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RITUAL AND BELIEF

LEARNING TO "THINK BLACK"

Sir Edward Tylor begins the chapters on Animism in that great work which laid the foundation of the modern study of the history of civilization, by a discussion of the evidence for the existence of tribes destitute of religion. In some half-dozen pages he easily shows that the existence of such tribes, "though in theory possible, and perhaps in fact true, does not at present rest on that sufficient proof which, for an exceptional state of things, we are entitled to demand." He convicts travellers and missionaries who have made the assertion, of contradicting themselves; and he renders probable that the denial of religion to peoples in the lower culture is begotten of a perverted judgement in theological matters, and "the use of wide words in narrow senses."

Other causes are equally prolific of error in regard to savage beliefs. Sir Edward Tylor refers to haste and imperfect acquaintance by the traveller with the people whose beliefs he is professing to repeat. These are obvious causes on which it is needless to dwell. Many peoples, too, are accustomed out of mere politeness to endeavour to divine what sort of answer to his remarks will please a guest, or what sort of answer an enquirer expects to his questions, and to make it accordingly, regardless whether it has any relation to the facts or not. This courtier-like etiquette of agreement applies to every subject, and is emphasized when the enquirer is an official or social superior from whom favour may be looked for or displeasure apprehended. The Malayans, a jungle tribe of southern India, invariably say "Yes" in reply to a question by a government officer or a member of a higher caste, "believing that a negative answer might displease him." In such cases it is difficult to extract the truth on the most indifferent and trivial, to say nothing of weightier, matters.

Passing over these commonplaces, let us pause for a moment on another cause mentioned by Tylor, namely, the natural reluctance of savages to reveal "to the prying and contemptuous foreigner their worship of gods who seem to shrink, like their worshippers, before the white man and his mightier Deity." Very instructive is the account given by Kolben of the Hottentots. Writing in the early years of the eighteenth century, he says it is "a difficult thing to get out of the Hottentots what are really their notions concerning God and religion, or whether they have any at all. They keep all their religious opinions and ceremonies, as they do every other matter established among them, as secret as they can from Europeans, and when they are questioned concerning such matters are very shy in their answers and hide the truth as much as they can." They take refuge from questions in "a thousand fictions," which they excuse, when taxed with them, by alleging that "the Europeans are a crafty, designing people. They never ask a question for the sake of the answer only, but have other ends to serve, perhaps against the peace and security of the Hottentots." From this source, we are told, have sprung most of the contradictions to be found in authors upon the religion of the Hottentots. More than a hundred years after Kolben's day a British traveller, exploring Great Namaqualand under the auspices of the British Government and of the Royal Geographical Society, assembled some of the old men among the Namaqua and put them through an examination. His thirst for information was doubtless praiseworthy; and he was at least successful in proving, albeit unconsciously, the truth of the older traveller's words. For the proceeding he adopted affords a brilliant example of "how not to do it." I quote some of his questions: "What laws have the Namaqua?" Answer--"They have none; they only listen to their chiefs." "Do the people know anything of the stars?" Answer--"Nothing." "Do the Namaqua believe in lucky and unlucky days?" Answer--"They don't know anything of these things." "Are there rainmakers in the land?" Answer--"None." "What do the old Namaqua think becomes of people when they die?" Answer--"They know nothing of these things; all they see is that the people die and are buried, but what becomes of them they know not; and before the missionaries came to the Great River the people had never heard of another world."

Many European casuists justify one who is questioned concerning matters he desires to keep secret, and who meets the inquisitive person with a falsehood. It cannot therefore be surprising that these poor Hottentots thus took advantage of the only defence open to them when they found their most cherished beliefs and customs the subject of impertinent and bungling interrogations by an unsympathetic intruder into their country. Their Bantu neighbours do the same. The Kaffir, we are told, "dislikes to find Europeans investigating his customs, and he usually hides all he can from them and takes a sportive pleasure in baffling and misleading them." When questioned by Andersson, the Ovambo denied that they had any belief, or abruptly stopped him with a "Hush!" Prying of this kind is rarely welcomed even among peoples on a much higher plane of civilization. Not to appeal to our own feelings, we may take as an illustration a people of the Far East. To question a native of Korea concerning custom or belief at once arouses his suspicions. Indeed, for a stranger to enquire the number of houses in a village, or what the land produces, needs much tact if bad feeling is to be avoided. A missionary who lived for many years in the country was of opinion that people are unconscious of their customs. At any rate a Korean asked suddenly about a certain custom will in all likelihood deny that such a thing exists; and yet he may be absolutely free from dishonesty in the matter: he is simply unconscious, he has never thought about it.

To this point we will return directly: our present point is the conscious refusal of information. And here it should be noted that savages, as well as others, do not hide their beliefs only because they do not understand the motive of enquiry, or because they are afraid of ridicule or of the denunciations of the missionary, even where the Christian priest can call down the thunderbolt of the magistrate. These reasons operate, but not alone. From all quarters of the world comes the report that the native is uncommunicative. The Lengua Indians of the Paraguayan Chaco are quite aware that their "superstition is regarded with disfavour by the missionaries"; but they are naturally "very reticent in these matters," and their reticence is only heightened--not caused--by this knowledge. An excellent illustration of the difficulty of discovering the beliefs and even the practices of savages is afforded by Mr Batchelor, a missionary who, having resided among the Ainu of Japan for more than twelve years, wrote an interesting book upon them. He naturally supposed that so long a residence and intimacy with them entitled him to think he knew practically all that could be told about them. Alas for the fallibility of even a careful observer! There was one chamber in the mind of every Ainu which he had not explored. When another twelve years had elapsed he wrote that "when writing that book I must frankly confess that I had no idea, nor had I for many years after, that ophiolatry was practised at all by this people." And all the while the Ainu whom he knew so well were holding beliefs, relating myths, and practising rites of which he had not the least suspicion. Nor is there any reason to suggest that they were concealing those things from him out of fear of ridicule or clerical reproofs.

Deeper reasons exist. German missionaries have been labouring for a number of years among the tribes on the north-eastern coast of New Guinea. In view of the various difficulties attending the investigation of the beliefs of these tribes the latest scientific explorer of the country called in the aid of some of the more experienced of the missionaries. He thus sums up the position: "The heathen Papuan is a reticent fellow, and no power in the world can move him to disclose the secrets of his fathers. He has too much fear of the vengeance of the spirits and of the sorcerers, who would infallibly kill him if he betrayed the smallest thing. Long years of work accomplished with endless patience have been necessary to convince the Black that sorcery is powerless,--that it is all lies and deceit. Only if he is about to be baptized will he voluntarily deliver up to his teacher his knowledge of witchcraft and its methods. In plain terms, he feels the need on this point to lighten both his conscience and his pocket." Reasons of this order have never been better put than by an eminent French anthropologist whose untimely death a few years ago was a serious blow to the cause of science. Reviewing the work of a lady for whom English colleagues yet mourn, he says: "The savage does not like to speak of his belief; he fears the contemptuous mockery of the Whites. Perhaps, too, he fears to give an advantage over himself, in allowing more to be known than is fitting of the rites by which he tries to conciliate the benevolence of the spirits, or to turn away their disfavour from his hut and his plantations. To make known his resources for the fight would be to half-disarm him; surrounded with supernatural dangers, he does not willingly indicate the supernatural means by which he guarantees himself against them." One other reason may be added to these: a reason probably operative in many more cases than enquirers have been aware of. The things after which they ask are often revealed only to the initiate. An outsider, one who is not known to be, or at least treated as, an initiate, will seek in vain by means direct or indirect for information on these matters. A stony silence or repeated lies are all he will get. This has been the cause of much mystification and many contradictory statements about tribes in various parts of the world, not the least in Australia.

It is not suggested, of course, that all contradictory statements emanate from the deliberate mystification of non-initiate enquirers. We have not by any means exhausted the causes of error in regard to savage beliefs. Contradictory statements are made in good faith because those who make them hold contradictory beliefs. On the subject, for example, of the future life the mutually destructive character of the beliefs often held by the same tribes, and even by the same individuals, is one of the truisms of anthropology. The Zulus and their neighbours hold that their dead are to be recognized in the form of various animals, notably snakes, that haunt the tomb or the abodes of the living, and yet that these very dead dwell in the bowels of the earth, presiding in patriarchal fashion over shadowy kraals, and rejoicing in the possession of herds of sky-blue kine with red and white spots. Moreover, notwithstanding this wealth of cattle, they are dependent, if not for their continued existence, at least for their comfort, on the sacrifices offered by their descendants. The truth is that "the whole spirit-world is one of haze and uncertainty." This opinion, expressed by an experienced missionary, is true of all savage and barbarous nations. It is not merely the doctrine of souls that is difficult to understand fully and to state clearly: all the relations with the supernatural are shifting; and the supernatural itself melts away into mist and gloom and the undefined terrors of night.

Proof of the mental capacity of peoples in the lower culture, and their alertness within the narrow range of their appetites, their bodily needs, and the warfare they wage for existence against untoward environment of various kinds, is to be found in every record of exploration, in the reports of every missionary. Beyond that range there are differences between races, as between individuals, in reasoning power, in curiosity, and in general development. Some cause to us unknown may have turned the thoughts of one people into profounder and subtler channels than those of another. We are told of two neighbouring tribes in California that their differences are very striking, and are based on deep-lying racial factors. The mythology of the one is more dramatic, that of the other is more metaphysical, exhibiting "more of the power of abstract thought and intellectual conception." We must beware of reading too extensive a meaning into what is after all merely a comparison of characteristics. It is adduced here for the sole purpose of illustrating the statement that such differences exist even between tribes that are subject to similar external influences. In spite of these differences the unanimous verdict, alike of missionaries and explorers, scientific enquirers and traders, given with tiresome iteration, is that of dormant faculties, want of interest, inability to follow a train of thought, and dislike of intellectual effort. These are qualities that we are sufficiently familiar with at home to render them fully credible in "the poor heathen." Ask a man anywhere--ask a Zulu, ask an English peasant--why such and such a thing is done. He will tell you: "It is the custom," and will look at you with wondering eyes that you can demand a reason or dream of any alternative as possible. Custom to him is more than a second nature. It is nature itself, the established order, the cosmos. To conceive of departure from it would entail a greater burden of thought than he has ever undertaken or would willingly bear. It may even be so much a part of his existence that, like the Korean referred to above, he is barely conscious of it.

In such a case the custom may be denied in perfect good faith. Sometimes, it is true, another cause may lead to the denial. This is well illustrated in a recent work on the Holy Land. The author, speaking of local variations of custom, says: "The small area in which peculiar customs occur, and the comparative isolation of these areas which still prevails, make it often extremely difficult to ascertain local customs and usages. Many of these can only be discovered accidentally or by long residence in the particular locality. The people of neighbouring villages may be quite unaware of the existence of a certain custom, while only a few miles away it may be very familiar. I have known intelligent, educated natives to be entirely ignorant of certain customs, and even to deny their existence, because they were not in vogue in their own particular district, whereas further enquiry or fuller acquaintance with other parts revealed the fact that they were perfectly familiar to others." Here the expression "intelligent, educated natives" must be interpreted of course by reference to the standard of intelligence and education in the rural parts of a country so backward as Palestine. In such a case the ignorance by natives described as intelligent and educated of customs quite different from, and perhaps opposed to, their own may be due to the concentration of their faculties in the struggle for daily needs, or the absorption of their interests in the concerns of their own little community. Millions of men and women in our country, who may be fairly described, by reference to their class and occupation, as "intelligent, educated natives," are quite ignorant--and supremely indifferent--about everything not pertaining to their material well-being, their habitual amusements, the affairs of their little town, their family or their church, or the latest scandal whispered in their tiny coterie. These fill up their life; they have neither leisure nor inclination to worry about anything beyond. We cannot, therefore, be surprised that where the facilities for communication are smaller and the general indigence greater, similar mental indolence may exist. Economic causes, the product themselves of the environment, are often responsible for internal conditions, and cannot be disentangled from them. Intelligent curiosity about things not immediately or apparently affecting ourselves is a rare virtue, and of late development. We ourselves often deem that we pay it abundant homage by witnessing the exhibition of a few lantern slides, or slumbering tranquilly through a lecture on Dante. But to it, if rightly and strenuously pursued, we owe how much of modern discovery and the amenities of civilization! Let us, however, return to our savages.

Of the Nootkas or Ahts of Vancouver Island we are told by Sproat in a passage that has often been quoted that he "had abundant proof in conversing with them about matters in which they took an interest, that their mental capacities are by no means small. It is true that the native mind, to an educated man, seems generally to be asleep; and if you suddenly ask a novel question, you have to repeat it while the mind of the savage is awaking, and to speak with emphasis until he has got your meaning. This may partly arise from the questioner's imperfect knowledge of the language; still, I think, not entirely, as the savage may be observed occasionally to become forgetful when voluntarily communicating information. On his attention being fully aroused he often shows much quickness in reply and ingenuity in argument. But a short conversation wearies him, particularly if questions are asked that require efforts of thought or memory on his part. The mind of the savage then appears to rock to and fro out of mere weakness, and he tells lies and talks nonsense." On this Professor Boas, the distinguished American anthropologist, comments thus: "I happen to know through personal contact the tribes mentioned by Sproat. The questions put by the traveller seem mostly trifling to the Indian; and he naturally soon tires of a conversation carried on in a foreign language, and one in which he finds nothing to interest him. As a matter of fact, the interest of those natives can easily be raised to a high pitch, and I have often been the one who was wearied out first. Neither does the management of their intricate system of exchange prove mental inertness in matters which concern the natives. Without mnemonic aids, they plan the systematic distribution of their property in such a manner as to increase their wealth and social position. These plans require great foresight and constant application."

So far as this comment is directed to depreciate the value of Sproat's estimate of the mental powers of the Nootkas, I cannot think that Professor Boas has been quite fair to the writer. Sproat was no passing traveller, speaking to the natives in a foreign language, and jotting down superficial impressions derived from hasty observation. He had "lived among them and had a long acquaintanceship with them." He was a settler, and for five years a colonial magistrate in constant contact with several of their tribes. His own account of his method of collecting information and the substance of his book are conclusive as to his painstaking researches; and Professor Boas himself elsewhere bears testimony to his trustworthiness. Moreover, a comparison of the quotations renders it clear that on the whole they confirm one another. Probably, however, Professor Boas' criticism is intended to apply not so much to Sproat's statements as to the use made of them by Herbert Spencer and other theorists. It comes to this, therefore, that the Nootka's mental capacity is considerable, his mind is alert and active on subjects that interest him, but that he is not interested in many of those on which an anthropologist desires to learn, and hence he speedily becomes "bored" and answers at random.

The horizon of savage interests among the neighbouring Dene or Ten'a of the Yukon Valley is thus defined by an experienced missionary: "The activity of their minds is commonly confined within a narrow circle, as is evidenced by their favourite subjects of conversation. Food, hunting and fishing, with their attendant circumstances, family happenings, health and disease, devils and their actions, sexual propensities--such are the topics which practically sum up the encyclopaedia of their conversation." "The Ten'a mind," he says in another place, "is anything but speculative, and its imaginative powers have not been turned to building theories of its belief, but rather to excogitate a variety of ways whereby this belief perseveringly asserts itself." The native's "dogmas are very nebulous and undefined, and he has never heard them explicitly formulated, nor even attempted to state them distinctly to himself." Consequently, "whereas there is a certain uniformity in the practices, and an overabundance of them, there are very few points of belief common to several individuals, and these are of the vaguest kind."

If we turn to an entirely different race, the same features present themselves. The capacity of the Bantu peoples of the Lower Congo for the intellectual acts of perception, recognition, memory, and so forth, is well developed and appears early in childhood. "In this respect the natives are much on a par with the civilized races; but the limit is reached early in life, and but little mental progress is observable after adolescence is reached. The ideas are mostly of the simpler forms, seldom passing the concretes of actual experience, generalizations being as a rule beyond their power. Association of ideas, though good as implied by good memory, only takes place in the concrete form of contiguity in time and space as actually already perceived; analogies are confined to the crudest forms, and a very simple figure of speech is apt to be unintelligible.... The fundamental act of intelligence, the intuition of likeness and unlikeness, is very circumscribed; and high acts of intellect are thereby negatived.... An accompanying trait is the absence of rational surprise. On seeing something new a vacant wonder is all that is observable; and this is very transient, and the new experience is classified as 'white man's fashion.' It almost follows as a matter of course that there is no curiosity, no wish to enquire into the cause of a novel experience; it never occurs to the native that there is a cause of the novelty or an explanation required. In like manner there is almost total absence of theorizing about natural phenomena." In fact, the relation of cause and effect in all but the most patent and mechanical cases is said to be beyond his grasp. In general terms this description may stand for all the Bantu, due allowance being made, as pointed out above, for individual and tribal differences.

The fact is that on these subjects the majority of the human race, whether savage or civilized, think little. Their minds are seldom excited to the point of reasoning on their beliefs. They accept what they are told, and do not even know whether they believe it or not, because they have never reflected upon it. One has only to talk for a few minutes to a peasant at home to find out how narrow the border of his knowledge is, how misty and uncertain is everything beyond the routine of his daily life and the village gossip and amusements, unless where in the neighbourhood of a town the supreme interests of football open to him a prospect into another world. Gossip, amusements, his daily bread are subjects of importance; they fill his horizon; on them his views are perfectly definite. Nor does he differ in this respect from people who are looked upon as his social superiors. It would be making too strenuous a demand upon their intellectual life to expect them to rise above the markets, the newspaper, the latest novel, the county cricket-score, and the problems of golf and bridge. All the rest they are content to leave to their professional advisers, who in nine cases out of ten, if the truth must be told, have as little taste or capacity as themselves for metaphysical speculation, historical research or theological enquiry, and are bound as tightly in the cords of tradition as the far more imaginative Zulu medicine-man, or the Eskimo wizard. For the average man in civilization appraises the subjects of thought no otherwise than does his brother in savagery. Each alike is eminently practical. Something done, or to be done, by himself or others is what interests him. Some personal gain, some bodily pleasure--for this he will think and think hard; all other mental exertion must be easy and short. Nor could the human race exist on any other terms.

We may go further still. Where the observer puts aside his prejudices, where he is animated by true sympathy--not the false and mawkish sympathy that too often takes its place--where he is able to communicate with the natives in their own tongue, there is notwithstanding very often a difficulty in following their ideas. We have been told of the Andaman Islanders that "with these, as with other savages, it is vain to expect them to understand the logical conclusions to which their beliefs tend." That may be because they have never thought them out. In the majority of cases it would probably be juster to say that their logic follows a different course, their ideas run in different channels, from ours. After conceding everything that has been said with perfect truth as to their vagueness, their indolence of mind on subjects not concerned with their daily life, and their dislike of intellectual effort, there remains the fact that they are human; they do reason, albeit after their own fashion. Language among the higher races has been trained and tortured during many centuries to express the highest thoughts of the highest thinkers; and how inadequate an instrument has it often been found! It must therefore not surprise us if the thought of races in the lower culture occasionally surpasses a language not yet exercised and adapted to the complicated processes of ideation and ratiocination. Thus not merely is it difficult or impossible to translate native words by English equivalents, as I have already pointed out: the native finds it not easy to translate his thoughts into his own tongue. When he has struggled with more or less success to effect this, his course of thought is so widely different from ours that we can hardly believe in its coherence.

The objects of thought, alike among savages and among ourselves, fall into categories. Many of these categories manifest themselves in the very fibre of language. A familiar illustration is the curious distinctions of grammatical gender, so different even in different languages sprung from a common stock, and those comparatively simple, as are the Aryan tongues of civilization. When we refer to the languages of the lower culture, with their minute distinctions of number and person, of action, tense, and all sorts of relations of time and place, we are overwhelmed by their complexity and puzzled by the oddness of their grouping. Categories of another kind become visible when we attempt to push our explorations further into savage thought. The counting of kinship and the difficulties attending the attempt to translate words expressive of religious ideas have already been mentioned. In the totemism of Australia the totems are classes of animals or other objects not merely united by some mystic bond to one or other class of tribesmen; they are related to other objects of human environment in such a way that the whole universe is shared among them. To us these relationships are strange and inexplicable; they form categories that we do not understand. To the native these categories are familiar by immemorial association; they have become part of the texture of his mind; and thereby they have acquired emotional values, from the bonds of which he can hardly deliver himself. So it seems that the West African Bantu comprise their entire social system, every activity of their mental and physical life, and every aspect of the external universe under a limited number of categories wholly alien to our modes of thought. Hints of them are perhaps to be found in the various classes of Bantu nouns that have not yet been fully explained by philologists. In any case the classification of these nouns is probably no arbitrary association of purely formal significance. It is based on some archaic experience, which has grouped together various objects often to us utterly dissimilar: the connecting links escape us. Among other peoples in parts of the earth remote from one another categories have been discovered associating and dissociating acts and modes of feeling, and apportioning their environment in unexpected ways. Such categories must react on mentality to an extent that we can hardly measure. They form part of the traditional presuppositions of thought. They are the framework in which ideas are grouped. We, who have gradually elaborated and established through generations of increasing discovery and invention a habit of regarding everything from a more or less scientific standpoint, have acquired a series of presuppositions of an entirely different character. To the educated classes of Europe and America they in their turn have become traditional. They are the axioms from which we argue. Every new experience must be fitted into the framework thus supplied, otherwise we cannot logically interpret it. At the best we may make for it what has been wittily called a watertight compartment. Men of the lower culture brought suddenly into contact with civilization and civilized ideas experience a corresponding difficulty. Missionaries are often in despair over their converts' relapses. These relapses are occasioned not merely by the difference of moral atmosphere, but quite as much by the intellectual abyss between savagery and civilization. Christianity and heathenism--the new and the old--are jumbled together in the convert's mind. His traditional modes of thought are as little changed as his outward environment, and the new ideas are incongruous with them. The result is chaos. So the civilized enquirer into savage belief is constantly brought up in what seems a blind alley. He cannot find the way out, not because there is not a logical issue, but because the landscape is unfamiliar. He attempts to adapt the thoughts of the savage, so far as he has seized them, to his own totally different mental framework; and they are refractory. Not until the effort is abandoned, and patient, unprejudiced search has discovered the true pattern of the puzzle, will it be solved.

For it needs a considerable apprenticeship to enable the observer, in Miss Kingsley's phrase, to "think black," to understand the logic of "black" thought, and accurately, or at least approximately, to reproduce its process and aims. When we are told, therefore, by a writer whom I cited a few pages back that the relation of cause and effect in all but the most patent and mechanical cases is beyond the grasp of the West African Bantu, that statement must be taken with some qualification. It should be explained that it is the relation of cause and effect according to our ideas and our reasoning that is beyond the native grasp, because our axioms are unknown to him; he reasons from quite another set of logical presuppositions. To change the figure, he is a child, but a child familiar only with what we deem a topsy-turvy world, though it is the same world from which we ourselves emerged long ago. If we would comprehend him we must painfully climb down into that world again, breathe its air, familiarize ourselves with its scenes of wonder and of terror, and make intimate companions of all its strange inhabitants. Thus and thus only can we recover the clue that will lead us safely through the shadowy forests and haunted valleys and over the primeval mountain-tops of native thought. Then we shall find that the savage is not so irrational as we have thought him, and that in his wildest divergence from our methods of reasoning he has a method of his own--a method followed once upon a time by our own ancestors, a method from which the peasantry of many a European country is not yet wholly emancipated.

This is to "think black." It is not everybody who can do it: it requires more sympathy and insight than are given to all men. Above all, it requires patience, long and close contact with the native, and the persistent and self-abandoning endeavour to penetrate his thoughts. Some missionaries have achieved it, some travellers, some traders, some colonists, some government officials. Too many of them, alas! have only skimmed the surface of the native mind. Even the latter, however, though they have failed to read the underlying meaning of what they saw, have sometimes taught us what to look for. To that extent the modern school of anthropology is founded on their observations. The training now given in anthropology at the universities and elsewhere utilizes and criticizes the reports of all observers, as well as the conclusions drawn from them by anthropologists at home. That training is of material assistance in fitting new labourers out for fresh fields of enquiry, or for working over again those fields which have been hitherto imperfectly reaped by ill-equipped enquirers. In some measure it supplies the place of longer preliminary intercourse with the man of lower culture; and it has the advantage that it teaches the student what kind of phenomenon to expect--an advantage perhaps not unaccompanied by dangers of its own.

Be that as it may, the information of all kinds, good, bad, and indifferent, already at our service on the subject of the religions of the lower culture has been and is still being subjected to ruthless comparison and criticism. The result of this constant sifting is to put us in possession of a considerable body of material for a sane judgement in regard to some of the beliefs of tribes in various parts of the world and to help us forward on the track of others. We no longer summarily deny the possession of religion to tribes whose practices we do not understand. We no longer attempt to docket beliefs imperfectly apprehended under headings applicable only to the highly developed and literary theology of Europe. We lie under a more insidious temptation--that of the too rapid generalization of the beliefs of the lower culture, for which the groundwork may not as yet exist. But we are learning the lesson that only by unwearied investigation, diligent observation, sympathetic enquiry without prepossession, can we attain to a real grasp of the protean ideas and half-formulated speculations of savage minds.

THE RELATIONS OF RELIGION AND MAGIC

Thus forewarned of the difficulties and dangers of our path, let us proceed to enquire whether there are any general ideas relating to religion disseminated among men in the lower stages of culture, that either are themselves primitive, or can have been derived from an earlier condition of thought discoverable by us.

The religious practices of savage and barbarous peoples are largely based upon ideas which anthropologists have agreed to group together under the comprehensive title of animism. Animism is, to quote Sir Edward Tylor, who was the first to investigate the subject and to use the word in this sense, "the groundwork of the philosophy of religion, from that of savages up to that of civilized man." As he uses the word, it expresses the doctrine which attributes a living and often a separable soul--a soul in any case distinct from the body--alike to human beings, to the lower animals and plants, and even to inanimate objects. Let us note, however, that this soul is not necessarily immaterial. The refined conception of the soul, which we have received from the Greek philosophers, belongs not to the savage. To him, as to the average man of civilization, the notion of an absolutely immaterial being would seem to be unthinkable. At all events it has hardly occurred to him. The soul, to him, may be thin as a vapour, oftentimes invisible as the air; at other times it takes a visible and even tangible form. So far as it is connected with what we know as a living body, the ordinary, familiar form and substance, it is the principle of life. But it is capable of existing independently of the body, at least for a time. The body, on the other hand, is also capable of continuing to exist, and even to live, though not in full health and vigour, for a time without the soul; but a lengthened separation usually means death. This, without taking account of details varying from culture to culture and people to people, may be described as the outline of the savage doctrine of the soul, reduced as nearly as may be into the terms in which we think. Beyond this, and probably as a development of it, is the belief in spirits, beings frequently vague and shadowy, sometimes regarded as more substantial, sometimes inhabiting objects and persons known and definite, at other times unattached, but in all cases of more or less power, which may be exercised to the advantage or to the detriment of their human fellows, or perhaps subordinates. The distinction between spirits and gods is not very easy to formulate, and need not for our present purpose trouble us.

Animism thus conceived is, it is obvious, too complex and elaborate to be really primitive. It appears to be itself derived from a simpler and earlier conception, whereby man attributes to all the objects of external nature life and personality. In other words, the external world is first interpreted by the savage thinker in the terms of his own consciousness; animism, or the distinction of soul and body, is a development necessitated by subsequent observation and the train of reasoning which that observation awakens.

Primitive man is so far away from us, not merely in time but in thought, that we find it difficult to imagine his attempts to grapple with the interpretation of external phenomena. What waves of desire, of curiosity, of wonder, of awe, of terror, of hope, of bewilderment must have rolled through the sluggish dawn of his intellect! As he struggled in his little communities with the evolution of speech, how did those various and perhaps ill-defined emotions come to utterance? He was not naturally speculative. Savage man even now is not, as a rule, speculative, though, as we have seen in the preceding essay, observers who have had opportunities of comparison have noted differences in this respect between one people and another. Everything primitive man saw, everything he heard or felt must have struck his mind primarily in relation to himself--or rather to the community , of which the individual formed a part, to its dangers and its needs. The personal element would dominate his thoughts, and must have found expression in his words. As a matter of fact, it forms everywhere the basis of language. Hence it was impossible for man to interpret external phenomena in any other than personal terms. This necessity may have been an inheritance from a pre-human stage, since there is reason to think that the lower animals project their own sensations to other animals, and even to objects without life. Yet to fix the objective personalities that primitive man thought he saw and felt about him must have taken time and observation. Not all objects claimed his attention in the same degree or with the same insistence. Some would stand out aggressively, would fill him with a sense of power manifested in ways that seemed analogous with his own. Others would long remain comparatively unregarded, until something happened which aroused his interest. His attitude was first of all and intensely practical, not contemplative. His fellow-men, the animals he hunted, the trees whose branches he saw waving in the breeze, the sun and moon overhead going their daily rounds--to all these he would early attach significance: they would easily yield the personal quality. But what of the pools, the hills, the rocks, and so forth? There must have been many things that long abode in the twilight of perception--many things upon which reflection was not yet concentrated. The North American Indian lays a tribute of tobacco at the foot of any strange rock whose form strikes him as he goes by, or strews his gift upon the waters of the lake or stream that bears his canoe. On the top of every pass in the Cordilleras of South America and of every pass in the mountains of China the native leaves a token still more trivial. It may be that his earliest forefather, who set the example of such an offering, did so without any definite conception of a personality behind the phenomenon, but, smitten by fear or awe, simply sought, by the means familiar to him in the case of known personal beings, to conciliate whatever power might lurk beneath an unwonted form. And although a comparatively definite conception of a personality might in time crystallize, to be transformed later by the evolution of animism into the idea of a spirit, yet there must always have remained, after all these crystallizations, the vague and formless Unknown, confronted in all its more prominent manifestations through the medium of an undefined dread of power which might at any time be revealed from it.

In this relation of the personal and the impersonal lies, as it seems to me, the secret of primitive philosophy, if philosophy it may be called, all un-selfconscious as it must have been. There is no written record of man's earliest guesses at the meaning of the universe. Whatever they were, they were limited to his immediate surroundings and the relation of these surroundings to himself. We must judge of them as they are represented in the beliefs and actions of modern, or at all events much later, savages and in those of great historic nations. For all scientific enquirers are agreed that the history of the human mind has been that of a slow evolution from something lower than the lowest savagery known to-day, that it has not everywhere evolved in the same way or to the same degree, and that the course it has taken has left traces, discoverable by close inspection, upon every mental product and in every civilization throughout the world. The testimony on which we have to rely in the investigation is of the most various value, and often most difficult of interpretation. Its difficulties and defects have already been touched upon; nor do I propose further to consider them now. The minute examination and relentless criticism to which it has been subjected have revealed its weakness; they have also revealed its strength. They have left a solid body of evidence from which we may cautiously but confidently reason. What can we learn from it on the point under discussion?

The first thing to be noticed is the fluidity of the savage concept of personality. It is not confined within the bounds of one stable and relatively unchangeable body. You may quite easily be transformed, like the hero of Apuleius' tale, into an ass. Your next-door neighbour, for whom you have the profoundest respect as a prosperous man of business and a churchwarden of exemplary piety, may startle you some morning with a sudden change into a noisy little street-arab, not a tenth of his own portly dimensions, turning a wheel all down his garden path, or into a melancholy cow cropping a bare pittance of grass from his closely trimmed lawn. He and his magnificent wife may even become, like Philemon and Baucis, an oak and a lime-tree before your eyes, or a pair of standing stones upon the moor. None of these metamorphoses would be accounted impossible by peoples in the lower culture. To them the essential incident of the tale of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde would be mere commonplace. The personality which they have known running in one mould can, in their opinion, be directed into, and will run as freely in, another mould, and yet be the same. So hard do such archaic beliefs die, that in remote parts of our own country it is still firmly believed that a witch may assume the form of a hare, and if any bold sportsman succeed in wounding the animal, the injury will afterwards be found on the witch's proper person, testifying beyond dispute to the preservation of her individuality under the temporary change of shape and species.

Shape-shifting, as it is called, may even take place by means of death and a new birth without loss of identity. Miss Kingsley tells us that in West Africa "the new babies as they arrive in the family are shown a selection of small articles belonging to deceased members whose souls are still absent: the thing the child catches hold of identifies him. 'Why, he's Uncle John; see! he knows his own pipe'; or 'That's Cousin Emma; see! she knows her market calabash,' and so on." This belief and corresponding practices are found over a large part of the world. Nor is it necessary that the deceased should be born again in human form, or even of the same sex. A group of tribes in Central Australia have elaborated the doctrine of re-birth to an unusual degree. Two of the tribes, the Warramunga and Urabunna, definitely hold, if we may trust our authorities, that the sex changes with each successive birth. A Mongolian tale relates that a certain Khotogait prince, having been beheaded for conspiracy against the Chinese Emperor, twice reappeared as a child of the Empress, and was identified by the cicatrice on his neck. Both children were destroyed, and he was then born as a hairless bay mare, whose hide is still preserved. In the same way, fish, fruit, worms, stones, any object indeed, may, if it can once enter the body of a woman, be born again and become human. As developed by animism, the doctrine of a new birth has become what we know as that of the Transmigration of Souls, which has played a part in more religions and more philosophies than one.

Moreover, detached portions of the person, as locks of hair, parings of finger-nails, and so forth, are not dead inert matter. They are still endued with the life of their original owner. Nay, garments once worn, or other objects which have been in intimate contact with a human being, are penetrated by his personality, remain as it were united with him for good and ill. It would be no exaggeration to say of this belief that it is universal. Upon it rests much of the practice of witchcraft, as well as of the medicine of the lower culture. The cleft ash through which a child has been drawn for the cure of infantile hernia, bound up and allowed to grow together, continues to sympathize with him in health and sickness as though part of his own body. In ancient Greece maidens on their marriage offered their veils to Hera, the goddess who favoured marriage and aided childbirth; and Athenian women who became pregnant for the first time used to hang up their girdles in the temple of Artemis. These customs were not mere acts of homage; they had a practical intention.

Some votive offerings may perhaps be interpreted as surrogates of human sacrifice. Others, made when the votary is suffering from sickness, may be intended to transfer the disease. These explanations are in many cases very questionable; and a large number of offerings remain that do not easily submit to be thus explained. The Greek women just mentioned had no disease to be returned to the custody of the goddess, ready for another victim. In view of future contingencies they placed in her care objects identified with themselves; they brought into physical touch with her a portion of their own personality. Convergence of more than one rite, similar in outward form but distinct in origin, has doubtless occurred very often in human history. But the ambiguity which would follow is not always to be traced on a careful analysis. It is obvious, at all events, that if an article of my clothing in a witch's hands may cause me to suffer and die, the same article in contact with a beneficent power may relieve my pain, restore me to health, or promote my general prosperity. My shirt or stocking, or a shred from it, placed upon a sacred bush, or thrust into a sacred well--a lock of my hair laid upon a sacred image--my name written upon the walls of a temple--a stone from my hand cast upon a sacred cairn--a remnant of my food thrown into a sacred waterfall or suspended from a sacred tree--a nail driven by my hand into the trunk of a tree--is thenceforth in immediate contact with divinity. It is a portion of my personality enveloped with the sanctity of the divine being; and so long as it remains there I am myself in contact with the same divine being, whoever he may be, and derive all the advantages incident to the contact.

Such beliefs as these are world-wide; they are a commonplace of anthropology; and it would be waste of time to multiply examples. They exhibit a concept of personality imperfectly crystallized. It is still fluid and vague, only to become entirely definite under the influence of trained reason and larger and more scientific knowledge. But, such as it is, there is behind and around it the still vaguer, the unlimited territory of the Impersonal, because the Unknown. Every object on which the attention has been fixed, every object, therefore, that may be said to be known, has its own personality--every object, whether living, or, according to our ideas, not-living. What remains is the stuff out of which personalities are formed as it is gradually reduced into relations with the savage observer. These personalities do not necessarily correspond even to anything objective. They may be creations of the excited imagination. It is sufficient for the savage that they seem to be, and to have a relation to himself which he cannot otherwise interpret. His emancipation from this state of mind is slow, though among some peoples in the lower culture it is more perceptible than among others. But it leaves its traces everywhere--there, most of all, where emotion is most acute and permanent, where hopes and fears are most overwhelming, in the sphere of religion.

Now every personality is endowed with qualities which enable it to persist, to influence others, and even to overcome, subjugate, and destroy them for its own ends. No more than ourselves could the primeval savage avoid being influenced and often overmatched by the charm and wiles of woman, the wisdom of the elders of his horde, the dauntless might of the warrior. The non-human personalities with which he came in contact possessed qualities not less remarkable than those of the human. The strength, the fierceness, the agility of the lion, the speed of the antelope, the cunning of the fox, the lofty forms and endurance of the forest trees, their response to every breath of wind, and the kindly shelter they yielded to birds and beasts and men, the fantastic forms and stern patience of the rocks, the smooth and smiling treachery of the lake, the gentle murmur and benign largess of the river, the splendour, the burning heat of the sun, the changeableness and movement of the clouds are a few of the more obvious qualities attached to the myriad personalities with which men found themselves environed. These personalities and their qualities would impress them all the more because of the mystery that perpetually masked them. Mystery magnified them. Hence every non-human personality was apt to be conceived in larger than human terms, and its qualities were larger than human.

Not merely was every personality, human and other, endowed with qualities, but by virtue of those qualities it possessed a potentiality and an atmosphere of its own. The successful warrior and huntsman by more than his successes, by his confidence and his brag, his readiness to quarrel and his vindictiveness, or the many-wintered elder, wise and slow to wrath, experienced in war and forestry, of far-reaching purpose and subtle in execution, would be enshrined in a belief in his powers, surrounded with a halo of which we still see a dim, a very dim, reflection in the touching regard entertained for a political leader or the worship paid to an ecclesiastical dignitary. Nor would this atmosphere surround only important or successful men. Everyone is conscious of powers of some sort, and everyone would attribute to others capabilities larger or smaller. Some would possess in their own consciousness and in the eyes of their fellows a very small modicum of power for good or evil. The mere glance or voice of others would inspire terror or confidence. This potentiality, this atmosphere would often cling with greater intensity to non-human beings, objective or imaginary. The snake, the bird, the elephant, the sun, the invisible wind, the unknown wielder of the lightning, would be richly endowed. None, human or non-human, would be wholly without it.

"Language affords means of approaching nearer to a definition of this religious sentiment. In the Algonkin dialects of the Sauk, Fox, and Kickapoo, a rigid distinction of gender is made between things with life and things without life.... Accordingly, when they refer to the manitou in the sense of a virtue, a property, an abstraction, they employ the form expressive of inanimate gender. When the manitou becomes associated with an object, then the gender becomes less definite....

"When the property becomes the indwelling element of an object, then it is natural to identify the property with animate being. It is not necessary that the being shall be the tangible representative of a natural object." This the writer illustrates from the account given by a Fox Indian of the sweat-lodge, in the course of which he observes: "The manitou comes from the place of his abode in the stone, ... when the water is sprinkled on it. It comes out in the steam, and in the steam it enters the body wherever it finds entrance. It moves up and down and all over inside the body, driving out everything that inflicts pain. Before the manitou returns to the stone it imparts some of its nature to the body. That is why one feels so well after having been in the sweat-lodge." The writer's comment on this is instructive. "The sentiment," he says, "behind the words rests upon the consciousness of a belief in an objective presence; it rests on the sense of an existing reality with the quality of self-dependence; it rests on the perception of a definite, localized personality. Yet at the same time there is the feeling that the apprehended reality is without form and without feature. This is the dominant notion in regard to the virtue abiding in the stone of the sweat-lodge; it takes on the character of conscious personality with some attributes of immanence and design."

The conclusion is "that there is an unsystematic belief in a cosmic mysterious property which is believed to be existing everywhere in nature; that the conception of the property can be thought of as impersonal, but that it becomes obscure and confused when the property becomes identified with objects in nature; that it manifests itself in various forms; and that its emotional effect awakens a sense of mystery; that there is a lively appreciation of its miraculous efficacy; and that its interpretation is not according to any regular rule, but is based on one's feelings rather than on one's knowledge."

In the foregoing passages it will be perceived that the missionary is doing something more than describing rites he had no doubt often witnessed; he is labouring also to translate into English and incorporate with his account the explanations he had extracted from his Polynesian friends. He seems to exhaust his spiritual vocabulary in speaking of "powers," "influence," "the communication of attributes," of "the essence of the gods." But when he recalls the words of the priest, they are even stronger and at the same time simpler than any of these expressions: the god is prayed to "abide in" the feathers; he is declared to "inhabit" them. If these be an accurate translation of the words employed, it would seem that not merely the power but a portion of the personality of the god passed into the feathers, and that while his chief residence was still at the great temple where his principal image dwelt, he was also present whithersoever the bunches of feathers which had been consecrated by deposition within or upon it were carried. He himself inhabited them; and it was this fact that "identified" the king, as the wearer of such feathers, with the gods.

Thus we find in widely separated regions, among widely different races and in cultures the most diverse, the idea of mystic power or potentiality, often concentrated in individual persons or things, but in effect spread throughout the world. Some peoples have been more alive to the impersonal character of this power, and have ascribed to it, wherever manifested, a unity of origin akin to the scientific concept of force behind all phenomena. To others it has assumed a more individual character. It clings in any case to personality and tends to become inseparable from it; but the impersonal aspect is never wholly wanting.

The patient reader will have observed the difficulty experienced alike by scientific explorers and missionaries in expounding this idea in its varied forms and applications. The difficulty has not arisen wholly from its strangeness. It is due in large part to its want of clarity. The savage himself does not know; he has rarely had occasion, and still more rarely inclination, to reflect on his beliefs. He has had no schools of science or philosophy to think out his thoughts for him. Hence they are ill defined; like clouds in the sky, they take first one shape and then another. Yet those very clouds, by comparison with the formless vapour from whence they have been condensed, are continents of solidity and definiteness.

At this point we are confronted with the difficult questions What is Religion? and What is Magic?

Religion is notoriously hard to define. Every man thinks he knows what it is; but when he comes to define it he never succeeds, clever as he may be, in framing a definition generally acceptable. The ordinary man, with a particular religion--the only one of which he has had any experience--in his eye, defines it to square with that religion: if others cannot be brought into the definition, so much the worse for them. The anthropologist, whatever his bias, fares no better than the ordinary man. He has his theories; and in expounding them he is frequently called upon to define religion. In practice his theories are hardly a safer guide than the other's prejudices or ignorance. Hence a definition of religion usually begs the question.

We will confine our attention here to some of the recent attempts made by anthropologists to define religion.

To Professor Jevons the fundamental principle of religion is "belief in the wisdom and goodness of God"; "the revelation of God to man's consciousness was immediate, direct, and carried conviction with it"; and the original religion was monotheism, albeit a low form of that faith. This may perchance fit the religion of the Hebrews as seen through theological spectacles; but it definitely excludes Buddhism, at all events in its primitive form. For though Buddhism arose out of an earlier religion, and in a comparatively high stage of civilization, and though its founder admitted the existence of other intelligences than man, he would have nothing to do with them. Sir Edward Tylor surmounts this difficulty by his famous "minimum definition of religion--the belief in Spiritual Beings." But it is only to land himself in another. For religion is nothing if not practical: the mere belief is not religion. As Lord Avebury points out: "A belief in ghosts is in itself no evidence of religion. A ghost is not a god, though it may become one." Australian savages believe in ghosts--and tremble; but of very few of them is anything approaching to worship recorded. Conscious of this objection, Professor Frazer employs the word Religion to express "a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life. Thus defined, religion consists of two elements, a theoretical and a practical, namely, a belief in powers higher than man and an attempt to propitiate or please them.... Hence belief and practice or, in theological language, faith and works are equally essential to religion, which cannot exist without both of them."

This definition supplies the obvious deficiency in Tylor's; but it does not touch the case of Buddhism. And there is one important respect in which all these definitions fail. None of them explicitly recognizes the social character of the religions of the lower culture. For aught that appears, religion might be the business of solitary men, founded on their speculations, hopes and fears, uncommunicated to and unshared by others, their own individual concern. But, in savage life at least, religion is pre-eminently social. Individual rites there may be; they are, however, parts of a whole, subordinate to the common observances and common beliefs on which they are founded. The individualist idea--the supreme necessity of saving one's own soul--has no place in them. St Simeon Stylites and the Hindu fakir are equally the product of a much higher development.

A recent French writer, impressed with these objections to the foregoing and similar definitions, has attempted to formulate one more comprehensive and more subtle. Summing up a long discussion, he concludes that "a religion is a connected system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred--that is to say, separated, interdicted--things,--beliefs and practices that unite into one moral community, called Church, all who adhere to them." This, however, is not Religion . Religion, referring of course to the theoretical side or belief, he says elsewhere, "is before everything a system of notions by means of which individuals interpret the society of which they are members, and the obscure but intimate relations they sustain with it." And he goes on to say of the practical side that the function of religious rites is to tighten the bonds that unite the individual to the society. In other words, Religion is Society realizing itself. Before considering this definition, let us turn to Magic.

Professor Frazer draws a sharp line between religion and magic. The latter is founded on the assumption "that in nature one event follows another necessarily and invariably without the intervention of any spiritual or personal agency.... The magician does not doubt that the same causes will always produce the same effects, that the performance of the proper ceremony, accompanied by the appropriate spell, will inevitably be attended by the desired results, unless indeed his incantations should chance to be thwarted and foiled by the more potent charms of another sorcerer." The laws governing the practical application of this assumption are resolved into two: "first, that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed. The former principle may be called the Law of Similarity, the latter the Law of Contact or Contagion. From the first of these principles, namely, the Law of Similarity, the magician infers that he can produce any effect he desires merely by imitating it: from the second he infers that whatever he does to a material object will affect equally the person with whom the object was once in contact, whether it formed part of his body or not. Charms based on the Law of Similarity may be called Homoeopathic or Imitative Magic. Charms based on the Law of Contact or Contagion may be called Contagious Magic." Magic therefore is the result of a mistaken association of ideas. It preceded religion. But when man began to find out "the inherent falsehood and barrenness of magic," when "men for the first time recognized their inability to manipulate at pleasure certain natural forces which hitherto they had believed to be completely within their control," they fell back on the theory that there were other beings like themselves who directed the course of nature and brought about the effects they had hitherto believed to be dependent on their own magic. To them they turned in their helplessness, and thus evolved religion. Accordingly, magic and religion have always been hostile. Magic has indeed in many ages and in many lands permeated religion, has often gone the length of fusing and amalgamating with it. But this fusion was not primitive: they are originally and fundamentally distinct.

Destructive criticism is comparatively easy; anyone can make objections. Not everyone can substitute a sounder theory in place of that destroyed. It is when Messrs Hubert and Mauss come to construct their own theory of magic that they find themselves in difficulty. For they have to admit that in magic the same collective forces operate as in religion. Faith is as necessary to magic as to religion; it is as necessary to the magician as to the priest. Trickery no doubt there is; that has not always been excluded from religion. But there is much more than trickery. The magician believes in his own powers; and he believes all the more strongly because his public believes. The faith of society and his own faith act and react upon one another. But this is precisely the case with the priest and his religion.

If we examine the magician's methods we can hardly distinguish them from those employed in religion. The attempt to bewitch an enemy by means of his clothing or a fragment of his body is precisely the same in principle as the proceedings already described at the inauguration of a Polynesian king or the communication of the virtues of mediaeval saints by means of their relics. It is true that in the one case the object of the ceremony is maleficent, in the other cases it is beneficent. If that were a real distinction, the processes would still remain analogous. It is not real, however; for the sanctity of Polynesian kings has its maleficent side, and the relics of the saints have been often employed to the injury of an enemy, as well as to the healing of a friend. Nor can it be said that magic is purely an art, a technique, while religion is dependent upon higher and independent wills. The aid of spirits is often invoked in magic; spell passes easily into prayer, and prayer into spell. The accounts that have reached us of the Witches' Sabbath may be the product of hallucination, or confessions extorted from victims who said what they were expected to say. But at least they bear witness to the general belief of the times, which regarded magic rather as a counter-religion than as a mere technique. Professor Frazer's reply to this is of course that such a belief, such practices, were the result of a later fusion of religion and magic. That the fusion was not primitive is, however, incapable of proof. As we shall see by and by, in the lowest societies of which we have evidence practices usually regarded as magical are indistinguishable from those regarded as religious. The mutual hostility of religion and magic, where it exists, is, in truth, the result of a later development.

All this is equally true of religion. The authors see therefore that magic is, like religion, a social phenomenon; it has parallel rites with those of religion; it has parallel postulates and beliefs. To distinguish it from religion they are driven to erect into a test the individualistic aims of its practitioners, or of those on whose behalf it is called in aid. Its true distinction is, according to this, that it tends to be isolated, to be furtive, to be put into motion on behalf of individuals and against the community; its methods become arbitrary; it ceases to be a common obligation. Individuals in magic have appropriated the ideas and the collective forces generated by religion, and turned them to their own ends. Religion, in short, is social in its aims, magic is antisocial. That is the only difference between them. In this distinction Professor Durkheim agrees. Everywhere, he says, religious life has for its substratum a definite group; even what are called private cults are celebrated by the family or the corporation or society to which they are restricted. On the other hand, though magical beliefs are widely diffused and practised by large classes of a population, their effect is not to bind together those who adhere to them and unite them into a group having one common life: there is no magical Church. Between the magician and those who consult him there is no durable bond. He has clients, not a church. His relations with them are accidental, not permanent; and they may have no relations with one another; they may even be ignorant of one another's existence.

The man who, in Europe or elsewhere, makes use of spells to injure individuals, or even of the Evil Eye, is practising magic: he is doing an antisocial act. The man who defends himself with a gesture, with spells, or by loading his body with amulets, is not doing an antisocial act; he is simply protecting himself. But is he practising religion or magic? Be it remembered here that a man may have the Evil Eye without knowing it. Pius the Ninth, Vicar of Christ, was reputed to have the Evil Eye. Nothing was so fatal as his blessing; the faithful quailed at his glance and doubtless protected themselves with amulets. So the Boloki of the Congo hold that "one can have witchcraft without knowing it." In these cases there can be no antisocial intention. Among the Thonga of South-Eastern Africa a common procedure is to point at one's enemy with the index-finger. This is antisocial: it is witchcraft. Before they go to war a ceremony is performed by an old woman, naked and in a state of ritual purity, over the warriors, and an incantation is muttered, to enable them to kill their foes. This may not be antisocial; but is it anything else than magic? True, the men murmur prayers to their ancestral spirits for help; but then religion is penetrated with magic. Even Professor Durkheim admits that he cannot show a solution of continuity between them; the frontiers between their respective domains are often undefined, unfixed. At all events he cannot say where the one ends and the other begins.

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