Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/41

 Presidential Address. 29

conditions either brin^^ it into play by requiring men to rough it and take their chance, or else promote feelings of security and a corresponding sense of a rational and law- abiding universe.

Or take as another example the fear of witchcraft. Can we not study it among ourselves more effectively than among savages, even though it be written in larger letters on the surface of their lives ? Surely the root-feeling must be apprehended by experience, before its manifestations can be recognized for what they truly are ; and the root- feeling, I maintain, lurks here and now within the breast of everyone of us. Education has scotched it, may be, but it has not succeeded in killing it. We may do as Kim did in the story, and with the help of the multiplication-table divert the attention from the paralysing sensation of magic wrought upon us. But in the penumbra of the civilized mind lurk the old bogeys, ready to leap back into the centre of the picture if the effort to be rational relax for an instant. If, then, the p.sychology of magic begins at home, why need the folklorist look to the student of savagery for his leading, just because the latter operates on more simple social conditions in the light of a vast ignorance of what it feels like to live under such conditions? Even as I write I receive a newspaper from the Channel Islands in which there is to be read the full story, as told in the police court, of how a woman, reputed by her neighbours to be a witch, nearly drove another woman to suicide by her supposed incantations. Eirst the cattle perished mysteri- ously; they had clearly been overlooked. Then the owner's death was prophesied, did she not take steps to buy release from the prophet. The house became full of devils; and no wonder, since the witch herself, sniffing with her nose, declared that the place smelt of witchcraft. So powders must be purchased, and buried in the garden at the four points of the compass ; also a metal box " full of devils " was obtained and carried about, presumably to