It is perhaps necessary, at the commencement of this chapter, to say a, few more words about the nature and origin of the belief in Magic. Magic represented on one side, and clearly enough, the beginnings of Religion--i.e. the instinctive sense of Man's inner continuity with the world around him, taking shape: a fanciful shape it is true, but with very real reaction on his practical life and feelings. 1 On the other side it represented the beginnings of Science. It was his first attempt not merely to feel but to understand the mystery of things. Inevitably these first efforts to understand were very puerile, very superficial. As E. B. Tylor says 2 of primitive folk in general, "they mistook an imaginary for a real connection." And he instances the case of the inhabitants of the City of Ephesus, who laid down a rope, seven furlongs in length, from the City to the temple of Artemis, in order to place the former under the protection of the latter! We should lay down a telephone wire, and consider that we established a much more efficient connection; but in the beginning, and quite naturally, men, like children, rely on surface associations. Among the Dyaks of Borneo, 3 when the men are away fighting,
Observations of this kind were naturally made by the ablest members of the tribe--who were in all probability the medicine-men and wizards--and brought in consequence power into their hands. The road to power in fact--and especially was this the case in societies which had not yet developed wealth and property--lay through Magic. As far as magic represented early superstition land religion it laid hold of the hearts of men--their hopes and fears; as far as it represented science and the beginnings of actual knowledge, it inspired their minds with a sense of power, and gave form to their lives and customs. We have no reason to suppose that the early magicians
And what of the transformation of the king into a god--or of the Magician or Priest directly into the same? Perhaps in order to appreciate this, one must make a further digression. For the early peoples there were, as it would appear, two main objects in life: (1) to promote fertility in cattle and crops, for food; and (2) to placate or ward off Death; and it seemed very obvious--even before any distinct figures of gods, or any idea of prayer, had arisen--to attain these objects by magic ritual. The rites of Baptism, of Initiation (or Confirmation) and the many ceremonies of a Second Birth, which we associate with fully-formed religions, did belong also to the age of Magic; and they all implied a belief in some kind of re-incarnation--in a life going forward continually and being renewed in birth again and again. It is curious that we find such a belief among the lowest savages even to-day. Dr. Frazer, speaking of the Central Australian tribes, says the belief is firmly rooted among them "that the human soul undergoes an endless series of re-incarnations--the living men and women of one generation being nothing but the spirits of their ancestors come to life again, and destined themselves to be reborn in the persons of their descendants. During the interval between two re-incarnations the souls live in their nanja spots, or local totem-centres, which are always natural objects such as trees or rocks. Each totem-clan has a number of such totem-centres scattered over the country. There the souls of the dead men and
And what the early people believed of the human spirit, they believed of the corn-spirits and the tree and vegetation spirits also. At the great Spring-ritual among the primitive Greeks "the tribe and the growing earth were renovated together: the earth arises afresh from her dead seeds, the tribe from its dead ancestors." And the whole process projects itself in the idea of a spirit of the year, who "in the first stage is living, then dies with each year, and thirdly rises again from the dead, raising the whole dead world with him. The Greeks called him in this stage 'The Third One' [Tritos Sotêr] or 'the Saviour'; and the renovation ceremonies were accompanied by a casting-off of the old year, the old garments, and everything that is polluted by the infection of death." 2 Thus the multiplication of the crops and the renovation of the tribe, and at the same time the evasion and placation of death, were all assured by similar rites and befitting ceremonial magic. 3 In all these cases, and many others that I have not mentioned--of the magical worship of Bulls and Bears and Rams and Cats and Emus and Kangaroos, of Trees and Snakes, of Sun and Moon and Stars, and the spirit of the Corn in its yearly and miraculous resurrection out of the ground--there is still the same idea or moving inspiration, the sense mentioned in the foregoing chapter, the feeling (hardly yet conscious of its own meaning) of
How was it then, it will be asked, that the belief in separate and separable gods and goddesses--each with his or her well-marked outline and character and function, like the divinities of Greece, or of India, or of the Egyptian or Christian religions, ultimately arose? To this question Jane Harrison (in her Themis and other books) gives an ingenious answer, which as it chimes in with my own speculations (in the Art of Creation and elsewhere) I am inclined to adopt. It is that the figures of the supranatural
And farther back still in the evolutionary process we may trace (as in chapter iv above) the divinization or deification of four-footed animals and birds and snakes and trees and the like, from the personification of the collective emotion of the tribe towards these creatures. For people whose chief food was bear-meat, for instance, whose totem was a bear, and who believed themselves descended from an ursine ancestor, there would grow up in the tribal mind an image surrounded by a halo of emotions--emotions of hungry desire, of reverence, fear, gratitude and so forth--an image of a divine Bear in whom they lived and moved and had their being. For another tribe or group in whose yearly ritual a Bull or a Lamb or a Kangaroo played a leading part there would in the same way spring tip the image of a holy bull, a divine lamb, or a sacred kangaroo. Another group again might come to worship a Serpent as its presiding genius, or a particular kind of Tree, simply because these objects were and had
And, further still, what more natural than that when the tribe passed to some degree beyond the animal stage and began to realize a life more intelligent and emotional--more specially human in fact--than that of the beasts of the field, that it should then in its rituals and ceremonies throw off the beast-mask and pay reverence to the interior The moveless pillar of a mountain's weight The tendency to animism and later to anthropomorphism
86:1 For an excellent account of the relation of Magic to Religion see W. McDougall, Social Psychology (1908), pp. 317-320. 86:2 Primitive Culture, vol. i, p. 106. 86:3 See The Golden Bough, i, 127. 87:1 See Evolution of Sex, by Geddes and Thomson (1901), p. 41, note. 88:1 Odyssey xix, 109 sq. Translation by H. B. Cotterill. 89:1 Myth, Ritual and Religion, vol. i, p. 113. 90:1 The Golden Bough, vol. i, p. 96. 90:2 Gilbert Murray, Four Stages, p. 46. 90:3 It is interesting to find, with regard to the renovation of the tribe, that among the Central Australians the foreskins or male members of those who died were deposited in the above-mentioned nanja spots-- the idea evidently being that like the seeds of the corn the seeds of the human crop must be carefully and ceremonially preserved for their re-incarnation. 91:1 For a discussion of the evolution of religion out of magic, see Westermarck's Origin of Moral Ideas, ch. 47. 92:1 See The Art of Creation, ch. viii, "The Gods as Apparitions of the Race-Life." 93:1 The Four Stages, p. 140. 97:1 Far Away and Long Ago, ch. xiii, p. 225.MAGICIANS, KINGS AND GODS
Barley and wheat, and the trees are laden with fruitage, and alway
Yean unfailing the flocks, and the sea gives fish in abundance." 1
Is active living spirit. Every grain
Is sentient both in unity and part,
And the minutest atom comprehends
A world of loves and hatreds.