Argonauts of the Western Pacific

by Bronisław Malinowski

This statement, expressing the belief in a very clear and direct manner, I had confirmed, reiterated with variations and amplifications, by ever so many informants. They all emphasise the fact that magic has its roots in tradition, that it is the most immutable and most valuable traditional item, that it cannot leak into human knowledge by any present human intercourse with spirits or with any non-human beings such as the tokway or tauva’u. The property of having been received from previous generations is so marked that any breach of continuity in this succession cannot be imagined, and any addition by an actual human being would make the magic spurious.

At the same time, magic is conceived as something essentially human. It is not a force of nature, captured by man through some means and put to his service; it is essentially the assertion of man’s intrinsic power over nature. In saying that, I of course translate native belief into abstract terms, which they would not use themselves for its expression. None the less it is embodied in all their items of folk-lore and ways of using magic and thinking about it. In all the traditions, we find that magic is always in possession of man, or at least of anthropomorphic beings. It is carried out from underground by man. It is not conceived as having been there somewhere outside his knowledge and then captured. On the contrary, as we saw, often the very things which are governed by magic have been brought forth by man, as for instance rain, the kalala fish; or disease, created by the anthropmorphic crab.

The close sociological association of magic with a given sub-clan emphasises this anthropocentric conception of magic. In the majority of cases indeed, magic refers to human activities or to the response of nature to human activities, rather than to natural forces alone. Thus, in gardening and in fishing, it is the behaviour of plants and animals tended or pursued by man; in the canoe magic, in the carver’s magic, the object is a human-made thing; in the Kula, in love magic, in many forms of food magic, it is human nature on to which the force is directed. Disease is not conceived as an extraneous force, coming from outside and settling on the man, it is directly a man-made, sorcerer-made something. We may, therefore, amplify the above given definition, and say that magic is a traditionally handed on power of man over his own creations, over things once brought forth by man, or over responses of nature to his activities.

There is one more important aspect of the question of which I have spoken already — the relation of magic to myth. It has been stated in Chapter XII, that myth moves in the realm of the supernatural, or better, super-normal, and that magic bridges over the gap between that and present-day reality. Now this statement acquires a new importance; magic appears to us as the essence of traditional continuity with ancestral times. Not only, as I have emphasised in this chapter, is it never conceived as a new invention, but it is identical in its nature with the supernatural power which forms the atmosphere of mythical events. Some of this power may have been lost on its way down to our times — mythical stories relate how it has been lost; but never has anything been added to it. There is nothing in it now which has not been in it in the ancient, hoary times of myth. In this the natives have a definitely regressive view of the relation between now and before; in this they have their counterpart to a Golden Age, and to a Garden of Eden of sorts. Thus we fall back upon the recognition of the same truth, whether we approach the matter by looking for beginnings of magic, or by studying the relations between the present and the mythical reality. Magic is a thing never invented and never tampered with, by man or any other agency.

This, of course, means that it is so in native belief. It hardly needs explicitly stating that in reality magic must constantly change. The memory of men is not such, that it could hand over verbally exactly what it had received, and, like any other item of traditional lore, a magical formula is in reality constantly being re-shaped as it passes from one generation to another, and even within the mind of the same man. As a matter of fact, even from the material collected by me in the Trobriands, it can be unmistakably recognised that certain formulae are much older than others, and indeed, that some parts of spells, and even some whole spells, are of recent invention. Here I cannot do more than refer to this interesting subject, which, for its full development, needs a good deal of linguistic analysis, as well as of other forms of „higher criticism”.

All these considerations have brought us very near to the essential problem: what does magic really mean to the natives ? So far, we have seen that it is an inherent power of man over those things which vitally affect him, a power always handed over through tradition⁹⁴. About the beginnings of magic they know as little, and are occupied as little as about the beginnings of the world. Their myths describe the origin of social institutions and the peopling of the world by men. But the world is taken for granted, and so is the magic. They ask no questions about magiogony any more than they do about cosmogony.

IV

So far we have not gone beyond the examination of myths and of what we can learn from them about the nature of magic. To gain a deeper insight into this subject, we must study more closely the concrete data about magical performance. Even in the foregoing chapters a sufficient material has been collected to allow of correct inferences, and I shall only here and there have to allude to other forms of magic, besides that of canoe, Kula and sailing.

I have spoken so far about „magic” in a wholesale manner, as if it were all of one piece. As a matter of fact, magic all the world over, however rudimentary or developed it might be, presents three essential aspects. In its performance there enter always some words spoken or chanted, some actions carried out, and there are always the minister or ministers of the ceremony. In analysing the concrete details of magical performances, therefore, we have to distinguish the formula, the rite, and the condition of the performer.

These three factors stand out quite clearly and definitely in the Trobriand magic, whether we examine the facts themselves or the natives’ way of looking at them. It may be said at once that in this society the relative importance of the three factors is not quite the same. The spell is by far the most important constituent of magic. In their linguistic use, although those natives have a special word, yopa, they very often use the word magic, megwa, to describe a spell. The spell is the part of the magic which is kept secret and known only to the esoteric circle of practitioners. When a magic is handed over, whether by purchase, gift, or inheritance, only the spell has to be taught to the new recipient, and as already once said before, it is usually taught in instalments, while the payment is received in that manner. When one speaks about magical knowledge, or in inquiries whether an individual knows some magic, this invariably refers to the formula, for the nature of the rite is always quite public property. Even from the examples given in this book, it can be seen how simple are the rites and how elaborate often the formulae. To direct questions on the subject, the natives always reply that the spell is the more important part. The question: „where is the real strength of magic?” would receive the reply: „in the spell”. The condition of the magician is, like the rite, essential to the performance of the magic, but it also is considered by the natives as subservient to the spell.