Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/294

262 the black-fellows the difference between proceedings which are used for a good end and proceedings which are used for evil purposes is not a merely verbal difference. It is for them, and it is, as I suggest, in fact, a real difference—as real as the difference between killing and murder. The modus operandi may be the same in killing as in murder, but that does not make the one proceeding the same as the other, nor does it show that the difference between the two is merely verbal.

To speak then of an "age of magic" is to imply one of two things. Either it implies an age in which evil is always, and good is never, aimed at—and such an age there has never been. Or else it implies an age in which man was not conscious of the difference between proceedings aimed at an end that he thought good and proceedings directed to an end which he felt to be evil—and such an age there has never been. Proceedings directed to an end felt to be evil are themselves evil and are magical.

What then are we to say of proceedings aimed at an end felt to be good? Can we say of them that, if they are not to be called magical, they must be termed religious? The moment we ask this question we find ourselves face to face with the difficulty of defining rehgion. We may with Sir James Frazer define or describe religion as involving belief in personal beings superior to man; and then we cannot class the ceremonies which in Australia are conducted for the good of the community either as religion or as magic. Religious they are not, if religion implies belief m personal beings superior to man, and if in the Australian intichiuma ceremonies there is no reference to any such beings. Magical they are not, for the essence of the connotation of magic is that its purpose is condemned by the community as evil. Dr. Marett in the Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics suggests that what he calls "determinate religion"—by which he