Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/120

 no Magic and Religion

community might well rank as licit ; but is the community the kinship group, the quarter, the town or the tribe ? If the cursers are in a minority, does that make the curse magical ? If both sides regard a curse as permissible, does the fact that it is to work evil make it magical ?

Or again, let us agree that rain-making is religious if it benefits the crops, but magical if it is meant to ruin them. What shall we say of the rite that aims at destroying one set of crops and saving another ? And what shall we say of the rain-making rite performed in mere bravado by two small boys, proud of their esoteric knowledge and regardless of material consequences ? If we say that they are border- line cases, does not this mean that magic passes insensibly into religion. And this is precisely what Dr. Jevons set out to disprove.

Or take Dr. Jevons's proof that the Frazer's " age of magic " is impossible. It might appear to those unversed in controversial methods that in order to demonstrate the absurdity of a statement, it is necessary to look at the meaning of it, i.e. to use the terms in the sense in which they were used by the author of the statement. Dr. Jevons, on the other hand, proceeds to confound Sir James Frazer, not by showing that he makes unfounded assumptions or contradicts himself, but by substitut- ing his own sense of the term " magic " for that which Sir James Frazer has adopted ; controversy on these lines is easy and entirely barren. Given Sir James Frazer's definition of magic, his " age of magic " is not only arguable, but actually maintained (p. 264) by Dr. Jevons himself ; Sir James Frazer means by his " age of magic " a period in which gods were unknown, and Dr. Jevons argues that religion began by being without gods. The only question is one of names — are we to term this pre-religious age magical 1 Dr. Jevons's whole argument against Sir James Frazer depends on the ambiguity of the term " magic." Ultimately, therefore.