Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/119

 Magic and Religion 109

justifiable homicide, and simple killing ; will Dr. Jevons admit a similar gradation between magic and religion ? In the second place, the difference between killing and murder is a legal one ; murder is killing without legal sanction, even though the motives may be of the highest kind and the approval of the community unqualified. If, for example, before the outbreak of war, I had killed a spy as the only means of averting a disaster to my country, the act would have been technically murder ; so is the killing of a tyrant. Will Dr. Jevons class these among illicit acts } If not, his analogy is a false one.

But the fatal flaw in his argument is really the fact that the community is an indefinite body, and that the results are good or evil according to the point of view. Let us take the case of cursing. We may admit that to curse a thief is justifiable, however much the thief may object, because theft is anti-social ; but suppose a man launches a curse against an innocent man or against a man who has excited his envy, what then } The animus is the same in all three cases, and in the two latter, public opinion will not be in his favour. Are we to say that the cursing is religious in the first case, magical in the latter .'* If so, we disregard the mental attitude of the curser. If, on the other hand, we say that all the cases are magical, we disregard public opinion, which permits the thief to be cursed.

Or let us say that European-made law has made cursing for theft illegal, that the native chiefs who administer it will condemn the curser to fine or imprisonment, and that native public opinion has swung round and condemns this old method of dealing with thieves. Do any of these facts change the psychological attitude of the curser or justify us in classing as magical a rite that we should earlier have put under the head of religion } If not, what becomes of the criterion of public approval }

Again, a curse for the confounding of the enemies of the