Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/168

 150 From Spell to Prayer.

exercise of will on the part of the operator will surely be submission, i.e. of will, as we should say, on the part of the patient. For the rest, it would seem that Dr. Frazer bases his case for it being a kind of physical necessity that is ascribed by the savage to the workings of his magic on the explanation which the medicine-man gives of his failures, when he alleges that nothing but the interference of another more potent sorcerer could have robbed his spell of its ef^cacy.-^ But the excuse appears to imply, if any- thing, a conditionality and relativity of will-power, of maiia, the analogy of the scientific law being manifestly far-fetched. And surely it is in any case somewhat rash to deduce the implicit assumptions of an art from such a mere piece of professional "bluff."

If, then, the occult projectiveness of the magical act is naturally and almost inevitably interpreted as an exertion of will that somehow finds its way to another will and dominates it, the spell or uttered " must " will tend, I con- ceive, to embody the very life and soul of the affair. Nothing initiates an imperative more cleanly, cutting it away from the formative matrix of thought and launching it on its free career, than the spoken word. Nothing, again, finds its way home to another's mind more sharply. It is the very type of a spiritual projectile. I do not, indeed, believe that what may be called the silent opera- tions of imitative magic are ultimately sign-language and nothing more. I prefer to think, as I have already explained, that they are originally like the fire drawn from an excitable soldier by the tree-stump he mistakes for an enemy, or, more precisely, miscarriages of passion-clouded purpose prematurely caused by a chance association ; and that what might be called their prefigurative function is an outgrowth. But I certainly do incline to think that, when the stage of developed magic is reached and the projec-

'-* G- B.,^i., 61. Sec, however, S/^. and C, 532, from which it appears that the medicine-man by no means sticks to a single form of excuse.