Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/162

 144 From Spell to Prayer.

the savage magician and his victim may become aware of the fact? I think we must. Of course the true reasons of the fact, namely that suggestion is at work, and so on, are beyond the ken of primitive man. But I submit that the projectiveness of the magical act is grounded, not merely on a subjective bias that " fakes " its facts, but on one that is met half-way, so to speak, by the real facts themselves. I would even suppose that the kind of magic practised by man on man, since it lent itself especially to objective verification, may very well have been the earliest kind of developed magic — the earliest kind to pass beyond the stage of impulse to that of more or less conscious and self-justifying policy. Were this the case, one w'ould have to assume that the savage extended his sphere of operations by some dim sort of analogous reasoning. If, despite appearances to the contrary, magic really answered in the case of man, it would really answer in the case of the weather and so on, to vent one's spleen on the weather being, meanwhile, as a naive impulsive act, hardly, if at all, less natural than to do so in the case of one's human foe.^'' Thus I surmise that the proved effectiveness of the social department of deve- loped magic gave the greater share of such logical support as was required to the meteorological and other branches of the business.

It is high time that we address ourselves to the more immediate subject of our interest, the spell, the nature of which, however, could not fail to be misunderstood so long as the magical act was vaguely conceived on its psycho- logical side, that is, the side of its true inwardness, the side to which it is the supreme business even of an anthropology that prides itself on its " objective methods " to attend. To begin, then, at the beginning, why should there be an accompanying spell at all ? Is it, in fact, an indispensable part of the true magical ceremony ? Now it is true that

" Cf. G. B.,' i., 108-9.