Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/508

 462 Reviews.

as protection from attempts against the person or reputation, from violation of a pledge or an agreement, and so forth. This magical procedure consisted of ceremonies of various kinds, involving maledictions on the evil-doer. Sometimes these male- dictions were expressed in symbol only, sometimes by word or song, sometimes in writing. In case of a pledge or agreement, the person put under the pledge was made to invoke the curse on himself if he broke it. In other words, the mana, the mystic power inherent more or less in every personality, and pre- dominant in magician or ghost, or in the higher beings of the imagination, was set in motion to guard a private contract or to avenge a private wrong. But this is simply the application to private ends of those religious forces which guard and enforce public rights. M. Huvelin concludes, therefore, that in the domain of law the magical rite is only a religious rite turned from its regular social aim and employed to realize an individual will or an individual belief. Thus the contradiction is resolved. The magical rite is religious in form and tenour : it is only anti-religious in its ends.

Can this conclusion be extended beyond the domain of law to all the applications of magic? M. Huvelin thinks it can; but for the present he pursues the subject no further, awaiting the results of fresh research in a larger field.

The second Mcmoire is by M. R. Hertz. It is a thoughtful analysis of funeral ceremonies with the object of arriving at a clearer view of the idea of death and all that it imports to peoples in the lower culture. It is obvious that death is looked upon as something very different from that which modern physiological research presents to us. A dead human body is not considered in the same light as the dead body of any other animal. It inspires horror ; and the more eminent the person who is dead the greater the emotion excited, not simply by the fact of death but by the corpse. Death in fact puts an end not alone to the visible corporeal existence of a living being : with the same blow is destroyed the social being grafted on the physical individuality, to which a greater or lesser importance and dignity and consecration are attached by the collective consciousness. The destruction of such a being