Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 14, 1903.djvu/118

 I02 Reviews.

ing from the same point, diverged into two distinct paths — the magician claiming to be able to manipulate the vital essence ; the priest maintaining " that the devolution of the soul could be modified or controlled by the pious or just man who observed the precepts of religion." Hence the business of the magician is principally concerned with the control or transference of life. Thus, in the magical rites performed to obviate barrenness, on a Sunday or a Tuesday night the woman takes her seat on a stool and is lowered into a well. When she reaches the water she strips, bathes, dresses, and is finally hauled up again ; or to effect the same object, she cuts a lock of hair from the head of a child, who must be a first-borfi, and takes it to the wizard. Here the idea obviously is that in the one case she extracts the principle of life from the living water, in the other from the first-born child.

" Religion, on the other hand, deprecated any such impious interference with the laws of nature. It maintained that, while, in the ordinary course of things, life was transmitted from one generation to another, superior sanctity could secure promotion on re-birth into a higher caste ; while impiety was punished by re-birth in a lower form of Hfe. Religion also adopted the view that life and spirit were one and the same thing ; that that prin- ciple was inherent in every living thing, and from this basis appears to have been evolved the metaphysical doctrine of the world-soul, which pervades everything in the universe, of which the individual soul is but a detached fragment, and into which it will be re- absorbed."

Most interesting is the glimpse which is all our present know- ledge gives us, of the secret religions. They were instituted either to protect an unpopular creed, like that of the Persian Babis, from persecution, or to enhance their value in the estimation of the outside public by confining the revelation to a limited body of initiates. All the ascetic orders, like the Jogis and Sannyasis, have secret initiatory rites or special pass-words to protect the mystery of the faith. The secret, such as it is, once revealed often turns out to be the most silly rubbish. But, as Mr. Rose suggests, some of these beliefs may be "the debris of old allegories." Once, in short, such things had a meaning which is now lost. Otherwise, "it is not easy to see how men could worship a whistle, or a personified whistle, or a whistling god, but it is not so difficult to understand that they could begin by making a whistle the