Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/217

Rh M A G M A G business in grain from the fertile lowlands of the llavi. The civil station lies to the east of the town, arid consists only of a court-house and treasury, sessions bungalow, jail, church, and three or four residences of officials. Maghiana forms a single municipality with Jhang town, which lies 3 miles to the north. The united population is 19,649. Origin of MAGIC 1 has its name from the magi, Greek pdyoi, the term. hereditary caste of priests among the ancient Persians, thought to be of Median origin (Spiegel, Avesta, vol. ii. p. vi.). Among the magi the interpretation of dreams was practised, as appears from the story of the birth of Cyrus (Herodotus, i. 107); later writers describe them in both a sacerdotal and magical capacity, Lucian (Makrob., 4) calling them a prophetic class and devoted to the gods, while Cicero (De Divinatione, i. 23, 41) writes of them as wise men, augurs, and diviners. In such super natural crafts the magi seem to have much influenced the Western nations, to judge by their name having passed into a set of classical terms (^.ayet a, //.ayevco, mayia, magice, &c.) applied to sorcery, enchantment, and occult science in general. In the New Testament soothsaying and sorcery are so designated (Acts viii. 9, xiii. 6) ; while the astrologers who divine the birth of the King of the Jews by the appearance of a star in the east are called magi (Matt. ii.). Iagical The word magic is still used, as in the ancient world, to &amp;gt;eliefs include a confused mass of beliefs and practices, hardly agreeing except in being beyond those ordinary actions of i ces&amp;gt; cause and effect which men accustomed to their regularity have come to regard as merely natural. Thus magical rites are difficult even to arrange in systematic order. A large proportion of them belong properly to the general theory of religion, inasmuch as their efficacy is ascribed to the intervention of spiritual beings. Thus the ghosts of the dead are called up by the necromancer to give oracles or discover hidden treasures, or sent to enter men s bodies and afflict them with diseases or to cure them, or in a score of ways to do the behests of the magician&quot;, whose spells or incantations are thought powerful enough to control the will even of such divine beings as can drive the winds and give or withhold the rain. It must be noticed, on the other hand, that many magical arts show no connexion with spirits at all, or, even if ghosts or demons or gods have to do with them, the nature of these beings does not of itself account for the processes employed or the effects believed to result. This non-spiritual element in magic depends on imagined powers and correspondences in nature, of which the adepts avail themselves in order to discover hidden knowledge, and to act on the world around them by means beyond the ordinary capabilities of men. Thus by mere effort of will, by traditional formulas and rites, or by working on symbolic fancies, the sorcerer believes he can bewitch others to sickness or death, the astrologer reads the future in the aspects of the stars, the augur attends to omens from the cries of birds and beasts, the haruspex prophesies by the heart or liver of a slaughtered animal, and other classes of diviners judge of the hidden past and the yet more hidden future by the falling of lots or dice, the twitching of their own fingers or the tingling of their ears, and a host of other facts of nature which, as the educated world has now found out, have no practical connexion with the magical meanings or effects assigned to them. The great characteristic of magic is its unreality. Its methods have often an ideal coherence which may be plainly traced, but practical effect they have none, and so they may be altered or transposed without being made worse or better. 1 The etymology of the word is seen in the terms &quot; art magic,&quot; or the &quot; magic art ; French, art magique; Latin, magica ars. One remarkable consequence of this is the fixity with which some magical formulas framed thousands of years ago hold on almost unchanged to this day. To understand this, it must be borne in mind that, if there were any practical use in such rules as those for divining by the cries of animals, the old rules would have been improved by experience into new shapes. But, they being worthless and incapable of improvement, this motive of change is absent, and the old precepts have held their ground, handed on by faithful but stupid tradition, from age to age. When the test of practical efficacy comes in upon the magic art, it is apt either to destroy it utterly or to transform it into something more rational, which passes from supernatural into natural science. Magic is to be reckoned among the earliest growths of Magic of human thought. The evidence for its remote antiquity l w er lies partly in its presence among all races of mankind, races - the ruder tribes especially showing it in such intelligible shapes that the beginnings of magical crafts may be fairly supposed to have arisen in the oldest and lowest periods of culture. An example may be taken from the wild natives of Australia, whose whole life is pervaded by the belief, and embittered by the terror, of sorcery. They imagine the sorcerers,, armed with their mysterious power called boyl-ya, to come moving along in the sky, invisible except to other sorcerers ; they enter the bodies of men, and feed stealthily on them, not eating the bones, but consuming the flesh ; the native feels the pain as the boyl-ya enters him like a bit of pointed quartz, and in this shape of quartz crystal the evil can be extracted by another sorcerer. The sorcerer has other means of attacking his victim : he can creep near to him when asleep, and bewitch him to death by merely pointing at him a leg bone of a kangaroo ; or he can steal away his kidney fat, where, as the natives believe, a man s power dwells; or he can call in the aid of a malignant demon to strike the poor wretch with Ms club behind the neck ; or he can get a lock of hair, and roast it with fat over the fire till its former owner pines away too, and dies. The Australians, like other low tribes in the world whose minds are thus set on imaginary causes of death, hardly believe a man can die unless by being slain or bewitched. When a native dies what we call a natural death, they ascribe it to magic. Then other magic must reveal the hostile sorcerer who has done him to death: either the corpse itself will seem to push its bearers in the direction of the murderer, or the flames of the grave-fire are seen to flicker towards where he is, or some insect will be seen creeping towards his home ; and, when the next of kin thus discover the magic enemy, they set off to take vengeance with earthly weapons. The sorcerer has kindlier duties when he sits by a sick man and charms and charms till he recovers, or sucks out the disease from his body in the shape of a stone spear-head or a fish bone, or brings out the ailment along a string, the other end of which he draws between his own lips till it is covered with blood, telling the bystanders (who believe it) that this blood came along the string out of the sick man. Not disease and cure only, but other events of life, come within the scope of native magic. Storm and thunder are the work of the sorcerers ; they can bring rain and make the rivers swell, or burn up the land with drought. Shooting stars and comets are to the natives omens of disaster; the great hawk s cry in the night portends the death of a child, whose soul the bird is carrying off; but when a man s finger-joints crack he stretches out his arm, for in that direction some one is doing him a kindness. 2 2 For these and other details see Grey, Journals of Expeditions ; Waitz, Anthropologie der Naturvolker, vol. vi. ; Brough Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria ; Fison and Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kurnai, &c.