Page:The International Folk-Lore Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, July, 1893.djvu/46

 THE MAGIC-POETRY OF THE FINNS AND ITS APPLICATION IN PRACTICE.

BY HON. JOHN ABERCROMBY.

word magic is of very wide significance. But according to the purpose for which it is used it may be classed as beneficent or injurious. Here I only propose to deal with the beneficent class, and further to limit myself to its special development among the Finns. By beneficent magic I understand the many various methods, verbal or ceremonial, by which weak, helpless mortals thought to defend themselves against the attacks of evil spirits or the machinations of their human enemies. How and when the notion of spirits, ghosts and supernatural beings first sprung up in the human mind is an open, probably an insoluble, question, though it is safe to assume that it has existed for a very long period. But. however the idea arose, we find in the earliest Egyptian and Babylonian records, and amongst all people all over the world, that spirits were, and are, conceived of as made in man's own image, as duplicates of his incorporeal self. Hence, it was perfectly natural, as we shall find further on, for evil spirits to be abused, scolded, insulted, implored, bribed or consigned to the infernal regions by the wizard, just as if he were addressing another man. Sometimes they are naively treated as naughty little boys, whose mischief the wizard threatens to report to their mothers. Indeed, the main difference between a spirit and a mortal is that the former is invisible, or at least generally so, while the other is not.

The original home of the Finns was somewhere in Siberia, though there is no historical or traditional record as to when they crossed the Ural Mountains. When they reached eastern Europe they still lived mainly by hunting, trapping and fishing, so that their civilization must have been of an elementary kind. If they are the Penni or Phinnoi, mentioned by Tacitus 26