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.
{67}
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.[67.1] 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 (apparently) 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.”[67.2] 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.”[67.3] 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 {68} are equally
essential to religion, which cannot exist without both of
them.”[68.1]
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 (_solidaire_) 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.”[68.2] This,
however, is not Religion (with a capital {69} letter). 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.[69.1]
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 (unconsciously indeed, for the primitive magician
“never analyses the mental processes on which his practice is based”)
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.”[69.2] 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. {70} 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
Homœopathic or Imitative Magic. Charms based on the Law of Contact or
Contagion may be called Contagious Magic.”[70.1] 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.[70.2] 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.[70.3]
In a powerful criticism of this theory Messrs Hubert and Mauss, two
French anthropologists, have pointed {71} out that Professor Frazer
has omitted one essential item. The effect of a magical rite is not
attained merely by sympathy. All magic is not sympathetic magic,
whether that sympathy be expressed by the Law of Similarity or the Law
of Contact. Moreover, even in sympathetic magic the sympathetic
formula is insufficient to account for the facts. Sympathy is only the
means by which the magical force passes from the magician to the
object at which it is aimed; it is not the magical force itself. That
still remains to be explained. It cannot be wholly explained by the
properties attributed to the materials used in the magical rite, and
that for three reasons. In the first place, the notion of property is
normally not the only one present. The employment of substances having
magical properties is ritually conditioned. They must be collected
according to rule, at certain times, in certain places, with certain
means, and after certain ritual preparations. When collected, they
must be employed according to certain rules and with the accompaniment
of rites, often exceedingly elaborate, which permit the utilization of
their qualities. In the second place, the magical property is not
conceived as naturally, absolutely, and specifically inherent in the
thing to which it is attached, but always as relatively extrinsic and
conferred. Sometimes it is conferred by a rite. At other times it is
explained by a myth; and in this case it is clearly regarded as
accidental and acquired. It often resides in secondary characters,
such as form, colour, rarity, and so forth. In the third place, the
notion of magical property suffices so little that it is always
confounded with a very generalized idea of force and nature. The idea
of the effect to be produced may indeed be precise; but that of the
special qualities of the substance used to produce it, and their
immediate action, is always obscure. {72} In fact, the idea of things
having undefined virtues is always prominent in magic. Salt, blood,
saliva, coral, iron, crystals, precious metals, the mountain ash, the
birch, the sacred fig-tree, camphor, incense, tobacco are among the
many objects which embody general magical powers, capable of all sorts
of applications. Corresponding with this is the extreme vagueness of
the designations applied to magical properties, such as divine,
sacred, mysterious, lucky, unlucky, and equivalent expressions. The
notion of property passes over easily into power and spirit. Property
and power are inseparable terms; property and spirit are often
confounded. The virtues or properties of a thing often belong to it as
the abode of a spirit. Spirits are indeed often the agents of magic.
It is hardly too much to say that there is no magical rite in which
their presence is not in some degree possible, though not expressly
mentioned. Magic works in a special atmosphere, if not in the world of
demons, at least in conditions in which their presence is possible.
Beyond doubt, one of the essential characteristics of magical
causality is that it is spiritual. Yet the idea of spiritual
personalities ill represents the general anonymous forces which
constitute the power of magicians. It gives no account of the virtue
of words or gestures, the power of a look or of the intention, the
influence or the mode of action of a rite. It does not explain why the
magical rite controls and directs spiritual existences, any more than
the sympathetic formula explains why the rite acts directly on the
object.[72.1]
{73}
I do not tarry now to give illustrations in detail of the various
points in the argument I have here summarized. It is clear that
Professor Frazer has overlooked something of importance, from one fact
alone to which he alludes, but of which he fails to observe the vast
implications. The commonest excuse made by the magician for the
failure of his spells is that some other magician of greater power is
thwarting him. There must therefore be degrees of power among
magicians, however it be acquired, and whether temporary or permanent,
inherent or due to the possession of greater knowledge or more
powerful spells. But that is a factor that tumbles the whole edifice
of the theory down. It introduces another element--the personal
potentiality. The same causes do not always produce the same effects,
apart from the personal element; the performance of the proper
ceremony, accompanied by the appropriate spell, is not inevitably
attended by the desired results; the magician has not reached the
scientific conclusion “that in nature one event follows another
necessarily and invariably, without the intervention of any spiritual
or personal agency.” Nay, the intervention of the magician himself is
proof to the contrary.
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; {74} 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 mediæval
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 {75} religious.
The mutual hostility of religion and magic, where it exists, is, in
truth, the result of a later development.
Like religion, the chief factor in magic--that by which it
accomplishes its ends--is the mystic force that is released and set at
work by the rite or the spell. Behind the sympathetic formula, behind
the notions of property and of spirits, there is another notion still
more mysterious, the notion of power, vague, impersonal, always
operating, irresistible, or depending for its efficaciousness on
conditions not altogether at command. The investigations of the last
chapter have disclosed to us what this power is. By its very vagueness
and impersonality it enshrines possibilities illimitable. It may be
materialized, localized, personalized; but it ceases not to be
spiritual, to act at a distance, and that by direct connection, if not
by contact, to be mobile and to move without movement, to be
impersonal though clothed in personal forms, to be divisible yet
continuous. It is this notion that accounts in the last resort for the
phenomena of magic. Without it, magic is incomprehensible; like a
sentence without the copula, the action, the affirmation is wanting.
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
{76} 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.[76.1]
But this very charge of being antisocial is brought by many dominant
religions against their rivals. It was substantially the charge
brought against the early Christians by the Pagans. It is to-day the
charge formulated by fanatical Russian Christians against the Jews.
Here in the west of Europe it is, in a somewhat vaguer form, the
reproach of orthodox Christians against Agnostics and all shades of
Rationalists. To apply it as a test to distinguish religion from magic
is to qualify the same practices as religious or as magical, according
as they have social or antisocial ends. And how shall we define these
ends? The act which at one stage of civilization is antisocial, at
another is often a social duty. To attempt a change in this respect
may be antisocial as regards the existing society, though it may
result in ultimate benefit; and the attempt may be made from purely
individualist motives, for purely individualist ends. {77} Nay, the
same act may be in the same society social or antisocial, according to
circumstances. In Central Australia the man who kills an enemy by
means of _arungquiltha_, which may be rendered _evil magic_, commits
an antisocial act; he does it in secret: it would be dangerous to let
it become known. But if a woman run away from her husband and cannot
be recovered, he may lawfully avenge himself with the aid of
_arungquiltha_. He is performing an act of social justice, and will be
joined in doing it by the men of his local group. In the same way
vengeance may be taken for a murder, real or supposed, by a
_Kurdaitcha_ party, which performs what we should designate as a
magical ceremony to cause the victim to sicken and die. This is held
to be a social, not an antisocial act, for it is fulfilling the social
duty of revenge. It is done with the sanction of the council of
elders.[77.1] In Melanesia, as we have seen, all religion consists in
getting _mana_ for oneself, not for the benefit of others; though
doubtless the _mana_, when obtained, is often used for the advantage
of the community.[77.2] Often it is not. “A man will commonly have
his _keramo_, a _tindalo_ [a ghost that is worshipped] of killing, who
will help him in fighting or in slaying his private enemy.” The
_tindalo_, albeit the object of religious worship, has no prejudice
against antisocial acts. His worshipper, before going out to commit
what we should call murder, performs an elaborate ceremony,
sacrificing to the ghost, and cursing his victim. If he succeed in
killing him, the _tindalo_ gets as his share of the spoil the ghost of
the deceased, and is invoked to give _mana_ in return.[77.3]
The man who, in Europe or elsewhere, makes use of {78} 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.”[78.1] 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.[78.2] 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.[78.3] At all events he cannot say where the one
ends and the other begins.
Perhaps, however, not the intention but the tendency, whether social
or antisocial, is the test. In that case it is hard to conceive
anything more antisocial than the operations of the Holy Inquisition.
They were, it is {79} true, not performed by supernatural
instrumentality, or for supernatural purposes. To that extent they are
not directly parallel with the rites we have been considering. But
they were carried on by persons consecrated to religion, as religious
acts, surrounded by religious rites, by exorcisms, imprecations,
conjurations, shielded by the Church with all her powers, and
sanctioned, if not set in motion, by the highest ecclesiastical
authorities. They desolated every society where the institution was
introduced.[79.1] Secrecy has been already noted as a characteristic
of magic as opposed to religion. Naturally antisocial acts are
performed in secret. The deeds of the Holy Office were done in the
deepest dens of the building, and surrounded by impervious precautions
against discovery, except the last dread act. In that consummation of
cruelty, that supreme Act of Faith, as it was called, its officials
nominally took no part; though it was well known that they insisted
upon it relentlessly and with every terror, ghostly or secular, which
they knew so well how to wield. On the other hand, the African
sorcerer, conjuring the rain or the sunshine so necessary for the
crops, performs an eminently social work, and does it very often in
the open eye of day and before the assembled people. When a
fisher-boat was launched in the north-east of Scotland a bottle of
whisky used to be broken on the prow or stern with the words:
“Frae rocks an’ saands
An’ barren lands
An’ ill men’s hands
Keep’s free.
Weel oot, weel in,
Wi’ a gueede shot.”
{80}
“On the arrival of the boat at its new home the skipper’s wife, in
some of the villages, took a lapful of corn or barley, and sowed it
over the boat.”[80.1] These are not antisocial acts; they have no
antisocial tendency; and they are not performed in secret. Must we
account them religious, and the operations of the Inquisition magical?
Thus antisocial character is no sufficient test of magic as opposed to
religion. Professor Doutté, dealing with magic as developed in Islam,
adheres generally to the views of Messrs Hubert and Mauss. He
proposes, however, another definition. Quoting with approval the late
M. Marillier’s observation that magic is “the action on the without by
the within,”[80.2] he remarks that the savage has not yet made a
sufficient distinction between subject and object; he does not
differentiate himself from the universe. And he concludes that magic,
invented under the pressure of need, is only the objectivation of
desire under the form of an extended force, singular, bound to
gestures representative of the phenomenon desired and mechanically
producing it. If the savage externalize this magical force so far that
he ends by personifying it, we have the genesis of a god; the god, in
fact, may be a personified _mana_. A god can only be anthropomorphic;
he is the psycho-physical objectivation of man in phenomena.[80.3]
This brings Professor {81} Doutté much nearer to Dr Frazer’s
position, and might form the basis of an _eirenicon_ between them. For
though he is fully aware that much in magic is indistinguishable from
religion, he holds it to be a subsequent development: magic has so far
modelled itself on religion and borrowed its theistic methods of
procedure. It presents itself as an anti-religion. Under Christianity
it reaches its ultimate term with the Black Mass and the cult of the
devil: Islam does not lend itself so well to hideous parody. Yet
Professor Doutté, after flirting with Professor Frazer’s opinion,
comes back to the orthodoxy of the French sociologists: the real
distinction between religion and magic is that the one is social--it
sustains the life of the society; the other applies its rites to
strictly personal ends--it is antisocial. The one is magic lawful and
even obligatory; the other is magic useless or injurious to society,
and it is condemned and interdicted. Islam even recognizes white or
religious magic; the Prophet himself recommended it. Ibn Khaldoûn, a
great Mohammedan jurist, can find, indeed, no solid distinction
between the miracle of the saint and the prodigy wrought by the
sorcerer, save that of the morality of its aim. The test of morality
is what is permitted by the Law. That which is permitted by the Law is
moral; the rest is immoral. It comes to this, then, that a miracle is
legitimate magic, and magic is a forbidden miracle.[81.1]
The same difficulty in severing magic from religion is experienced by
one of the acutest writers who has considered the subject. “Magic and
religion,” says Dr Marett, “according to the view I would support,
belong {82} to the same department of human experience.… Together
they belong to the supernormal world, the _x_-region of experience,
the region of mental twilight. Magic I take to include all bad ways,
and religion all good ways, of dealing with the supernormal--bad and
good, of course, not as we may happen to judge them, but as the
society concerned judges them. Sometimes, indeed, the people
themselves hardly know where to draw the line between the two; and in
that case the anthropologist cannot well do it for them. But every
society thinks witchcraft bad. Witchcraft consists in leaguing oneself
with supernormal powers of evil in order to effect selfish and
antisocial ends. Witchcraft then is genuine magic--black magic, of the
devil’s colour.”[82.1] Presumably white magic--magic performed for
good and social ends--is not magic; it is a part of religion,
notwithstanding that precisely the same means may be employed as in
witchcraft--black magic. For Dr Marett adds: “Every primitive society
also distinguishes certain salutary ways of dealing with supernormal
powers. All these ways taken together constitute religion.”[82.2]
Coming more particularly to define religion, he says: “Savage life has
few safeguards. Crisis is a frequent, if intermittent, element in it.
Hunger, sickness and war are examples of crisis. Birth and death are
crises. Marriage is usually regarded by humanity as a crisis. So is
initiation--the turning-point in one’s career, when one steps out into
the world of men. Now what in terms of mind does crisis mean? It means
that one is at one’s wits’ end; that the ordinary and expected has
been replaced by the {83} extraordinary and unexpected; that we are
projected into the world of the unknown.… Psychologically regarded,
then, the function of religion is to restore men’s confidence when it
is shaken by crisis.… Religion is the facing of the unknown. It is
the courage in it that brings comfort.” Sociologically, “a religion is
the effort to face crisis, so far as that effort is organized by
society in some particular way. A religion is congregational--that is
to say, serves the ends of a number of persons simultaneously. It is
traditional--that is to say, has served the ends of successive
generations of persons. Therefore inevitably it has standardized a
method. It involves a routine, a ritual. Also, it involves some sort
of conventional doctrine, which is, as it were, the inner side of the
ritual--its lining.”[83.1]
On this definition two observations may be made. The first is that it
does not exclude any rites performed for social ends, or for
individual ends, so far as they are not definitely antisocial. The
Australian husband meets the crisis of desertion by his wife by means
of _arungquiltha_. He performs an act organized by society to meet
this very crisis--on the definition, therefore, a religious act. But
if by precisely the same process he attempt to slay his enemy, he is
guilty of magic. Or is the wife’s desertion not a crisis in the sense
attached to the word by Dr Marett? Perhaps it is a relief, a solution
of a domestic crisis.
The second observation is that the definition ignores the whole of
life not occupied by crises. When the Californian Hupa awakes in the
morning and sees the dawn, it cannot be said that he is at his wits’
end, that the ordinary and expected has been replaced by the
extraordinary and unexpected. What does he do? He {84} greets the dawn
with a silent prayer that he may see many dawns, for he regards it as
a person who is benevolently inclined to him.[84.1] This surely is
religion. The point is met by the further statement that “the religion
of a savage is part of his custom; nay, rather it is his whole custom
so far as it appears sacred--so far as it coerces him by way of his
imagination. Between him and the unknown stands nothing but his
custom. It is his all-in-all, his stand-by, his faith and his hope.
Being thus the sole source of his confidence, his custom, so far as
his imagination plays about it, becomes his ‘luck.’ We may say that
any and every custom, in so far as it is regarded as lucky, is a
religious rite.”[84.2] In that case religion is much more than the
facing of the unknown, the organized effort to face crisis. It is
custom coercing man by way of his imagination. A convenient custom
coerces by way of their imagination weary women at Tlemcen in Algeria
not to sweep out the house for three days at the New Year, so that
they may not lose their luck.[84.3] Can we legitimately call this
religion? Or take another case. There are people in England who will
not utter a boast, or tell a small social fib, without taking the
precaution to touch wood. I have known educated women drag a chair
across the room to a visitor who had just boasted of immunity from a
trifling ailment, in order that she might touch wood. Despite their
education, they were coerced by way of their imagination to this
little ceremony. There must be thousands of things done merely for
luck, and done habitually, by peoples alike in barbarism and in
civilization. Some of them probably are relics of a once living
belief. About others there is no such presumption; {85} yet they
exercise the same constraint. Does that make them religious rites?
Does it make even those that once were portions of some living belief,
but are so no longer, religious rites now? Of course it is all a
matter of definition of terms. But a definition of religion which
would include all these would be catholic indeed.
The criticisms in this chapter involve no reflection on the
perspicacity of scientific writers who are trying to obtain a clear
vision of religion and magic and of their specific differences. But
they do aim at illustrating the futility of the attempt absolutely to
define anything so fluid and elusive as religion.[85.1] Both religion
and magic owe their origin to society; they are born and nurtured in a
social atmosphere. Both are concerned with forces mysterious,
far-reaching, enveloping and constraining {86} men and things. These
forces are not always personal, though their evolution usually takes a
personal direction. The means used by both are similar, because the
forces are the same, or at least alike. Spell and prayer are very near
akin; the one passes insensibly into the other. And the material means
common to both are chosen arbitrarily or according to some fancied
symbolism, and employed in closely parallel ways. There is, in short,
no decided boundary between religion and magic.
The task remains, notwithstanding, of defining the words for the
purposes of the following pages. It is hopeless to attempt to
harmonize the definitions we have considered. Whatever definition we
adopt, it is clear that we cannot so express it as to confine religion
within its own bounds, or to outlaw magic from the territory occupied
by its rival. Yet a working definition is needed. In framing it regard
ought to be paid to the ordinary meaning of the words: the definition
must not be arbitrary.
Now the word Magic, by the usage of centuries, is concerned not so
much with aim or tendency as with method. It conveys the notion of
power, by whatsoever means acquired, wielded by the magician as his
own, and not as that of a higher being whose coöperation is only
obtained by supplication and self-abasement. Supplication,
self-abasement, flattery are the religious means of winning the help
of divinities. Where higher beings, whether called gods or devils, or
by the more ambiguous title of spirits, are invoked by spell,
compliance with the call is not dependent on their goodwill; the
command is irresistible; and the procedure is magical. Sacrifice is
utilized in both procedures; but it has a very different value in the
one and the other. In the one it operates as a communion with the
divinity, as a gift to {87} win favour which he is by no means bound
to grant, or as an atonement for wrong. In the other it is a condition
on the fulfilment of which the desire of him who offers it is
accomplished, inevitably and by compulsion. In such a case he who
offers the sacrifice is not a worshipper; he is a master of the beings
to whom it is offered. True, they are sometimes gods. In the religion
of the Hindus “prayers, penances, and sacrifices are supposed to
possess an inherent and actual value, in no degree depending upon the
disposition or motive of the person who performs them. They are drafts
upon Heaven, for which the Gods cannot refuse payment. The worst men,
bent upon the worst designs, have in this manner obtained power which
has made them formidable to the Supreme Deities themselves.”[87.1]
Thus has Southey succinctly stated the belief on which his poem of
_The Curse of Kehama_ is built. Here by _prayers_ are meant liturgical
_formulæ_, which everywhere tend to degenerate into magical spells.
Penances are in the nature of sacrifices. Or they are taboos that
preserve and enhance the force and influence of the suppliant. Both
alike are a magical process, in the sense in which the word Magic is
generally employed. The constraining power of sacrifices was also a
tenet of Egyptian religion, at all events in its last ages.[87.2]
Have analogous beliefs in the magical powers of a rite even yet
disappeared from Christianity?
This then is the sense in which I venture to think the words Magic and
Magical should be employed. It is based upon their general, if
somewhat vague, usage; and it is therefore intelligible to the
ordinary reader without recourse to a special definition. It is
substantially that of Professor Frazer, save that it affirms nothing
concerning {88} the origin of the power active in magical practices:
it simply takes them as they are--again an undeniable convenience. It
follows that for our purpose Religion will be confined to cultual
systems, whose objects, so far as they are personal, are endowed with
free will, are to be approached with true worship, and may or may not
grant the prayers of their suppliants. Here also we have common usage
on our side, with all its advantages. In this use of the word
Religion, where the object is impersonal, or is but vaguely personal,
it is none the less treated with reverence and submission, as
something transcending man; it is the object of an emotional attitude,
actively directed towards it. The object thus, even where it is not
personal, tends to become so. Buddhism, in its original form, and
similar religions are the product of comparatively high civilizations.
The puritan severity of their primitive thought and practice was
speedily relaxed; they acquired personal gods, and thus liberated
themselves from a rule of life based upon philosophical considerations
and the effort to escape without the aid of the higher personalities,
of which they despaired, from the evils by which they felt themselves
oppressed. In the lower civilizations, as we have seen, no sooner is
an impersonal power conceived as acting than it assumes personal
characteristics. When once the attention is concentrated upon any
manifestation of it, these characteristics, originally vague, are
likely to be emphasized, and may grow into true personalities. In
magic, on the other hand, the impersonal power does not so readily
become thus transformed, because the attention fastens on the personal
agent, the magician, rather than on the power by which he operates.
When all is said, however, religion is (ideally, at least)
social--that is to say, moral--in its aims and tendencies, {89}
whereas magic lends itself to individualist aims. Religion binds the
society together by raising the individual above himself, and teaching
him to subordinate his desires and actions to the general good; magic
has no compunction in assisting to carry out the wishes of the
individual, though they may be contrary to the interests of the
society as a whole. To that extent it is disruptive, antisocial,
immoral; and when thus applied it may be described as Black, or Evil,
or Hostile Magic. Here perhaps we find the origin of the opposition
between them. So far from religion and magic having been originally
hostile, the further we go back into savage life, and presumably,
therefore, towards primitive humanity, the more we find them
interwoven, indistinguishable. It is only in the advance of
civilization, and the consequent evolution of religion and of magic
that they become conscious of mutual hostility. When once the
separation had begun it would tend to widen. Certain methods and means
would be regarded as proper to the one, certain other methods and
means as proper to the other, albeit neither of them, not even the
highest known and recognized form of religion, has hitherto been able
to shake itself entirely free from the methods of the other. This is
not incompatible with increasing hostility. The loftier the claims of
religion become, the closer its relations with the profoundest thought
of mankind, the more awful the sanctions it invokes, the more
inevitable, the more irreconcilable the hostility becomes. Family
quarrels are ever the bitterest.