Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 8, 1897.djvu/87

Rh Good service is rendered, we may remark incidentally, to science by Dr. Jevons' repeated criticism of the use of terms, and by his attempts to define more accurately. Thus, "a god," he says, "is not a supernatural being as such, but one having stated friendly relations with a definite circle of worshippers, originally blood-relations of one another." By applying this definition to the accounts of travellers and missionaries we may often clear up difificulties, of which Dr. Jevons has given us a valuable example in the case of Sasabonsum, a spirit to whom so painstaking an observer as the late Colonel Ellis gave the title of god, with the result of landing himself in perplexity. Another instance of the author's acumen is his criticism of the much-abused terms "fetish" and "fetishism." Henceforth, for all serious students the vague use of these terms will be without excuse; and it will be nothing but a gain to anthropology if they be entirely discarded or at least limited to certain classes of charms and to the system of employing these charms. Let us even carry the principle into the use of the term "charm," which is almost equally vague. It ought to be limited strictly to spoken and written incantations: all other "charms," such as are worn or deposited for luck or protection, are, according to Dr. Jevons' definition, fetishes.

One term, however, that he has not disentangled is "Sympathetic Magic." It has been lately the custom to label all magic as "sympathetic magic." This is to confuse at least three kinds of magic. First, we have Incantations, in which the object is attained by the use of certain verbal formularies. Next, we have Mimetic Magic. When the savage flaps a blanket to cause a wind to blow, "as the sailor still whistles to bring a whistling gale"; when before going on the warpath or the chase he executes a "dance in which the quarry or the foe are represented as falling before his weapon," to secure success; when water is sprinkled to produce rain; and so forth, all this is not "Sympathetic" but "Mimetic Magic." It is to this kind of magic that the maxim "like produces like" is specially applicable. We should confine the term "Sympathetic Magic" to practices, whether of injury or benefit, upon substances identified with, though in effect detached from, the person (or thing) we intend to reach, practices which are believed directly to affect the person (or thing) aimed at by means of sympathy between him (or it) and the substance actually operated on.