Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/54

 26 Presidential Address.

In the next place, we note that the primitive theory of supernormal power tends to represent it as a gift, or, one might almost say, as a loan on terms. There is great confusion of thought, to be sure, when it is sought to determine the precise source of the benefit received. It may be, as Codrington declares, that, according to the Melanesian belief, it exclusively belongs to personal beings of a supernatural kind to originate mana? If so, this is a far more definite piece of constructive theology than is usually to be extracted from our anthropological records. The state of mind of the typical savage would seem to be too undifferentiated, too blurred, to allow him to distinguish clearly between the value that he prizes and the agency whereby the realization of that value is accomplished.^ To speak broadly, the agency to which he trusts is a system of rites. A multitude of ceremonial acts and abstinences is the outward vehicle whereby the inward reinforcement is conveyed. That the ritual is a mere medium of communication, that it constitutes a sort of visual language whereby spirit speaks to spirit — such an idea is not likely to take definite shape in his nebulous consciousness.

Yet there are hints, even in the most naive of primitive theologies, of an awareness that by means of the externals of religion a participation of the human in the divine is brought about. Thus the crystals and other properties whereby the Kabi healer works his cures come from Dhakkan, the Rainbow; and, whereas these cause the doctor to be i)ux7irigiir, 'full of vitality,' Dhakkan himself is marnigurngur, vital and vitalizing in a superlative degree.^^ Even if we grant, however, that, on the whole, ritual is the savage substitute for God, we nmst go on to admit that a certain strictness of life is thus made the condition of spiritual increase. Not that the power can be claimed by

^Codrington, op. ciL, 119 n.

'Cf. W. K. Wright, Philosophical Review, xxv. (1916), 38.

'"Matthew, op. cit., 192.