Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/423

Rh moving, radiates for ever around the god. It is the baraka of the Moslem; it transmits itself like magical force. Theism is, like magic, a construction à priori; like magic, it is dominated by emotion; like magic, contradictions abound in it, and theologians spend their strength in reconciling them. Like magic, too, theism has a practical aim: it is a technique. It is occupied, first with immediate physical needs, and secondly with moral needs. One characteristic alone distinguishes it from magic,—the personification of power essentially magical as a distinct will. As a consequence the constraining character of the rite disappears. The god, having a free will, can no longer be mechanically compelled. He must be conciliated; and thus prayer replaces the charm. The magician commanded nature; the worshipper, on the other hand, preserves towards the god to whom he prays an expectant and receptive attitude which is characteristic of theism.

But magic is a collective creation. The needs that have given birth to it are collective needs,—food, sunshine, rain, and so forth. The magician only exists because his fellow-tribesmen believe in him, because they claim and await his magical acts in a state of excitability predisposed to illusion; they communicate to him their faith, even if he otherwise would not have it. The belief in magic, the ideas of magic, are not merely the product of a state of society; they are the product of society, not of the individual; and as collective beliefs and ideas they impose themselves on the individual,—he cannot escape from them. But, when magic is diverted to individual purposes, it tends to become anti-social. The interest of some persons finds itself in conflict with the general interest; and they apply magical processes to ends injurious to the community, or to ends that may be strictly personal. Thus, side by side with the lawful and even obligatory magic which sustains the life of the society, another magic springs up harmful or at least useless to society, and as such reprobated and forbidden, or hardly tolerated. The social magic is termed by M. Doutté religion, the anti-social witchcraft. It becomes an anti-religion, and ends by modelling itself on religion, and borrowing its methods and processes.

The author examines many of the beliefs and practices of Islam with the object of showing that much of magic has been taken up