Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/145

 Charni against the Child-stealing Witch. 135

survives the myth, because however much the gods may change, the way to approach them, the means employed, the formulas used remain the same. The slightest change in an invocation or an incantation, that is, in a prayer recited either as prose or as poem with the accompaniment of chants, would destroy its efficacy. No portion of it, however much misun- derstood, no name in it, however barbarous it may sound, but they will be preserved with the utmost fidelity. It is true they will be corrupted by oral transmission, but that will be an involuntary and unconscious act in the mouth of the charmer or conjurer, no such change being contemplated.

The religious background will shift from time to time whenever the nation changes its religious principles, or when the magical formula has been carried from a nation professing one form of religion to another professing a different one. The gods will thus either be eliminated entirely or others will be substituted for them, but the charm itself will survive that change. But it ceases then to be any longer considered part of religious worship, it is called " superstition " ; which means that which has withstood, which is held over, a fragment, or the wreckage of the ancient religion, which has managed to float on the top of the wave of human sentiment, and has thus been rescued from complete annihilation.

The efficacy of the magical formula rests, as is well known, partly on the ceremony w^hich accompanies it, and is often of a symbolical character, but mostly on the divine names which the charm contains. I am treading here on a some- what dangerous ground, as it might lure me on to widen the scope of this investigation. For wherever we may look, the w^hole range of ancient religious mysteries stands under the ban of the mysterious ineffable Name of the Divinities worshipped in those countries. We can scarcely conceive Egyptain or Assyrian, or even later Buddhist and Jaina mysteries, without being confronted with hosts of such masfical names. Even the ancient Greek Eleusinian