Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/243

 Rh ''Praep. Ev., VI, i, 2) to a person inquiring what sex his next child would be. The oracle is indeed somewhat obscure; but when illustrated by the folk-lore recorded in F.-L. J''., v, p. 208, and vi, 91, it may be seen to be based on the belief that if a birth takes place on the growing of the moon, the next child will be of the same sex; if on a waning moon, not.

In fine, it is impossible to divide primitive modes of forecasting the future into supernatural and non-supernatural, and confine the term "divination" to the former class. There is scarcely a member of either class which may not pass over into the other class. What may have been supernatural in its origin, survives as something not supernatural. What was in its origin possibly illogical but certainly not supernatural, comes to be explained as supernatural in ages when belief in this mode of communication between man and god is orthodox, as, for instance, in the time of the Stoics. This method of classification, then, confounds together things which have their origin in very different tendencies of the human mind. At the same time it obscures the relation of divination to "sympathetic magic", both of which are based on the belief that if one of two similar (or related) things is affected in any way, the other will be affected in a similar way. This belief when employed in Observation results in divination; when employed in Experiment, results in what may be conveniently called sympathetic magic, though there is not necessarily or originally anything supernatural about it. It is a mere matter of logic—savage, perhaps, rather than scientific, but still of logic, not of superstition—that if one member of a pair of similar or related things is in your power, you can affect the other as you wish; and that if one member is within the range of your observation you can tell how the other is faring. Thus, a lock of hair places the person from whose head it is cut (and to whom it is related, according to the primitive interpretation of the category of Relation) in