objects of worship, to avail themselves of the orenda of these objects, to locate it in their own persons or in the images and implements of their cult, to intensify their own orenda, and to exercise it for the benefit, spiritual, corporal or pecuniary, of themselves and others.
It may be well to illustrate the foregoing speculation from the customs and superstitions of the Arunta of Central Australia. The Arunta have been represented to be the lowest and least evolved of known humanity in their beliefs and institutions: they are, it is said, still in the stage of primitive absence of religion; magic alone is the object of their belief; magic alone they practise. Now none of the Australian tribes are, strictly speaking, in a primitive condition. The civilization of all of them has evolved to some extent. It has evolved, speaking in general terms, along similar lines; and these lines have been conditioned by the environment. It is admittedly significant that, in a land where so many archaic types of the lower animals have survived, we should find archaic types of human culture. Yet the most archaic types of Australian culture are far from being primitive. So far are they that the social organization is of the most complex character, the product of a succession of stages of development. The least archaic types exhibit the old social organization breaking down and new structures in course of formation. With the evolution of society an evolution of belief has also been going on. It has not been exactly concurrent. Culture rarely or never evolves equally in all directions. It is a mental process, partly conscious, partly unconscious. The collective mind of a given society, like the individual minds of which it is composed, is not exercised equally on all subjects at the same time. Hence while, for example, we find among the Euahlayi tribe, in the north of New South Wales, an advanced theology and a more developed worship than have been recorded elsewhere in Australia, the social organization is still on the basis of female descent; and though the clansmen eat without scruple their hereditary totems, in other respects the totemic system seems to be in full force. In the same way the Arunta and their neighbours certainly preserve relics of a very archaic condition of thought and social organization. Though for certain purposes a son inherits from his mother’s husband, it is doubtful whether descent is counted through the father for social purposes; the physical relation between father and child, indeed, is but imperfectly recognized. On the other hand, they have developed a very elaborate theory of reincarnation, and their totemic system seems to be in course of transformation into a number of societies bearing in some respects remarkable resemblance to those of the tribes of British Columbia.[98.1] Magical practices (chiefly in connection with these societies or totemic groups) are more prominent than religious.
Yet a closer examination will lead us to the conclusion that something more than, on any definition of magic, we can call magical practices, something we must recognize as religion, albeit of a low type, is not wholly wanting to the natives of Central Australia. We may perhaps grant that Twanyirika, with whose name the women and uninitiate children are kept in awe, is a bugbear “to frighten babes withal,” and nothing more. The Kaitish and the Loritja, adjacent tribes sharing the general culture of the Arunta, at all events believe in the real existence of a superior being, who invented the initiation rites and is pleased when men perform them now.[99.1] Indeed, if Herr Strehlow’s investigations are to be trusted, the Arunta themselves are not destitute of belief in such a being, though we learn little about him, and he has no influence on the destinies of mankind.[99.2] Among the Warramunga, a tribe a little further to the north, the Wollunqua, a gigantic mythical snake, is the object of important rites, and one of the totem-clans is called by its name. It dwells in a certain water-hole in a lonely valley of the Murchison Range, “and there is always the fear that it may take it into its head to come out of its hiding-place and do some damage.” Hence propitiation is necessary. This is effected by building a mound of sandy earth and delineating on it a representation of the animal. “They say that when he sees the mound with his representation drawn upon it, he is gratified, and wriggles about underneath with pleasure.” On the evening of the day succeeding that on which the ceremonies in connection with this mound were witnessed by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, “the old men who had made the mound said that they had heard the Wollunqua talking, and that he was pleased with what had been done and was sending rain; the explanation of which doubtless was that they, like ourselves, had heard thunder in the distance. No rain fell, but a few days later the distant rumble of thunder was again heard at night-time; and this, the old men now said, was the Wollunqua growling because the remains of the mound had been left uncovered. They also told the younger men that a heavy bank of clouds which lay on the western horizon had been placed there as a warning by the Wollunqua, and at once cut down boughs and hid the ruins of the mound from view, after which the Wollunqua ceased from growling, and all went on peacefully until the end of the series” of ceremonies.[100.1] There are, of course, myths associated with the Wollunqua. The mound recalled one of them. During its building and the ceremonies about it chants were sung referring to the deeds of the Wollunqua, breaking out from time to time into refrains of words, now at least meaningless, and said to belong to the language of the mythical past. The name Wollunqua is avoided in common parlance. A circumlocution is employed instead, “because, so they told us, if they were to call it too often by its real name, they would lose their control over it and it would come out and eat them all up.”[100.2] How does this differ from the familiar taboo of sacred names? When the explorers were taken to visit the Wollunqua’s dwelling-place (should we be wrong to call it his shrine?), the two chief men of the totemic group went down to the water’s edge and addressed him in whispers with bowed heads, praying him to remain quiet and do them no harm, for they were mates of his and had brought up two great white men to see where he lived and to tell them about him. “We could plainly see that it was all very real to them, and that they implicitly believed that the Wollunqua was indeed alive beneath the water, watching them, though they could not see him.”[100.3] In all these rites (the details of which were carried out with earnestness and frequently with excitement) it can hardly be denied that we have the elements of a true cult. The only one as to which any qualification could be admitted is “the savage attack,” described as being made on the mound when the ceremony relating to it was concluded. The result of it was that the figures delineated on the mound were destroyed, and all that remained was a rough heap of sandy earth. This is represented as an attempt to “coerce the mythic beast.” It is not quite certain that the interpretation is correct, for it does not rest on native statements, but is an inference of the explorers. The obliteration of sacred figures drawn on sand or earth for the purpose of a rite is not confined to the cult of the Wollunqua, nor even to Australia. It is equally found among the Pueblo tribes of North America and the Mongolian Buddhists of Central Asia.[101.1] Its object is to hide the sacred symbols from the eyes of the profane. But if the interpretation were correct (and it is not inconsistent with some of the expressions and traditions reported), it is no more than we might expect. If a savage deals with the mythic figures of his imagination as he deals with his fellowman, we must not be surprised that he should pass from cajolery to coercion, from prayer to defiance. Peoples on a much higher religious horizon (as we shall see hereafter) do not hesitate to threaten, and even to offer violence to, the objects of their worship, when they are unable to obtain otherwise what they want.
Nor are the rites of the Wollunqua alone among these tribes in bearing evidence of something more than magical ceremonies, namely, of rudimentary worship. When at the close of the initiation rites among the Arunta someone with a bundle of churinga, sacred stones or sticks in the shape of a bull-roarer, comes up to the newly initiated youth, saying: “Here is Twanyirika, of whom you have heard so much; they are churinga and will help to heal you quickly,”[102.1] neither the neophyte nor his friend regards them as mere toys. The statement that they will help to heal the neophyte’s wounds is enough to show this. We must not be misled by the apparent anticlimax to forget that they are, throughout this group of tribes, mysterious objects, marked with the emblem of the totem, and in the closest association with it; to the Arunta and Loritja they are the outward and visible sign, if not the embodiment, of the ancestral souls or invisible portions, and as such are regarded with veneration.[102.2] They are kept cunningly concealed from the eyes of the profane, hidden in stores which are sanctuaries, places of refuge from the pursuit of enemies, for men and even for wild animals. Herr Strehlow relates that when he was trying to find a native word to translate church, two baptized Blackfellows in all seriousness suggested to him the use of arknanaua, the name of these sacred storehouses in their tongue.[102.3] The very word churinga means, as nearly as can be rendered in a European tongue, hidden away, secret, appropriated, sacred. It is used as an adjective to describe objects employed in the sacred ceremonies, and the secret name bestowed on a child at birth. In this connection it is important to remember that the sacred ceremonies, and in fact everything sacred, are among these tribes secret also from the uninitiate. Though individuals may, at least among the Arunta and Loritja, have special property in their churingas, the latter are, as a whole, the collective property of the totemic clan; they are under the control of the ceremonial headman; their loss is the most serious evil that can befall a group; and even to lend them to another group, as is occasionally done for special purposes, is undertaken with the greatest solemnity and caution. When returned, they are received with every mark of veneration, with weeping and a low, mournful chant; and both parties must be strictly fasting.[103.1]