Though Magic does not make an anthropopathic appeal it may, and frequently does, bring to bear its peculiar coercitive virtue upon anthropopathic beings. It aims then at compelling souls, spirits or gods, into doing the operator’s will, or in preventing them from doing their own. In necromancy, spirits are summoned by means of spells and incantations. In old Egypt the art of dealing coercitively with spirits and gods reached a high development. Maspero, speaking of a strange belief regarding names, says, ‘when the god in a moment of forgetfulness or of kindness had taught them what they wanted [the sacred names], there was nothing left for him but to obey them.’[21] At Eleusis, it was not the name but the intonation of the voice of the magician which produced the mysterious results.[22] But whether Magic acts upon personal or impersonal objects, its effective power is ever impersonal.
I would not give the impression in this attempt at classification, that the conceptions of the savage are clear and definite. I hold them to be, on the contrary, hazy and fluid. What appears to him impersonal one moment may suddenly assume the characteristics of a spirit. Mana, for instance, although usually an impersonal force stored into plants, stones, animals or men, assumes at times truly personal traits; it becomes the god himself. One should not be surprised to meet with cases that fall between rather than in the classes, for the sharp lines of demarcation it suits us to draw are not often found in nature.
And now we return to our two theses.
1. The Probable Priority of Magic.—Certain historical facts might be held to support the pre-religious origin of Magic. As one descends from the higher to the lower social levels, Religion dwindles and Magic grows. In the lowest societies of which we have extensive and accurate knowledge, the Central Australian tribes, Religion is represented by mere rudiments, whereas Magic is everywhere and always in evidence. I have had occasion in a preceding section to quote Howitt with regard to the slight rôle played by Religion among the South-East Australians. The presence of Religion in the lives of the tribes inhabiting the central portions of Australia is still less obvious. Frazer reflects the views of Spencer and Gillen, of Howitt, and probably of every recent first-hand student of that country, when he writes: ‘Among the aborigines of Australia, the rudest savages as to whom we possess accurate information, Magic is universally practised, whereas Religion, in the sense of a propitiation or conciliation of the higher powers, seems to be nearly unknown. Roughly speaking, all men in Australia are magicians, but not one is a priest; everybody fancies he can influence his fellows or the course of nature by sympathetic magic, but nobody dreams of propitiating gods by prayer and sacrifice.’[23] If we may trust our knowledge of other savages, the general fact thus affirmed of the native Australians holds good with regard to every other uncivilised tribe.
But as the least civilised of existing tribes are far from being ‘primitive’ in the true sense of the word, it could be argued that Magic is, after all, the outcome of the corruption of a primitive Religion, of which almost nothing remains in the savage tribes of the present day. And so we shall have to rest our case not upon historical evidences, but upon considerations regarding the psychological nature of Magic and Religion, and upon analogies we may discover between them and certain facts observed in children and in adults of uncivilised races.
In his attempt to support the belief in the priority of Magic, Frazer, who has put every student of Religion in his debt by his monumental work, affirms its greater simplicity when compared with Religion. The opinion itself is tenable, but the defence of it, made as it is from the standpoint of the old English associationism, is unfortunately worthless. ‘Magic,’ he tells us, ‘is nothing but a mistaken application of the very simplest and most elementary process of the mind, namely, the association of ideas by virtue of resemblance or contiguity,’ while ‘Religion assumes the operation of conscious or personal agents, superior to man, behind the visible screen of nature. Obviously the concept of personal agent is more complex than a simple recognition of the similarity or contiguity of ideas.... The very beasts associate the ideas of things that are like each other or that have been found together in their experience.... But who attributes to the animals a belief that the phenomena are worked by a multitude of invisible animals or by one enormous and prodigiously strong animal behind the scenes?’[24] It is undoubtedly true that the mind of man tends to pass from an object to others like it, or experienced at the same time, but this psychological fact does not in itself account for Magic. The mind of animals is regulated in a similar manner. In spring-time the sight of a feather makes the bird think of nest-building, and the smell and sight of his master’s coat brings the master to the dog’s mind. Yet animals do not practise the magical art. This fact should be sufficient to make one realise the insufficiency of ‘a simple [mistaken] recognition of the similarity and contiguity of ideas’ as an explanation of the origin of Magic. An animal might observe the colour-likeness between carrots and jaundice (not, however, unless practical dealings with them had attracted his attention to the colour), and ‘coat’ and ‘master’ might follow each other in a dog’s mind. But in order to treat the coat as he would the master, and in order to eat carrots or give them to be eaten for the cure of jaundice, there is required, in addition to the association, the belief that whatever is done to the coat will be suffered by the master, and that the eating of carrots will cure the disease. It is the existence of these ideas with their motor and affective values and of their dynamic connection which makes Magic possible in beings subject to the laws of association. This fundamental difference between mere association of ideas and the essential mental processes involved in Magic, Frazer has completely overlooked. The difference may be further illustrated by the instance of a dog biting in a rage the stick with which he is being beaten. He is indeed doing to the stick what he would like to do to the man. But in attacking the stick he does not conceive that, although the stick is not the man, the injury done to it will hurt the man. His action is blindly impulsive, while the form of Magic in question involves generalisations and other mental processes not expressed by the laws of association.[25]
If magical actions cannot be deduced from the principle of association, they can at least be classified according to the kind of association they illustrate. For, although the various ideas brought together in Magic, in a relation of cause and effect, are frequently said to have come together by ‘chance,’ some of the conditions under which they have in fact become connected are expressed in the universal laws of association, namely, association by similarity or contrast, by contiguity or spatial opposition, and by emotional congruity or disparity. Whenever magical acts have been classified, it has been according to the principle of association.[26] But every kind of activity involving mental operations falls in some of its relations under the laws of association, hence the relative unfruitfulness of these classifications, hence also our attempt at grouping magical practices according to a factor of greater significance, namely, the nature of the power they involve.
2. The Independence of Religion from Magic.—The following psychological arguments appear to me to go a long way towards proving that magical behaviour has had an origin independent of the animistic[27] belief, and that some of its forms, at least, antedated it, and therefore also Religion:—
(a) The absorbing interest found by young children in the use of things, and their complete indifference at first to the modus operandi, point, it would seem, to a stage in human development at which the explanation of things is not yet desired. It is well known that long before a child asks ‘how?’ he wearies his guardians with the question, ‘what for?’[28] He wants to know what things are good for, and, in particular, what he can do with them before he cares for an understanding of their origin, and of their mechanism. This keen interest in the production of results, this curiosity about the practical meaning of things, is apparently quite independent of any abstract idea of power. Since the child passes through a pre-interpretative stage, may we not admit a corresponding period in racial development during which no explanatory soul-theory, no animistic philosophy, is entertained? A mental attitude such as this would make Religion impossible, while it would provide the essential condition for a Magic of our first class.
(b) Children—and adult savages resemble children in many respects—like to amuse themselves by setting up prohibitions and backing them up with threats of punishment. ‘If you do this,’ they will say, ‘that will happen to you.’ The ‘this’ and the ‘that’ have usually no logical connection with each other, neither is there in the mind of the child any thought of a particular kind of power, or agent, meting out the punishment. This kind of play is strikingly similar to a large number of magical practices. Can it not be regarded as the prototype of most taboo customs? In taboo there is usually no logical and no qualitative relation between the prohibition and the punishment. Neither is there, ordinarily, any notion of a particular agent carrying out the threat. It involves, it seems, nothing more than the assumption of a causal connection between two facts brought together by ‘chance’ association under the pressure of a desire for food or success at war, or for the enforcement of a rule of conduct.[29] The punishment announced is anything on the efficacy of which one may choose to rely. In Madagascar conjugal fidelity is enforced by the threat that the betrayed husband will be killed or wounded in the war; among the indigenous tribes of Sarawak, the belief is that the camphor obtained by the men in the jungle will evaporate if the women are unfaithful during the absence of their husbands, while in East Africa, the husband would, in the same eventuality, be killed or hurt by the elephant he is hunting.[30] The high sanction which the requirements of social life give to beliefs of this sort is readily understood.