Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/182

 164 From Spell to Prayer.

" Mother Earth." ^^ Clearly the cults of the rice-mother, the maize-mother, the corn-mother, and so on^ wherein magic is finally swallowed up in unmistakable religion, are the natural outcome of such a gradually-intensifying personi- fication. But this personification in its turn would follow naturally upon that view of the magical act which we have all along assumed to have been its ground-idea, namely the view that it is an inter-personal, inter-subjective transaction, an affair between wills — something, therefore, generically akin to, if specifically distinct from, the relation which brings together the suppliant and his god.

One word only in conclusion. I have been dealing, let it be remembered in justice to my hypothesis, with this question of the relation of magic to religion, the spell to the prayer, abstractly. It is certain that religion cannot be identified merely with the worship directly generated by magic. Religion is a far wider and more complex thing. Again, there may be other elements in magic than the one I have selected for more or less exclusive consideration. It is to some extent a matter of definition. For instance, divination may, or may not, be treated as a branch of magic. If it be so treated, we might, as has already been said, have to admit that, whereas one kind of magic develops directly out of quasi-instinctive practice, namely the act of primitive credulity, another kind of magic, divination, is originally due to some sort of dim theorising about causes, the theory engendering the practice rather than the practice the theory. Meanwhile, if out of the immense confusion of beliefs and rites which the student of savage superstition is called upon to face, we shall haply have contrived to isolate, and more or less consistently keep in view, a single abstract develop- ment of some intrinsic interest and importance, we shall have done very well. Every abstraction that is " won from the void and formless infinite " is of value in the present vague and shifting condition of anthropology.

6' G. B.;- i., 99-