Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/174

 156 Fyoni Spell to Prayer.

magician, then what more natural than that a humar magician when in difficulties should seek, by any one of the many modes of entering into relations w'ith the divine to reinforce his own majia from the boundless store of self- same mana belonging to those magicians of a higher order whom, so to speak, he has created after his own image ?

All this, however, I confess, it is easier to deduce than to verify. When we try to study the matter in the concrete, we soon lose our w^ay amongst plural causes and intermixed effects. For instance, it is clear that the savage has in- w^ard experience of the supernormal, not only in his feats of projective magic, but likewise in his dreams, his fits of ecstasy, and so on (though these latter seem to have no place within the sphere of magic proper). Or again we have been dealing with the act of magic from the point of view of the operator. But there is also the point of view of the victim, whose suggestibility will, we may suppose, be largely conditioned by the amount of " asthenic " emotion — fear and fascination — induced in him. Hence any sort of association with the supernatural and awful which the sorcerer can establish will be all to the good. An all-round obscurantism and mystery-mongering is his policy, quite apart from the considerations that make his own acts mysterious to himself. However, the quotations cited by Dr. Frazer from Dr. Codrington seem fairly crucial as regards the hypothesis I am defending.^^ Mana is at all events the power which is believed to do the work in Melanesian magic, and to obtain mana on the other hand is the object of the rites and practices that make up what anthropologists will be ready to call Melanesian " religion." Or once more we seem to find exactly what we want in the following prayer of the Malay pawang at the grave of a murdered man : " Hearken, So-and-so, and assist me . . . . I desire to ask for a little magic." '"^ I submit, then, that

" G. />.,- i., 65-6. Cf. the same authority '\nj. A. /., xi., 309. ^ M. M., 60-1.