Introduction to the History of Religions Handbooks on the...

883. The perils and problems of savage life, more acute in certain directions than those that confront the civilized man, demand constant vigilance, careful investigation, and prompt action. So far as familiar and tangible enemies (beasts and men) are concerned, common sense has devised methods of defense, and ordinary prudence has suggested means of providing against excessive heat or cold and of procuring food. But there are dangers and ills that in the savage view cannot be referred to such sources, but must be held to be caused by intangible, invisible forces in the world, against which it is man's business to guard himself. He must learn what they are and how to thwart or use them as circumstances may require. They could be studied only in their deeds, and this study involves man in the investigation of the law of cause and effect. The only visible bond between phenomena is that of sequence, and on sequence the savage bases his science of causes—that which precedes is cause, that which follows is effect. The agencies he recognizes are spirits, gods, the force resident in things (mana), and human beings who are able to use this force.

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.

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.

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.

Magic, like religion, is a social product. The two, as is remarked above, may coexist in the same community. But when a State religion is established to which all citizens are expected to conform, the pursuit of magic assumes the aspect of departure from, and hostility to, the tribal or national cult. It is then under the ban, and can be carried on only in secret1554 (as is the case with prohibited religions also). Secrecy of practice is not of the essence of magic; among the Australian Arunta, for example, magical ceremonies constitute the publicly recognized business of the community acting through its accredited representatives; the partial exclusion of women and uninitiated boys from these ceremonies (and from political councils) is due mainly to the desire of the elders to keep the power in their own hands. The State religion may sometimes be forced by public opinion to adopt particular magical procedures.

892. It was natural that the specific study of sequences and laws should fall into the hands of special persons and classes of men. The human agent in the discovery of laws is the magician (sorcerer, shaman), who, since he was generally a physician also, sometimes received the name of "medicine man." As the office of chief arose for the direction of social culture and political affairs, so the office of magician arose naturally for the direction of supernatural relations. He may have been the earliest religious teacher and guide.1555 He knows the will and nature of the supernatural Powers and is therefore a necessity to men. He is specifically in charge of all that relates to the control of these Powers.

893. In the course of time there arises a differentiation of functions, and, when religion becomes friendly, the office of priest is created. The priest, like the magician, understands the will of the gods, but his procedure is intended simply to propitiate them or to discover their will in particular cases.1556 He is a development out of the magician in so far as friendly religion is a development out of magical religion.1557 The prophet also, in the rôle in which he appears among the Greeks, is a development out of the old magician; he knows the will of the gods and is thus able to predict events. This is the character of the old Hebrew seer; the Hebrew prophet, originally a seer, assumed in the course of time a quite different character—he became a preacher of ethical religion.

894. The office of magician, once established, became subject to all the rules that govern official persons in barbarous, half-civilized, and civilized societies. Of the way in which the position was attained in the earliest times we have no information, but in relatively low tribes it appears that it is attained in various ways. There is sometimes a suggestion of vocation in a dream or a vision.1558 Among some tribes a candidate for the office has to undergo a process of education, that is, of training in the signs by which the presence of superhuman Powers is recognizable and of the way of dealing with disease and other evils.1559 It is not unusual that the candidate is required to submit to a test, sometimes of physical endurance (as is required also in the case of the young warrior), but chiefly of susceptibility to supernatural influences and capacity of insight, and of the conduct of magical operations.1560 Generally in the lower tribes the office comes by free choice of the individual, or by choice of the body of magicians, without regard to the social position of the man. In West Africa, says Miss Kingsley, everybody keeps a familiar spirit or two for magical purposes; this is unlawful only when the spirit is harmful.1561

895. In somewhat more advanced societies the office falls into the hands of families and descends from father to son, in which case the younger man is instructed by the older in the secrets of the profession.1562 In some higher religions magical performances are in the hands of certain clans or tribes. In most of these cases women as well as men may be masters of the art. In the more advanced systems it is often the case that it is especially women who are considered adepts; so it was in Babylonia;1563 in the Old Testament Saul seeks the woman of Endor;1564 Thessalian witches were famous;1565 women who tie magical knots are provided against in the Koran by a special form of prayer;1566 in Europe, medieval and later, the practicers of magic have generally been women.

896. The grounds for the ascription of magical superiority to women—whether from their supposed greater susceptibility to demoniac influence, or for some other reason—are not clear. In the lowest tribes sorcerers are commonly men1567—the profession is an influential and honored one, and naturally falls into the hands of leading men; the magician is often the most powerful man in the community.

897. Reputation for magical power appears sometimes to attach to a tribe or other body of persons as the representatives of a religion which is adopted by a lower community. Possibly this is the explanation of the rôle ascribed at an early period to the Mazdean Magi.1568 The Magi (apparently Median of origin) formed the priestly tribe of the Mazdean religion, and we do not know that they played originally any part as sorcerers. But it seems that they were so considered in Greece as early as the fifth century B.C.,1569 and after the Moslem conquest of Persia and the suppression of Zoroastrianism a fire-worshiper or Magian is especially a representative of magic.1570 On the other hand, it sometimes happens among adjoining tribes that the lower become the special practitioners of magic,1571 which is then considered to be a mysterious art, alien to the official religion, and therefore proper to the ministers of the old mysterious cults.

898. The power exercised by the magician extends over the whole world of men and things, and is generally considered to be practically without limit. He guards men against diseases, noxious beasts, and all other forms of injury; he destroys one's enemies and guards one against plots of enemies, including other magicians; he is able to induce or destroy love, to give physical strength, to inflict disease, to kill, and to restore to life; he ascends to heaven or descends into the world below; he is able to coerce the gods themselves; in fact, he does everything that a god is commonly supposed to do—the tendency was to identify the magician and the god.1572 Such identification is natural or necessary in early faiths, inasmuch as it was held that there was no difference of nature between men and gods. A god was as a rule the stronger. But how gods arose and how they gained their superior strength was not clear, and it might thus easily happen that a man should acquire powers equal to those of divine beings.1573

899. The methods employed by the magician to effect his purpose are various. In early times it is usual for him to fall into an ecstatic state; by drinking intoxicating liquors, by violent movements, or by contemplation he gets out of himself and comes into relations with the mysterious potencies. In such a condition he acts as his imagination suggests.1574 But in the organized forms of magic long experience has devised various means of producing results beyond the power of ordinary men. Certain objects are magically charged with supernatural power (charms), and these worn on the person guard the possessor against malign influences. Various formulas are employed which are supposed to coerce the Powers; these are sometimes names of ordinary objects regarded as sacred, the name of some plant or animal.1575 Names of divine persons have special potency. The name of a god was supposed to carry with it his power, and the utterance of his name secured all that he could secure; thus, in the early Christian times the tetragrammaton YHWH (Yahweh) had absolute power against demons.

900. Similar efficacy attached to sacred compositions, prayers,1576 and the like. The Mazdean petition, Honover (Ahuna-Vairya), was so employed, and in Christian circles even the Lord's Prayer. Charms or incantations often took rhythmical form—verses, couplets, or quatrains were widely used. All such methods were the product of ages of experience.1577 They were handed down from generation to generation, often in families or classes of magicians, were modified or enlarged from time to time, and thus came at last to form a literature.

901. In the great civilized religions magical practice gradually assumed a tone somewhat different from that of the earliest times. It continued to be coercive toward evil Powers, but in regard to the good Powers it assumed rather to discover their modes of action. It was not anti-religious; it remained alongside of the official religious systems in friendly relations. It relied on the assistance of the good gods and not on that of the demons. There was good magic and bad magic, white magic and black magic, as these came to be called. A procedure of white magic can thus, from the point of view of religion, hardly be distinguished from prayer to a deity. The difference between the two appears to be that the magic produces abnormal or violent effects, which experience taught could not reasonably be expected from the deity. It is the old crude science brought (as the lesser divine Powers were brought) into a relation of subordination to the chief god of the community.

902. Elaborate magical systems are found in some of the ancient national religions. In India the Atharva-Veda, though it contains a mass of crude old material, is nevertheless recognized as one of the sacred books, standing by the side of the Rig-Veda, though of less authority and significance than that. The Atharvan was originally a priest of fire, but in this work he becomes simply a magician; the immense number of magical procedures in the book provided for all emergencies of life.1578 The Babylonian magical formulas also go back to an early time, but they were preserved by the priests and recognized as a legitimate element in the religious practice.1579 The old Egyptian stories introduce a number of magical proceedings, and the formulas have been preserved in treatises.1580 Of the earliest periods of the Mazdean religion we have unfortunately no records; in the time of the decadence of the national religion, especially in the Thousand and One Nights, the fire-worshiper or Magian is commonly a wicked magician, as was natural since he belonged to a faith hostile to Islam, and the practicer of good magic is generally a Moslem.1581 The early Greeks and Romans appear not to have been greatly interested in magical practices, though these existed.1582 But a great outburst of magic occurred in the Græco-Roman world in the first and second centuries of our era, the magician being, however, generally not Greek or Roman, but of an inferior alien race.1583 Among the old Hebrews we have no details of magical procedure except in the invocation of the dead;1584 this procedure was

denounced by the prophets as hostile to the worship of the national god, but it continued among the people a long time.1585 The practice of magic existed abundantly among the early peoples of Europe, the Teutons, and others. The primacy, however, in magic belongs to the Finns and Lapps, alien races regarded as inferior in civilization.

903. The hold of magic on the minds of men is shown by the fact that it has persisted up to the present day. Its basis is a belief in occult powers and the conviction that man may attain to mastery over them. Certain forms of this belief, called theosophical, are held by many at the present day; it is supposed that men are capable of transcending the ordinary limitations of humanity. In general, however, the whole system of magic yielded gradually to the organized religions, the essence of which was a friendly and rational relation with the deity. Religion has organized itself in accord with the general organization of human social systems. It has seen the necessity of getting rid of force, of depending on humane feeling, cultivating simply friendly relations, attempting a unity of work, a coöperation of divine and human forces. All this has worked against magic. In addition to these tendencies the constantly growing belief in the domination of natural forces has made it impossible in civilized societies to accept the powers called magical.1586

904. To sum up: magic is a means of securing superhuman results by adopting the methods of the superhuman Powers.1587 It may be coeval with religion proper or may have preceded it in human religious organization. In any case it has been, up to the present day, the rival of religion, though more and more driven to take a secondary place. It has collected physical facts which have served as a basis for the study of physical science and have indirectly furthered the cause of religion by leading men to recognize natural law and also by necessitating a distinction between theistic and other superhuman results.1588 In the absence of distinct religious systems it has been a bond of social union, and to that extent has been a civilizing influence. On the other hand, it has fostered belief in a false science of sequences and thus helped to introduce confusion into thought and the conduct of life. The aim of religion has been, and is, to banish magic from the world.1589