Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/172

 154 From Spell to Prayer.

and sui generis, the mystery of human death may be set over against the miracle of the magical projection as at least as original and unique a rallying-point of superstition- On the other hand, I am quite prepared to believe that magical occultism was able of its own right to colour primi- tive supernaturalism to a marked and noteworthy extent. I suggest that the peculiar contribution of magic — at all events of the kind of magic we have been considering — to religion was the idea of inana. No doubt, the actual mana of the Melanesians will on analysis be found to yield a very mixed and self-contradictory set of meanings, and to stand for any kind of power that rests in whatever way upon the divine. I suppose it, however, to have the central and nuclear sense of magical power; and, apart from the ques- tion of historical fact, let me, for expository purposes at any rate, be allowed to give the term this connotation. The inwardness of such mana or magical power we have seen reason to regard as derived by the magician from a more or less intuitive perception of his projective act of will as the force which occultly transmutes his pretence into ulterior reality. But if the essence of his supernormal power lie in precisely this, then wherever else there be discoverable supernormal power under control of a person, will not its essence tend to be conceived as consisting in the same ? Meanwhile, all manifestations of the super- natural are likely to appear as in some sense manifesta- tions of power, and as in some sense personally controlled. That they should be noticed at all by man they must come within the range of his practical interests, that is, be as agents or patients in regard to him ; and, if he is in awe of them, it will assuredly be as agents, actual or potential, that is, as powers, that he will represent them to himself. And again, whatever is able to stand up against him as an independent and self-supporting radiator of active powers will be inevitably invested by him with more or less self- hood or personality like in kind to what he is conscious of