Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/435

 Reviews. 381

incantations, and with allusions in the Bible, for the purpose of explaining one another. Only the historical process will raise the study of folklore from the stage of mere experiment to that of an exact science, and the more quickly this truth is realized the more profitable will it be for our studies.

Turning now to the book itself, the author has paid special attention, and rightly so, to what may be termed magic in Assyrian literature, i.e. incantations and charms, though it would be very difficult to draw the line in that literature between worship and sorcery. The division attempted by Mr. Thompson, who defines religion as the worship of the community and the service of the priests, and magic as the worship of the individual and practised by low-class people, will hardly commend itself to general acceptance. It is only a difference of degree, and not of kind. Nor can the line be sharply drawn between "gods" and "demons." The "god" of one nation is often the "demon" of another, and vice versa. Equally unsatisfactory is the definition of "tabu," adopted from Robertson Smith, whose words are given in full, by which holy and defiled are practically made identical. In a long and erudite introduction, Mr. Thompson discusses various incidental elements which play a role in magic, and then, in succession, demons and ghosts, demoniac possession and tabu, and sympathetic magic, leading up to The Atonement Service and The Redemption of the Firstborn. The first chapters are replete with important and accurate information, notably from Assyrian literature. So long as the author is dealing with concrete facts, and especially with Assyrian and Babylonian Hterature, we are on safe ground, but when he begins to explain these facts and to draw general conclusions for Semitic magic or for ancient practices recorded in the Bible, we find ourselves in a maze of hypotheses and of deductions of which one or two examples may sufiice. Like all the writers on similar subjects, Mr. Thompson assumes that the people of old and their priests never knew the exact meaning of their own actions, and the reason why they did these things, what the aim and object of the Atonement was, and why they brought a sacrifice, which, as now explained, was to free the sick man from the demon who had attacked him, and to lure the demon away by the smell of the blood, so that he might leave the body of the man