Page:The place of magic in the intellectual history of Europe.djvu/36

28 It is any change with characteristics and results which we do not expect nor usually see in changes. In short, magic is præternatural rather than supernatural.

Thus we find the existence of magic in the earliest period of human thought generally assumed by anthropologists, but some writers deny that man always has believed in supernatural beings. He first, they tell us, had a vague notion that by propitiating or by coercing nature he might secure for himself happiness; and that if anything external was to have power over the workings of the natural structure, it must be man, for both gods and God were yet unknown. Only gradually, they hold, through his belief in tree-spirits, through his devotion to plants or fetishes made sacred by their supposed efficacy in serving human wishes, perhaps, too, through his attitude toward human beings whose reputation for skill in magic finally led to deification, did man come to a belief in more or less divine beings and turn to them for the power and the happiness which in his savage and untutored impotency he had been unable to win by his own efforts. Then only would the performance of magic by the aid of supernatural beings commence.

There is another misleading idea which we should avoid. Fairy tales and romances picture magicians to us as few in number, adepts in a secret art. Instinctively, moreover, looking as we do upon magic as a mere delusion, we are prone to regard it as the creation of the popular imagination, and to believe that what magicians there were outside of the ordinary man's imagination were a few imposters who took advantage of his fancies, or a few self-deceived