MAGIC AND RELIGION
[Sidenote: Magic like science postulates the order and uniformity of
nature; hence the attraction both of magic and of science, which open
up a boundless vista to those who can penetrate to the secret springs
of nature.]
The examples collected in the last chapter may suffice to illustrate
the general principles of sympathetic magic in its two branches,
to which we have given the names of Homoeopathic and Contagious
respectively. In some cases of magic which have come before us we have
seen that the operation of spirits is assumed, and that an attempt
is made to win their favour by prayer and sacrifice. But these cases
are on the whole exceptional; they exhibit magic tinged and alloyed
with religion.[808] Wherever sympathetic magic occurs in its pure
unadulterated form, it assumes that in nature one event follows another
necessarily and invariably without the intervention of any spiritual or
personal agency. Thus its fundamental conception is identical with that
of modern science; underlying the whole system is a faith, implicit but
real and firm, in the order and uniformity of nature. 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. He supplicates
no higher power: he sues the favour of no fickle and wayward {p221}
being: he abases himself before no awful deity. Yet his power, great
as he believes it to be, is by no means arbitrary and unlimited. He
can wield it only so long as he strictly conforms to the rules of his
art, or to what may be called the laws of nature as conceived by him.
To neglect these rules, to break these laws in the smallest particular
is to incur failure, and may even expose the unskilful practitioner
himself to the utmost peril. If he claims a sovereignty over nature,
it is a constitutional sovereignty rigorously limited in its scope and
exercised in exact conformity with ancient usage. Thus the analogy
between the magical and the scientific conceptions of the world is
close. In both of them the succession of events is perfectly regular
and certain, being determined by immutable laws, the operation of which
can be foreseen and calculated precisely; the elements of caprice, of
chance, and of accident are banished from the course of nature. Both
of them open up a seemingly boundless vista of possibilities to him
who knows the causes of things and can touch the secret springs that
set in motion the vast and intricate mechanism of the world. Hence
the strong attraction which magic and science alike have exercised on
the human mind; hence the powerful stimulus that both have given to
the pursuit of knowledge. They lure the weary enquirer, the footsore
seeker, on through the wilderness of disappointment in the present by
their endless promises of the future: they take him up to the top of
an exceeding high mountain and shew him, beyond the dark clouds and
rolling mists at his feet, a vision of the celestial city, far off, it
may be, but radiant with unearthly splendour, bathed in the light of
dreams.
[Sidenote: The fatal flaw of magic lies not in its general assumption
of the uniformity of nature, but in its misapprehension of the
particular laws which govern the sequence of natural events.]
The fatal flaw of magic lies not in its general assumption of a
sequence of events determined by law, but in its total misconception
of the nature of the particular laws which govern that sequence. If
we analyse the various cases of sympathetic magic which have been
passed in review in the preceding pages, and which may be taken as
fair samples of the bulk, we shall find, as I have already indicated,
that they are all mistaken applications of one or other of two great
fundamental laws of thought, namely, the association of ideas by
similarity and the {p222} association of ideas by contiguity in space
or time. A mistaken association of similar ideas produces homoeopathic
or imitative magic: a mistaken association of contiguous ideas produces
contagious magic. The principles of association are excellent in
themselves, and indeed absolutely essential to the working of the human
mind. Legitimately applied they yield science; illegitimately applied
they yield magic, the bastard sister of science. It is therefore a
truism, almost a tautology, to say that all magic is necessarily false
and barren; for were it ever to become true and fruitful, it would
no longer be magic but science. From the earliest times man has been
engaged in a search for general rules whereby to turn the order of
natural phenomena to his own advantage, and in the long search he has
scraped together a great hoard of such maxims, some of them golden and
some of them mere dross. The true or golden rules constitute the body
of applied science which we call the arts; the false are magic.
[Sidenote: Relation of magic to religion.
Religion defined: it is a propitiation or conciliation of superhuman
powers which are believed to control nature and man. Thus religion
comprises two elements, a theoretical and a practical, or faith and
works, and it does not exist without both. But religious practice need
not consist in ritual; it may consist in ethical conduct, if that is
believed to be well-pleasing to the deity.]
If magic is thus next of kin to science, we have still to enquire how
it stands related to religion. But the view we take of that relation
will necessarily be coloured by the idea which we have formed of
the nature of religion itself; hence a writer may reasonably be
expected to define his conception of religion before he proceeds to
investigate its relation to magic. There is probably no subject in the
world about which opinions differ so much as the nature of religion,
and to frame a definition of it which would satisfy every one must
obviously be impossible. All that a writer can do is, first, to say
clearly what he means by religion, and afterwards to employ the word
consistently in that sense throughout his work. By religion, then, I
understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man
which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of
human life.[809] 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. Of the two, belief
clearly comes first, since we must believe in the existence of a divine
being before we can attempt to please {p223} him. But unless the belief
leads to a corresponding practice, it is not a religion but merely a
theology; in the language of St. James, “faith, if it hath not works,
is dead, being alone.”[810] In other words, no man is religious who
does not govern his conduct in some measure by the fear or love of
God.[811] On the other hand, mere practice, divested of all religious
belief, is also not religion. Two men may behave in exactly the same
way, and yet one of them may be religious and the other not. If the
one acts from the love or fear of God, he is religious; if the other
acts from the love or fear of man, he is moral or immoral according
as his behaviour comports or conflicts with the general good. Hence
belief and practice or, in theological language, faith and works are
equally essential to religion, which cannot exist without both of them.
But it is not necessary that religious practice should always take
the form of a ritual; that is, it need not consist in the offering of
sacrifice, the recitation of prayers, and other outward ceremonies.
Its aim is to please the deity, and if the deity is one who delights
in charity and mercy and purity more than in oblations of blood, the
chanting of hymns, and the fumes of incense, his worshippers will best
please him, not by prostrating themselves before him, by intoning his
praises, and by filling his temples with costly gifts, but by being
pure and merciful and charitable towards men, for in so doing they
will imitate, so far as human infirmity allows, the perfections of the
divine nature. It was this ethical side of religion which the Hebrew
prophets, inspired with a noble ideal of God’s goodness and holiness,
were never weary of inculcating. Thus Micah says:[812] “He hath shewed
thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but
to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” And
at a later time much of the force by which {p224} Christianity conquered
the world was drawn from the same high conception of God’s moral nature
and the duty laid on men of conforming themselves to it. “Pure religion
and undefiled,” says St. James, “before God and the Father is this,
To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep
himself unspotted from the world.”[813]
[Sidenote: By assuming the order of nature to be elastic or variable
religion is opposed in principle alike to magic and to science, both of
which assume the order of nature to be rigid and invariable.
Claim of Egyptian and Indian magicians to control the gods.]
But if religion involves, first, a belief in superhuman beings who
rule the world, and, second, an attempt to win their favour, it
clearly assumes that the course of nature is to some extent elastic
or variable, and that we can persuade or induce the mighty beings who
control it to deflect, for our benefit, the current of events from the
channel in which they would otherwise flow. Now this implied elasticity
or variability of nature is directly opposed to the principles of
magic as well as of science, both of which assume that the processes
of nature are rigid and invariable in their operation, and that they
can as little be turned from their course by persuasion and entreaty
as by threats and intimidation. The distinction between the two
conflicting views of the universe turns on their answer to the crucial
question, Are the forces which govern the world conscious and personal,
or unconscious and impersonal? Religion, as a conciliation of the
superhuman powers, assumes the former member of the alternative. For
all conciliation implies that the being conciliated is a conscious or
personal agent, that his conduct is in some measure uncertain, and
that he can be prevailed upon to vary it in the desired direction by
a judicious appeal to his interests, his appetites, or his emotions.
Conciliation is never employed towards things which are regarded as
inanimate, nor towards persons whose behaviour in the particular
circumstances is known to be determined with absolute certainty. Thus
in so far as religion assumes the world to be directed by conscious
agents who may be turned from their purpose by persuasion, it stands
in fundamental antagonism to magic as well as to science, both of
which take for granted that the course of nature is determined, not
by the passions or caprice of personal beings, but by the operation
of immutable laws acting mechanically.[814] In {p225} magic, indeed,
the assumption is only implicit, but in science it is explicit. It is
true that magic often deals with spirits, which are personal agents of
the kind assumed by religion; but whenever it does so in its proper
form, it treats them exactly in the same fashion as it treats inanimate
agents, that is, it constrains or coerces instead of conciliating
or propitiating them as religion would do. Thus it assumes that all
personal beings, whether human or divine, are in the last resort
subject to those impersonal forces which control all things, but which
nevertheless can be turned to account by any one who knows how to
manipulate them by the appropriate ceremonies and spells. In ancient
Egypt, for example, the magicians claimed the power of compelling even
the highest gods to do their bidding, and actually threatened them
with destruction in case of disobedience.[815] Sometimes, without
going quite so far as that, the wizard declared that he would scatter
the bones of Osiris or reveal his sacred legend, if the god proved
contumacious.[816] Similarly in India at the present day the great
Hindoo trinity itself of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva is subject to the
sorcerers, who, by means of their spells, exercise such an ascendency
over the mightiest deities, that these are bound submissively to
execute on earth below, or in heaven above, whatever commands their
masters the magicians may please to issue.[817] There is a saying
everywhere current in {p226} India: “The whole universe is subject to
the gods; the gods are subject to the spells (_mantras_); the spells to
the Brahmans; therefore the Brahmans are our gods.”[818]
[Sidenote: Hostility of religion to magic in history.]
This radical conflict of principle between magic and religion
sufficiently explains the relentless hostility with which in history
the priest has often pursued the magician. The haughty self-sufficiency
of the magician, his arrogant demeanour towards the higher powers,
and his unabashed claim to exercise a sway like theirs could not but
revolt the priest, to whom, with his awful sense of the divine majesty,
and his humble prostration in presence of it, such claims and such a
demeanour must have appeared an impious and blasphemous usurpation of
prerogatives that belong to God alone. And sometimes, we may suspect,
lower motives concurred to whet the edge of the priest’s hostility. He
professed to be the proper medium, the true intercessor between God
and man, and no doubt his interests as well as his feelings were often
injured by a rival practitioner, who preached a surer and smoother road
to fortune than the rugged and slippery path of divine favour.
[Sidenote: This hostility comparatively late: at an earlier time magic
co-operated, and was partly confused, with religion.
Confusion of magic and religion in Melanesia.]
Yet this antagonism, familiar as it is to us, seems to have made its
appearance comparatively late in the history of religion. At an earlier
stage[819] the functions of priest and sorcerer were often combined
or, to speak perhaps more correctly, were not yet differentiated from
each other. To serve his purpose man wooed the good-will of gods or
spirits by prayer and sacrifice, while at the same time he had recourse
to ceremonies and forms of words which he hoped would of themselves
bring about the desired result without the help of god or devil. In
short, he performed religious and magical rites simultaneously; he
uttered prayers and incantations almost in the same breath, knowing
or {p227} recking little of the theoretical inconsistency of his
behaviour, so long as by hook or crook he contrived to get what he
wanted. Instances of this fusion or confusion of magic with religion
have already met us in the practices of Melanesians and of other
peoples.[820] So far as the Melanesians are concerned, the general
confusion cannot be better described than in the words of Dr. R. H.
Codrington:—“That invisible power which is believed by the natives to
cause all such effects as transcend their conception of the regular
course of nature, and to reside in spiritual beings, whether in the
spiritual part of living men or in the ghosts of the dead, being
imparted by them to their names and to various things that belong to
them, such as stones, snakes, and indeed objects of all sorts, is that
generally known as _mana_. Without some understanding of this it is
impossible to understand the religious beliefs and practices of the
Melanesians; and this again is the active force in all they do and
believe to be done in magic, white or black. By means of this men
are able to control or direct the forces of nature, to make rain or
sunshine, wind or calm, to cause sickness or remove it, to know what
is far off in time and space, to bring good luck and prosperity, or to
blast and curse.” “By whatever name it is called, it is the belief in
this supernatural power, and in the efficacy of the various means by
which spirits and ghosts can be induced to exercise it for the benefit
of men, that is the foundation of the rites and practices which can be
called religious; and it is from the same belief that everything which
may be called Magic and Witchcraft draws its origin. Wizards, doctors,
weather-mongers, prophets, diviners, dreamers, all alike, everywhere
in the islands, work by this power. There are many of these who may be
said to exercise their art as a profession; they get their property
and influence in this way. Every considerable village or settlement is
sure to have some one who can control the weather and the waves, some
one who knows how to treat sickness, some one who can work mischief
with various charms. There may be one whose skill extends to all these
branches; but generally one man knows how to do one thing and one
another. This various knowledge is handed down from father {p228} to
son, from uncle to sister’s son, in the same way as is the knowledge
of the rites and methods of sacrifice and prayer; and very often the
same man who knows the sacrifice knows also the making of the weather,
and of charms for many purposes besides. But as there is no order of
priests, there is also no order of magicians or medicine-men. Almost
every man of consideration knows how to approach some ghost or spirit,
and has some secret of occult practices.”[821]
[Sidenote: Confusion of magic and religion in ancient India.]
The same confusion of magic and religion has survived among peoples
that have risen to higher levels of culture. It was rife in ancient
India and ancient Egypt; it is by no means extinct among European
peasantry at the present day. With regard to ancient India we are told
by an eminent Sanscrit scholar that “the sacrificial ritual at the
earliest period of which we have detailed information is pervaded with
practices that breathe the spirit of the most primitive magic.”[822]
Again, the same writer observes that “the ritual of the very sacrifices
for which the metrical prayers were composed is described in the other
Vedic texts as saturated from beginning to end with magical practices
which were to be carried out by the sacrificial priests.” In particular
he tells us that the rites celebrated on special occasions, such as
marriage, initiation, and the anointment of a king, “are complete
models of magic of every kind, and in every case the forms of magic
employed bear the stamp of the highest antiquity.”[823] Speaking
of the sacrifices prescribed in the _Brâhmaṇas_, Professor Sylvain
Lévi says: “The sacrifice has thus all the characteristics of a
magical operation, independent of the divinities, effective by its own
energy, and capable of producing evil as well as good. It is hardly
distinguished from magic strictly so called, except by being regular
and obligatory; it can easily be adapted {p229} to different objects,
but it exists of necessity, independently of circumstances. That is
the sole fairly clear line of distinction which can be drawn between
the two domains; in point of fact they are so intimately interfused
with each other that the same class of works treats of both matters.
The _Sâmavidhâna Brâhmaṇa_ is a real handbook of incantations and
sorcery; the _Adbhuta Brâhmaṇa_, which forms a section of the _Ṣaḍviṃça
Brâhmaṇa_, has the same character.”[824] Similarly Professor M.
Bloomfield writes: “Even witchcraft is part of the religion; it has
penetrated and has become intimately blended with the holiest Vedic
rites; the broad current of popular religion and superstition has
infiltrated itself through numberless channels into the higher religion
that is presented by the Brahman priests, and it may be presumed that
the priests were neither able to cleanse their own religious beliefs
from the mass of folk-belief with which it was surrounded, nor is it
at all likely that they found it in their interest to do so.”[825]
Again, in the introduction to his translation of the _Kausika Sūtra_,
Dr. W. Caland observes: “He who has been wont to regard the ancient
Hindoos as a highly civilised people, famed for their philosophical
systems, their dramatic poetry, their epic lays, will be surprised when
he makes the acquaintance of their magical ritual, and will perceive
that hitherto he has known the old Hindoo people from one side only. He
will find that he here stumbles on the lowest strata of Vedic culture,
and will be astonished at the agreement between the magic ritual of
the old Vedas and the shamanism of the so-called savage. If we drop
the peculiar Hindoo expressions and technical terms, and imagine a
shaman instead of a Brahman, we could almost fancy that we have before
us a magical book belonging to one of the tribes of North American
red-skins.”[826] Some good authorities hold that the very name of
Brahman is derived from _brahman_, “a magical spell”; so that, if they
are right, the Brahman would seem to have been a magician before he was
a priest.[827] {p230}
[Sidenote: Confusion of magic and religion in ancient Egypt.]
Speaking of the importance of magic in the East, and especially in
Egypt, Professor Maspero remarks that “we ought not to attach to the
word magic the degrading idea which it almost inevitably calls up
in the mind of a modern. Ancient magic was the very foundation of
religion. The faithful who desired to obtain some favour from a god had
no chance of succeeding except by laying hands on the deity, and this
arrest could only be effected by means of a certain number of rites,
sacrifices, prayers, and chants, which the god himself had revealed,
and which obliged him to do what was demanded of him.”[828] According
to another distinguished Egyptologist “the belief that there are words
and actions by which man can influence all the powers of nature and all
living things, from animals up to gods, was inextricably interwoven
with everything the Egyptians did and everything they left undone.
Above all, the whole system of burial and of the worship of the dead
is completely dominated by it. The wooden puppets which relieved the
dead man from toil, the figures of the maid-servants who baked bread
for him, the sacrificial formulas by the recitation of which food was
procured for him, what are these and all the similar practices but
magic? And as men cannot help themselves without magic, so neither can
the gods; the gods also wear amulets to protect themselves, and use
magic spells to constrain each other.”[829] “The whole doctrine of
magic,” says Professor Wiedemann, “formed in the valley of the Nile,
not a part of superstition, but an essential constituent of religious
faith, which to a {p231} great extent rested directly on magic, and
always remained most closely bound up with it.”[830] But though we can
perceive the union of discrepant elements in the faith and practice
of the ancient Egyptians, it would be rash to assume that the people
themselves did so. “Egyptian religion,” says the same scholar, “was
not one and homogeneous; it was compounded of the most heterogeneous
elements, which seemed to the Egyptian to be all equally justified.
He did not care whether a doctrine or a myth belonged to what, in
modern scholastic phraseology, we should call faith or superstition;
it was indifferent to him whether we should rank it as religion or
magic, as worship or sorcery. All such classifications were foreign
to the Egyptian. To him no one doctrine seemed more or less justified
than another. Nay, he went so far as to allow the most flagrant
contradictions to stand peaceably side by side.”[831]
[Sidenote: Confusion of magic and religion in modern Europe.
Mass of the Holy Spirit.
Mass of Saint Sécaire.]
Among the ignorant classes of modern Europe the same confusion of
ideas, the same mixture of religion and magic, crops up in various
forms. Thus we are told that in France “the majority of the peasants
still believe that the priest possesses a secret and irresistible
power over the elements. By reciting certain prayers which he alone
knows and has the right to utter, yet for the utterance of which he
must afterwards demand absolution, he can, on an occasion of pressing
danger, arrest or reverse for a moment the action of the eternal laws
of the physical world. The winds, the storms, the hail, and the rain
are at his command and obey his will. The fire also is subject to him,
and the flames of a conflagration are extinguished at his word.”[832]
For example, French peasants used to be, perhaps are still, persuaded
that the priests could celebrate, with certain special rites, a “Mass
of the Holy Spirit,” of which the efficacy was so miraculous that
it never met with any opposition from the divine will; {p232} God
was forced to grant whatever was asked of Him in this form, however
rash and importunate might be the petition. No idea of impiety or
irreverence attached to the rite in the minds of those who, in some of
the great extremities of life, sought by this singular means to take
the kingdom of heaven by storm. The secular priests generally refused
to say the “Mass of the Holy Spirit”; but the monks, especially the
Capuchin friars, had the reputation of yielding with less scruple to
the entreaties of the anxious and distressed.[833] In the constraint
thus supposed by Catholic peasantry to be laid by the priest upon the
deity we seem to have an exact counterpart of the power which, as we
saw, the ancient Egyptians ascribed to their magicians.[834] Again, to
take another example, in many villages of Provence the priest is still
reputed to possess the faculty of averting storms. It is not every
priest who enjoys this reputation; and in some villages, when a change
of pastors takes place, the parishioners are eager to learn whether
the new incumbent has the power (_pouder_), as they call it. At the
first sign of a heavy storm they put him to the proof by inviting him
to exorcise the threatening clouds; and if the result answers to their
hopes, the new shepherd is assured of the sympathy and respect of his
flock. In some parishes, where the reputation of the curate in this
respect stood higher than that of his rector, the relations between
the two have been so strained in consequence that the bishop has had
to translate the rector to another benefice.[835] Again, Gascon
peasants believe that to revenge themselves on their enemies bad men
will sometimes induce a priest to say a mass called the Mass of Saint
Sécaire. Very few priests know this mass, and three-fourths of those
who do know it would not say it for love or money. None but wicked
priests dare to perform the gruesome ceremony, and you may be quite
sure that they will have a very heavy account to render for it at the
last day. No curate or bishop, not even the archbishop of {p233} Auch,
can pardon them; that right belongs to the pope of Rome alone. The Mass
of Saint Sécaire may be said only in a ruined or deserted church, where
owls mope and hoot, where bats flit in the gloaming, where gypsies
lodge of nights, and where toads squat under the desecrated altar.
Thither the bad priest comes by night with his light o’ love, and at
the first stroke of eleven he begins to mumble the mass backwards,
and ends just as the clocks are knelling the midnight hour. His leman
acts as clerk. The host he blesses is black and has three points; he
consecrates no wine, but instead he drinks the water of a well into
which the body of an unbaptized infant has been flung. He makes the
sign of the cross, but it is on the ground and with his left foot.
And many other things he does which no good Christian could look upon
without being struck blind and deaf and dumb for the rest of his life.
But the man for whom the mass is said withers away little by little,
and nobody can say what is the matter with him; even the doctors can
make nothing of it. They do not know that he is slowly dying of the
Mass of Saint Sécaire.[836]
[Sidenote: The early confusion of magic with religion was probably
preceded by a still earlier phase of thought, when magic existed
without religion.]
Yet though magic is thus found to fuse and amalgamate with religion
in many ages and in many lands, there are some grounds for thinking
that this fusion is not primitive, and that there was a time when
man trusted to magic alone for the satisfaction of such wants as
transcended his immediate animal cravings. In the first place a
consideration of the fundamental notions of magic and religion may
incline us to surmise that magic is older than religion in the history
of humanity. We have seen that on the one hand magic is nothing but
a mistaken application of the very simplest and most elementary
processes of the mind, namely the association of ideas by virtue of
resemblance or contiguity; and that on the other hand religion assumes
the operation of conscious or personal agents, superior to man, behind
the visible screen of nature. Obviously the conception of personal
agents is more complex than a simple recognition of the similarity
or contiguity of ideas; and a theory which assumes that the course
of nature is determined by conscious {p234} agents is more abstruse
and recondite, and requires for its apprehension a far higher degree
of intelligence and reflection, than the view that things succeed
each other simply by reason of their contiguity or resemblance. The
very beasts associate the ideas of things that are like each other
or that have been found together in their experience; and they could
hardly survive for a day if they ceased to do so. But who attributes
to the animals a belief that the phenomena of nature are worked by a
multitude of invisible animals or by one enormous and prodigiously
strong animal behind the scenes? It is probably no injustice to the
brutes to assume that the honour of devising a theory of this latter
sort must be reserved for human reason. Thus, if magic be deduced
immediately from elementary processes of reasoning, and be, in fact, an
error into which the mind falls almost spontaneously, while religion
rests on conceptions which the merely animal intelligence can hardly be
supposed to have yet attained to, it becomes probable that magic arose
before religion in the evolution of our race, and that man essayed to
bend nature to his wishes by the sheer force of spells and enchantments
before he strove to coax and mollify a coy, capricious, or irascible
deity by the soft insinuation of prayer and sacrifice.
[Sidenote: Among the Australian aborigines magic is universal, but
religion almost unknown.]
The conclusion which we have thus reached deductively from a
consideration of the fundamental ideas of religion and magic is
confirmed inductively by the observation that among the aborigines
of Australia, the rudest savages as to whom we possess accurate
information, magic is universally practised, whereas religion in the
sense of a propitiation or conciliation of the higher powers seems
to be nearly unknown. Roughly speaking, all men in Australia are
magicians, but not one is a priest; everybody fancies he can influence
his fellows or the course of nature by sympathetic magic, but nobody
dreams of propitiating gods by prayer and sacrifice.[837]
[Sidenote: Magic is probably older than religion, and faith in it is
still universal among the ignorant and superstitious.]
But if in the most backward state of human society now known to us
we find magic thus conspicuously present and religion conspicuously
absent, may we not reasonably conjecture that the civilised races of
the world have also at some period of their history passed through a
similar {p235} intellectual phase, that they attempted to force the
great powers of nature to do their pleasure before they thought of
courting their favour by offerings and prayer—in short that, just as
on the material side of human culture there has everywhere been an
Age of Stone, so on the intellectual side there has everywhere been
an Age of Magic?[838] There are reasons for answering this question
in the affirmative. When we survey the existing races of mankind
from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego, or from Scotland to Singapore,
we observe that they are distinguished one from the other by a great
variety of religions, and that these distinctions are not, so to speak,
merely coterminous with the broad distinctions of race, but descend
into the minuter subdivisions of states and commonwealths, nay, that
they honeycomb the town, the village, and even the family, so that
the surface of society all over the world is cracked and seamed,
sapped and mined with rents and fissures and yawning crevasses opened
up by the disintegrating influence of religious dissension. Yet when
we have penetrated through these differences, which affect mainly
the intelligent and thoughtful part of the community, we shall find
underlying them all a solid stratum of intellectual agreement among the
dull, the weak, the ignorant, and the superstitious, who constitute,
unfortunately, the vast majority of mankind. One of the great
achievements of the nineteenth century was to run shafts down into this
low mental stratum in many parts of the world, and thus to discover its
substantial identity everywhere. It is beneath our feet—and not very
far beneath them—here in Europe at the present day, and it crops up
on the surface in the heart of the Australian wilderness and wherever
the advent of a higher civilisation has not crushed it under ground.
This universal faith, this truly Catholic creed, is a belief in the
{p236} efficacy of magic. While religious systems differ not only
in different countries, but in the same country in different ages,
the system of sympathetic magic remains everywhere and at all times
substantially alike in its principles and practice. Among the ignorant
and superstitious classes of modern Europe it is very much what it was
thousands of years ago in Egypt and India, and what it now is among the
lowest savages surviving in the remotest corners of the world. If the
test of truth lay in a show of hands or a counting of heads, the system
of magic might appeal, with far more reason than the Catholic Church,
to the proud motto, “_Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus_,” as
the sure and certain credential of its own infallibility.
[Sidenote: Latent superstition a danger to civilisation.]
It is not our business here to consider what bearing the permanent
existence of such a solid layer of savagery beneath the surface of
society, and unaffected by the superficial changes of religion and
culture, has upon the future of humanity. The dispassionate observer,
whose studies have led him to plumb its depths, can hardly regard
it otherwise than as a standing menace to civilisation.[839] We
seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the
subterranean forces slumbering below. From time to time a hollow
murmur underground or a sudden spirt of flame into the air tells of
what is going on beneath our feet. Now and then the polite world is
startled by a paragraph in a newspaper which tells how in Scotland an
image has been found stuck full of pins for the purpose of killing
an obnoxious laird or minister, how a woman has been slowly roasted
to death as a witch in Ireland, or how a girl has been murdered and
chopped up in Russia to make those candles of human tallow by whose
light thieves hope to pursue their midnight trade unseen.[840] But
whether the influences that make for further progress, or those that
threaten to undo what has already been accomplished, will {p237}
ultimately prevail; whether the impulsive energy of the minority or
the dead weight of the majority of mankind will prove the stronger
force to carry us up to higher heights or to sink us into lower depths,
are questions rather for the sage, the moralist, and the statesman,
whose eagle vision scans the future, than for the humble student of
the present and the past. Here we are only concerned to ask how far
the uniformity, the universality, and the permanence of a belief in
magic, compared with the endless variety and the shifting character of
religious creeds, raises a presumption that the former represents a
ruder and earlier phase of the human mind, through which all the races
of mankind have passed or are passing on their way to religion and
science.
[Sidenote: The change from magic to religion may have been brought
about by the discovery of the inefficacy of magic.]
If an Age of Religion has thus everywhere, as I venture to surmise,
been preceded by an Age of Magic, it is natural that we should enquire
what causes have led mankind, or rather a portion of them, to abandon
magic as a principle of faith and practice and to betake themselves
to religion instead. When we reflect upon the multitude, the variety
and the complexity of the facts to be explained, and the scantiness of
our information regarding them, we shall be ready to acknowledge that
a full and satisfactory solution of so profound a problem is hardly
to be hoped for, and that the most we can do in the present state of
our knowledge is to hazard a more or less plausible conjecture. With
all due diffidence, then, I would suggest that a tardy recognition
of the inherent falsehood and barrenness of magic set the more
thoughtful part of mankind to cast about for a truer theory of nature
and a more fruitful method of turning her resources to account. The
shrewder intelligences must in time have come to perceive that magical
ceremonies and incantations did not really effect the results which
they were designed to produce, and which the majority of their simpler
fellows still believed that they did actually produce. This great
discovery of the inefficacy of magic must have wrought a radical though
probably slow revolution in the minds of those who had the sagacity to
make it. The discovery amounted to this, that men for the first time
recognised their inability to manipulate at pleasure certain natural
forces which hitherto they had believed to be completely within {p238}
their control. It was a confession of human ignorance and weakness.
Man saw that he had taken for causes what were no causes, and that
all his efforts to work by means of these imaginary causes had been
vain. His painful toil had been wasted, his curious ingenuity had been
squandered to no purpose. He had been pulling at strings to which
nothing was attached; he had been marching, as he thought, straight
to the goal, while in reality he had only been treading in a narrow
circle. Not that the effects which he had striven so hard to produce
did not continue to manifest themselves. They were still produced, but
not by him. The rain still fell on the thirsty ground: the sun still
pursued his daily, and the moon her nightly journey across the sky:
the silent procession of the seasons still moved in light and shadow,
in cloud and sunshine across the earth: men were still born to labour
and sorrow, and still, after a brief sojourn here, were gathered to
their fathers in the long home hereafter. All things indeed went on as
before, yet all seemed different to him from whose eyes the old scales
had fallen. For he could no longer cherish the pleasing illusion that
it was he who guided the earth and the heaven in their courses, and
that they would cease to perform their great revolutions were he to
take his feeble hand from the wheel. In the death of his enemies and
his friends he no longer saw a proof of the resistless potency of his
own or of hostile enchantments; he now knew that friends and foes alike
had succumbed to a force stronger than any that he could wield, and in
obedience to a destiny which he was powerless to control.
[Sidenote: Recognising their own inability to control nature, men came
to think that it was controlled by supernatural beings.]
Thus cut adrift from his ancient moorings and left to toss on a
troubled sea of doubt and uncertainty, his old happy confidence in
himself and his powers rudely shaken, our primitive philosopher must
have been sadly perplexed and agitated till he came to rest, as in a
quiet haven after a tempestuous voyage, in a new system of faith and
practice, which seemed to offer a solution of his harassing doubts and
a substitute, however precarious, for that sovereignty over nature
which he had reluctantly abdicated. If the great world went on its way
without the help of him or his fellows, it must surely be because there
were other beings, like {p239} himself, but far stronger, who, unseen
themselves, directed its course and brought about all the varied series
of events which he had hitherto believed to be dependent on his own
magic. It was they, as he now believed, and not he himself, who made
the stormy wind to blow, the lightning to flash, and the thunder to
roll; who had laid the foundations of the solid earth and set bounds to
the restless sea that it might not pass; who caused all the glorious
lights of heaven to shine; who gave the fowls of the air their meat
and the wild beasts of the desert their prey; who bade the fruitful
land to bring forth in abundance, the high hills to be clothed with
forests, the bubbling springs to rise under the rocks in the valleys,
and green pastures to grow by still waters; who breathed into man’s
nostrils and made him live, or turned him to destruction by famine and
pestilence and war. To these mighty beings, whose handiwork he traced
in all the gorgeous and varied pageantry of nature, man now addressed
himself, humbly confessing his dependence on their invisible power, and
beseeching them of their mercy to furnish him with all good things,
to defend him from the perils and dangers by which our mortal life
is compassed about on every hand, and finally to bring his immortal
spirit, freed from the burden of the body, to some happier world,
beyond the reach of pain and sorrow, where he might rest with them and
with the spirits of good men in joy and felicity for ever.
[Sidenote: The change from magic to religion must have been gradual.]
In this, or some such way as this, the deeper minds may be conceived
to have made the great transition from magic to religion. But even in
them the change can hardly ever have been sudden; probably it proceeded
very slowly, and required long ages for its more or less perfect
accomplishment. For the recognition of man’s powerlessness to influence
the course of nature on a grand scale must have been gradual; he cannot
have been shorn of the whole of his fancied dominion at a blow. Step
by step he must have been driven back from his proud position; foot by
foot he must have yielded, with a sigh, the ground which he had once
viewed as his own. Now it would be the wind, now the rain, now the
sunshine, now the thunder, that he confessed himself unable to wield at
will; and as province after province of {p240} nature thus fell from
his grasp, till what had once seemed a kingdom threatened to shrink
into a prison, man must have been more and more profoundly impressed
with a sense of his own helplessness and the might of the invisible
beings by whom he believed himself to be surrounded. Thus religion,
beginning as a slight and partial acknowledgment of powers superior to
man, tends with the growth of knowledge to deepen into a confession
of man’s entire and absolute dependence on the divine; his old free
bearing is exchanged for an attitude of lowliest prostration before the
mysterious powers of the unseen, and his highest virtue is to submit
his will to theirs: _In la sua volontade è nostra pace_. But this
deepening sense of religion, this more perfect submission to the divine
will in all things, affects only those higher intelligences who have
breadth of view enough to comprehend the vastness of the universe and
the littleness of man. Small minds cannot grasp great ideas; to their
narrow comprehension, their purblind vision, nothing seems really great
and important but themselves. Such minds hardly rise into religion
at all. They are, indeed, drilled by their betters into an outward
conformity with its precepts and a verbal profession of its tenets; but
at heart they cling to their old magical superstitions, which may be
discountenanced and forbidden, but cannot be eradicated by religion,
so long as they have their roots deep down in the mental framework and
constitution of the great majority of mankind.
[Sidenote: The belief that the gods are magicians may mark the
transition from magic to religion.]
A vestige of the transition from magic to religion may perhaps be
discerned in the belief, shared by many peoples, that the gods
themselves are adepts in magic, guarding their persons by talismans
and working their will by spells and incantations. Thus the Egyptian
gods, we are told, could as little dispense with the help of magic as
could men; like men they wore amulets to protect themselves, and used
spells to overcome each other. Above all the rest Isis was skilled in
sorcery and famous for her incantations.[841] In Babylonia the great
god Ea was reputed to be the inventor of magic, and his son Marduk,
the chief deity of Babylon, inherited the art from his father. Marduk
is described as “the master of exorcism, the magician of the gods.”
{p241} Another text declares that “the incantation is the incantation
of Marduk, the exorcist is the image of Marduk.”[842] In the legend of
the creation it is related that when Marduk was preparing to fight the
monster Tiamat he gave a proof of his magical powers to the assembled
gods by causing a garment to disappear and reappear again at the word
of his mouth. And the other Babylonian deities had in like manner
recourse to magic, especially to magical words or spells. “The word
is above all the instrument of the gods; it seems to suit the high
conception of their power better than mere muscular effort; the hymns
celebrate the irresistible might of their word; it is by their word
that they compel both animate and inanimate beings to answer their
purposes; in short, they employ almost exclusively the oral rites of
magic.” And like men they made use of amulets and talismans.[843] In
the Vedic religion the gods are often represented as attaining their
ends by magical means; in particular the god Bṛhaspati, “the creator
of all prayers,” is regarded as “the heavenly embodiment of the
priesthood, in so far as the priesthood is invested with the power, and
charged with the task, of influencing the course of things by prayers
and spells”; in short, he is “the possessor of the magical power of
the holy word.”[844] So too in Norse mythology Odin is said to have
owed his supremacy and his dominion over nature to his knowledge of
the runes or magical names of all things in earth and heaven. This
mystical lore he acquired as follows. The runic names of all things
were scratched on the things themselves, then scraped off and mixed in
a magical potion, which was compounded of honey and the blood of the
slain Kvasir, the wisest of beings. A draught of this wonderful mead
imparted to Odin not only the wisdom of Kvasir, but also a knowledge of
all things, since he had swallowed their runic or mystical names along
with the blood of the sage.[845] {p242} Hence by the utterance of his
spells he could heal sickness, deaden the swords of his enemies, loose
himself from bonds, stop the flight of an arrow in mid-air, stay the
raging of the flames, still the winds and lull the sea; and by graving
and painting certain runes he could make the corpse of a hanged man
come down from the gallows-tree and talk with him.[846] It is easy
to conceive how this ascription of magical powers to the gods may
have originated. When a savage sorcerer fails to effect his purpose,
he generally explains his want of success by saying that he has been
foiled by the spells of some more potent magician. Now if it began to
be perceived that certain natural effects, such as the making of rain
or wind or sunshine, were beyond the power of any human magician to
accomplish, the first thought would naturally be that they were wrought
by the more powerful magic of some great invisible beings, and these
superhuman magicians might readily develop into gods of the type of
Odin, Isis, and Marduk. In short, many gods may at first have been
merely deified sorcerers.
[Sidenote: The fallacy of magic is not easy to detect, because nature
herself generally produces, sooner or later, the effects which the
magician fancies he produces by his art.]
The reader may well be tempted to ask. How was it that intelligent men
did not sooner detect the fallacy of magic? How could they continue to
cherish expectations that were invariably doomed to disappointment?
With what heart persist in playing venerable antics that led to
nothing, and mumbling solemn balderdash that remained without effect?
Why cling to beliefs which were so flatly contradicted by experience?
How dare to repeat experiments that had failed so often? The answer
seems to be that the fallacy was far from easy to detect, the failure
by no means obvious, since in many, perhaps in most cases, the desired
event did actually follow, at a longer or shorter interval, the
performance of the rite which was designed to bring it about; and
a mind of more than common acuteness was needed to perceive that,
even in these cases, the rite was not necessarily the cause of the
event. A ceremony intended to make the wind blow or the rain fall,
or to work the death of an enemy, will always be followed, sooner or
later, by the occurrence it is meant to bring to pass; and primitive
man may be excused for regarding the occurrence as a direct result
of the ceremony, and {p243} the best possible proof of its efficacy.
Similarly, rites observed in the morning to help the sun to rise,
and in spring to wake the dreaming earth from her winter sleep, will
invariably appear to be crowned with success, at least within the
temperate zones; for in these regions the sun lights his golden lamp
in the east every morning, and year by year the vernal earth decks
herself afresh with a rich mantle of green. Hence the practical savage,
with his conservative instincts, might well turn a deaf ear to the
subtleties of the theoretical doubter, the philosophic radical, who
presumed to hint that sunrise and spring might not, after all, be
direct consequences of the punctual performance of certain daily or
yearly ceremonies, and that the sun might perhaps continue to rise and
trees to blossom though the ceremonies were occasionally intermitted,
or even discontinued altogether. These sceptical doubts would naturally
be repelled by the other with scorn and indignation as airy reveries
subversive of the faith and manifestly contradicted by experience. “Can
anything be plainer,” he might say, “than that I light my twopenny
candle on earth and that the sun then kindles his great fire in heaven?
I should be glad to know whether, when I have put on my green robe in
spring, the trees do not afterwards do the same? These are facts patent
to everybody, and on them I take my stand. I am a plain practical man,
not one of your theorists and splitters of hairs and choppers of logic.
Theories and speculation and all that may be very well in their way,
and I have not the least objection to your indulging in them, provided,
of course, you do not put them in practice. But give me leave to stick
to facts; then I know where I am.” The fallacy of this reasoning is
obvious to us, because it happens to deal with facts about which we
have long made up our minds. But let an argument of precisely the same
calibre be applied to matters which are still under debate, and it may
be questioned whether a British audience would not applaud it as sound,
and esteem the speaker who used it a safe man—not brilliant or showy,
perhaps, but thoroughly sensible and hard-headed. If such reasonings
could pass muster among ourselves, need we wonder that they long
escaped detection by the savage?
{p244}