Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/178

 150 the other. That is why failure is fatal to ogres. The Sirens must die when Odysseus passes in safety; the Sphinx, when her riddle has been answered, is doomed. In the case of witchcraft, again, may be seen how, beneath the conflict, lies still the idea of union,—the victim simply by being bewitched becomes part of the witch's personality. The regular charm against witchcraft is to attack the witch by sympathetic magic; it is noticeable that part of the victim is in this process as efficacious an instrument as the excreta of the witch. For example, a Somerset farmer cut off the ears of his bewitched cattle and burned them, "that the Witch should be in misery, and could not rest till they were pluck'd out." Glanvill narrates of another house where the furniture was bewitched "which they of the house being fully persuaded of, roasted a Bedstaff, upon which an old Woman, a suspected Witch, came to the House."

Magic then might almost be expressed as a conflict of wills. Powers or personalities are brought into contact, with the result that the identity of one party is absorbed or annihilated by the other. In the simple case of the accumulation of mana by the medicine-man, the power of the conquered enemy becomes, in the eating, ipso facto the power of the victor. The stronger absorbs the weaker. My object here is to suggest that throughout magical conflict this holds good and the stronger party wins. The aggressor, the party who takes the initiative, who recognises the seriousness of the conflict and acts with intention, is the winner; failure is of the weaker party, who is taken unawares, who gives himself away, who allows the enemy to get an advantage.

Let us take, first, the effect produced by very great mana on that with which it comes into contact. Contact with