Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/171

 From Spell to Prayer. i 53

This relative disjunction, then, of instrument and end, protasis and apodosis, being taken as characteristic of the spell of developed magic, let us proceed to inquire how each in turn is in general character fitted to promote the development of the prayer out of the spell (assuming this to be possible at all). First, then, let us consider whether magic contributes anything of its own to religion when we approach the subject from the side of what has been called the instrument. Under this head we have agreed to take account both of the projective act and of the projec- tile — in other words, both of the putting forth of the "must" and of the symbol in which the "must" is embodied.

Now the projective act, I have tried to show, whilst felt by the operator as essentially a kind of imperative willing, is yet concurrently perceived by him to be no ordinary and normal kind of imperative willing. Inasmuch as the merely symbolised and pretended reproduces itself in an ulterior and separate shape as solid fact, the process is manifestly occult or supernormal.^^ Now I have elsewhere tried to show probable reason why the prime condition of the his- torical genesis of religion should be sought in the awe caused in man's mind by the perception of the supernatural, that is, supernormal, as it occurs within him and about him. For the purposes of the anthropologist I would have the limits of primitive religion coincide with those of primi- tive " supernaturalism." To adopt a happy phrase coined by Mr. Hartland when noticing my view, the supernatural is the original " theoplasm, god-stuff." ^- Is, then, the occult or supernatural as revealed in magic at first the one and only form of supernatural manifestation known to man ? Emphatically I say. No. To take but one, and that perhaps the most obvious, example of an object of supernaturalistic awe that anthropology must be content to treat as primary

^' Folk- Lore, xi., 162, f. ^^ Folk- Lore, xii., 27.