Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/175

 THE FORCE OF INITIATIVE IN MAGICAL CONFLICT.

BY W. R. HALLIDAY.

magic is in a sense a conflict. It is not, however, with the machinery of this conflict, nor with the weapons with which it is carried on, that we are here concerned, but rather with the deeper causes of victory or defeat. The result of reflection on the relation between sorcerer and victim, witch and bewitched, and an examination of the psychological presuppositions on which are based their success or failure, may, perhaps, prove of some interest and even importance in connection with the general question of the basis of magical efficacy; and at the outset, in view of the vexed controversy in which the larger question is involved, some declaration of creed may be thought necessary. Certain views, at any rate, I must put forward as briefly as possible, more or less after the manner of postulates deprived by lack of space of the justification which, in some cases, they may seem to require.

It is now widely admitted by anthropologists that magic is based on power. A rite which has efficacy in se is exactly analogous to a word of power. It is by his power or inana that the sorcerer or medicine-man works his will. But it is important to notice that in the lower culture the sorcerer's power differs not so much in kind as in degree from that of the ordinary man. Everyone has some power, some personality. For example, on the Rio Grande people are warned not to leave their hair clippings about, not because an enemy might make magical use of them, but