Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/170

152 the force it but transmits. Not unfrequently, however, the personal agency of the operator appears on the surface of the spell, as when sunshine is made in New Caledonia by kindling a fire and saying: "Sun! I do this that you may be burning hot." Here the sun is treated as a "you," so that the operator is perhaps not unnaturally led to refer to himself as the other party to this transaction between persons. Meanwhile, hough [sic] our second instance is interesting as indicating the true source of the mana immanent in the spell, namely the operator's exertion of will-power, it is better not to insist too strongly on the difference between the instrument and the force that wields and as it were fills it. Both alike belong to what may be called the protasis of the spell. The important logical cleavage occurs between protasis and apodosis—the firing of the projectile and the hitting of the target—the setting-in-motion of the instrument and the realisation of the end. Every true spell, I submit, distinguishes implicitly or explicitly between the two. I say implicitly or explicitly, for we find curtailed spells of the kind "We carry Death into the water," no mention being made of the symbol. It would be quite wrong, however, to argue that here is no make-believe, no disjoining of instrument and end requiring an exertion of occult influence to bridge the gap, but a primitive credulity that simply takes the one act for the other. This is shown by the occurrence of the same sort of spell in fuller form, e.g. "Ha, Korē, we fling you into the river, like these torches, that you may return no more." The participants in the rite know, in short, that they are "only pretending." They have the thought which it is left to Mr. Skeat's Malays to express with perfect clearness: "It is not wax that I am scorching, it is the liver, heart, and spleen of So-and-so that I scorch."