Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/391

 Reviews. 363

powers, capnble of all sorts of applications. Corresponding with this is the extreme vagueness of the designations applied to magical properties, such as divine, sacred, mysterious, lucky, unlucky, and so forth. The notion of property passes over easily into power and spirit. Property and power are inseparable terms ; property and spirit are often confounded. The virtues or properties of an object often belong to it as the abode of a spirit. Spirits are indeed often the agents of magic. It is hardly too much to say that there is no magical rite in which their presence is not in some degree possible, though not expressly mentioned. Magic works in a special atmosphere, if not in the world of demons, at least in conditions in which their presence is possible. Beyond doubt, one of the essential characteristics of magical causality is that it is spiritual. Yet the idea of spiritual personalities ill represents the general anonymous forces which constitute the power of magicians. It gives no account of the virtue of words or gestures, the power of a look or of the intention, the influence or the mode of action of a rite. It does not explain why the magical rite controls and directs spiritual existences, any more than the sympathetic formula ex- plains why the rite acts directly on the object.

In short, behind the sympathetic formula, behind the notions of property and of spirits, there is another notion still more mysterious, the notion of power, vague, impersonal, always operating, irresistible, or depending for its efficaciousness on conditions not altogether at command. This power is known to the Melanesians as inaiia, to various tribes of North America as orenda, or wakaji, to the Malays as kramat^ to the Indo-Chinese as dcng. By its very vagueness and impersonality this power enshrines possibilities illimitable. It may be materialized, localized, personalized ; but it ceases not to be spiritual, to act at a distance, and that by direct connection, if not by contact, to be mobile and to move without movement, to be impersonal though clothed in personal forms, to be divisible yet continuous. Our notions of luck, of influence, of quintessence, of the Evil Eye, are pale survivals of a notion much richer and more fruitful. It is this notion which accounts for the phenomena of magic. Without it, magic is incomprehensible ; like a sentence without the copula, the action, the affirmation is wanting.

Dr. Frazer, of course, does not overlook this important notion.