So far we have been dealing mainly with native ideas
and with native views of magic. This has led us to the point where the savage
simply affirms that magic gives man power over certain things. Now we must
analyze this belief from the point of view of the sociological observer. Let us
realize once more the type of situation in which we find magic.
Man, engaged in a series of practical activities, comes to a gap; the hunter is
disappointed by his quarry, the sailor misses propitious winds, the canoe builder
has to deal with some material of which he is never certain that it will stand
the strain, or the healthy person suddenly feels his strength failing. What
does man do naturally under such
conditions, setting aside all magic ,belief and ritual? Forsaken by his
knowledge, baffled by his past experience and by his technical skill, he
realizes his impotence. Yet his desire rips him only the more strongly; his
anxiety, his fears and hopes, induce a tension in his organism which drives him
to some sort of activity. Whether he be savage or civilized, whether in
possession of magic or entirely ignorant of its existence, passive inaction the
only thing dictated by reason, is the last thing in which he can acquiesce. His
nervous system and his whole organism drive him to some substitute activity.
Obsessed by the idea of the desired end, he sees it and feels it. His organism reproduces
the acts suggested by the anticipation of hope, dictated by the emotion of passion
so strongly felt.
The man under the sway of impotent fury or dominated by thwarted hate
spontaneously clenches his fist and carries out imaginary threats at his enemy,
muttering imprecations, casting words of hatred and anger against him. The
lover aching for his unattainable or unresponsive beauty sees her in his visions,
addresses her, and entreats and commands her favors, feeling himself accepted,
pressing her to his bosom in his dreams. The anxious fisherman or hunter sees in
his imagination the quarry enmeshed in the nets, the animal attained by the
spear; he utters their names, describes in words his visions of the magnificent
catch, he even breaks into gestures of mimic representation of what he desires.
The man lost at night in the woods or the jungle, beset by superstitious fear,
sees around him the haunting demons, addresses them, tries to ward off, to
frighten them, or shrinks from them in fear, like an animal which attempts to
save itself by feigning death.
These reactions to overwhelming emotion or obsessive desire are natural responses
of man to such a situation, based on a universal psycho-physiological
mechanism. They engender what could be called extended expressions of emotion
in act and word, the threatening gestures
of impotent anger and its maledictions, the spontaneous enactment of the
desired end in a practical impasse, the passionate fondling gestures of the
lover, and so on. All these spontaneous acts and spontaneous works make man
forecast the images of the wished for results, or express his passions in
uncontrollable gestures, or break into words which give vent to desire and
anticipate its end.
And what is the purely intellectual process, the conviction formed during such
a free outburst of emotion in words and deed? First there surges a clear image
of the desired end, of the hated person, of the feared danger or ghost. And
each image is blended with its specific passion, which drives us to assume an
active attitude towards that image. When passion reaches the breaking point at
which man loses control over himself, the words which he utters, his blind
behavior, allow the pent-up physiological tension to flow over. But over all
this outburst presides the image of the end. It supplies the motive force of
the reaction, it apparently organizes and directs words and acts towards a definite purpose. The substitute action in
which the passion finds its vent, and which is due to impotence, has
subjectively all the value of a real action, to which emotion would, if not impeded, naturally have led.
As the tension spends itself in these words and
gestures the obsessing visions fade away. The desired end seems nearer
satisfaction, we regain our balance, once more at harmony with life. And we
remain with a conviction that the words of malediction and the gestures of fury
have traveled towards the hated person and hit their target; that the
imploration of love, the visionary embraces, cannot have remained unanswered,
that the visionary attainment of success
in our pursuit cannot have been without a beneficial influence on the
pending issue. In the case of fear, as the emotion which has led us to frenzied
behavior gradually subsides, we feel that it is this behavior that has driven
away the terrors. In brief, strong emotional experience, which spends itself in
a purely subjective flow of images,
words, and acts of behavior, leaves a very deep conviction of its reality, as
if of some practical and positive achievement, as if of something done by a power
revealed to man. This power, born of mental and physiological obsession, seems
to get hold of us from outside, and to primitive man, or to the credulous and
untutored mind of all of ages, the spontaneous spell ,the spontaneous rite, and
the spontaneous belief in their efficiency must appear as a direct revelation
from some external and no doubt impersonal sources.
When we compare this spontaneous ritual and verbiage of overflowing passion or
desire with traditionally fixed magical ritual and with the principles embodied
in magical spells and substances, the striking resemblance of the two products.. Magical ritual, most of the principles of
magic, most of its spells and substances, have been revealed to man in those
passionate experiences which assail him in the impasses of his instinctive life
and of his practical pursuits, in those gap and breaches left in the ever imperfect wall of culture which
he erects between himself and the besetting temptations and dangers of hi
destiny. In this I think we to recognize not only one of the sources but the very
fountainhead of magical belief.
To most types of magical ritual, therefore, there corresponds a spontaneous
ritual of emotional expression or of a forecast of the desired end. To most
features of magical spell, to the commands, invocations, metaphors, there
corresponds a natural flow of words, in malediction, in entreaty, in exorcism,
and in the descriptions of unfulfilled wishes. To every belief in magical
efficiency there can be laid in parallel one of those illusions of subjective
experience, transient in the mind of the civilized rationalist, though even
then never quite absent, but powerful and convincing to the simple man in every
culture, and, above all, to the primitive savage mind.
Thus the foundation of magical belie and practice are not taken from the air,
but are due to a number of experiences actually lived through, in which man
receives the revelation of his power to attain the desired end. We must now
ask: What is the relation between the promise contained in such experience and
their fulfillment in real life.
Plausible though the fallacious claims of magic might be to primitive
man, how is it that they have remained so long unexposed?
The answer to this is that, first, it is well known fact that in human memory
the testimony of a positive case always overshadows the negative one. One gain
easily outweighs several losses, Thus the instances which affirm magic always
loom far more conspicuously than those which deny it. But there are other facts
which endorse by a real or apparent testimony the claims of magic. We have seen
that magical ritual must have originated from a revelation in a real experience.
But the man who from such an experience conceived, formulated, and gave to his
tribesmen the nucleus of a new magical performance-acting, be it remembered, in
perfect good faith –must have been a man of genius. The men who inherited\ and
wielded his magic after him, no doubt always building it out and developing it,
while believing that they were simply following up the tradition, must have
always been men of great intelligence, energy, and power of enterprise. They
would be the men successful in all emergencies. It is an empirical fact that in
all savage societies magic and outstanding personality go hand in hand. Thus
magic also coincides with personal success, skill, courage, and mental power.
No wonder that it is considered a source of success.
The personal renown of the magician and its importance in enhancing the belief
about the efficiency of magic are the cause of an interesting phenomena: what
may be called the current mythology
of magic. Round every big magician there arises a halo made up of stories about
his wonderful cures or kills, his catches, his victories, his conquests in
love. In every savage society such stories form the backbone of belief in
magic, for, supported as they are by the emotional experiences which everyone
has himself, the running chronicle of
magical miracles establishes its claims beyond any doubt or cavil. Every
eminent practitioner, besides his traditional claim,, besides the filiation
with his predecessors, makes his personal warrant of wonder-working.
Thus myth is not a dead product of past ages, merely surviving as an idle
narrative. It is a living force, constantly producing new phenomena, constantly
surrounding magic by new testimonies. Magic moves in the glory of the past
tradition, but it also creates its atmosphere of ever nascent myth. As there is
a body of legends already fixed, standardized, and constituting the folklore of
the tribe, so there is always a stream of narratives in kind to those of
mythological time. Magic is the bridge between the golden age of primeval craft
and the wonder-working power of today. Hence the formulas are full of mythical
allusions, which, when uttered, unchain the power of the past and cast them
into the present.
With this we see also the role and meaning of mythology in a new light. Myth is
not a savage speculation about the origin of things born out of philosophical
interest. Neither is it the result of the contemplation of nature – a sort of
symbolical representation of its laws. It is the historical statement of one of
those events which once for all vouch for the truth of a certain magic. Sometimes
it is the actual record of a magical revelation coming directly from the first
man to whom magic was revealed in some dramatic occurrence. More often it bears
on its surface that it is merely a statement of how magic came into the possession
of a clan or a community or a tribe. In all cases it is a warrant of its truth,
a pedigree of its filiation, a charter of its claim to validity. And as we have
seen, myth is the natural result of human faith, because every power must give
signs of its efficacy, must act and be known to act if people are to believe in
its virtue. Every belief engenders its
mythology, for there is no faith without miracles, and the main myth recounts
simply the primeval miracle of the magic.
Myth, it may be added at once, can attach itself not only to magic but to any
form of social power or social claim. It is used always to account for extraordinary
privileges or duties, for great social inequalities, for severe burdens of
rank, whether this be very high or very low. Also the beliefs and powers of
religion are traced to their sources by mythological accounts. Religious myth,
however, is rather an explicit dogma, the belief in the nether world, in
creation, in the nature of divinities, spun into a story. Sociological myth, on
the other hand, especially in primitive cultures, is usually blended with legends about the sources of magical
powers. It can be said without exaggeration that the most typical, most highly developed,
mythology in primitive cultures, is that of magic, and the function of myth is
not to explain but to vouch for, no to satisfy curiosity but to give
confidence in power, not to spin out yarns but to establish the flowing freely
from present-day occurrences frequently similar validity of belief. The deep connection
between myth and cult, the pragmatic function of myth in enforcing belief, has been
so persistently overlooked in favor of the etiological or explanatory theory of
myth that it was necessary to dwell on this point.
