§ 4 Retrogradation
On the other hand, in all these cases, the animistic interpretation of the power of fetiches, omens, prayers, rites, whether original (as Prof. Wundt holds) or acquired, may be lost, and a magical interpretation alone remain. For one’s mind becomes so engrossed with objects or practices (such as fetich-things or prayers) that are regarded as necessary to the gratification of any masterful desire, that not only irrelevant ideas, but any ideas not indispensable to the connexion between the objects or practices and the gratifications, may be forgotten; and as objects or practices acquire interest in themselves, even the gratifications formerly desired may be forgotten. Just as such means as money or books, business or study, may become ends to the exclusion of further enjoyments, so images or rites, at first subsidiary to the obtaining of demonic aid in love or revenge, may be cared for with a fervour that excludes the thought of any intervening means to those ends (especially such means as a capricious spirit who may fail one), and may even be employed under a vague fear or discomfort in the omission of them, when no particular purpose is any longer remembered. On the principle of least effort, we attend only to what is necessary.
(a) A saint’s finger-joint may at first be treasured as a fetich having the power of the saint to save from shipwreck; after a time it may be carried as an amulet without any thought of the saint’s interposition; whilst the evil to be averted is more and more vaguely imagined. Seeing that spiritual and magical agencies are the same invisible, unintelligible force, how easy to interchange them!
(b) Similarly omens, from being divine messages, each relating to a particular undertaking, may come to be merely occurrences that encourage or discourage a man, or a tribe, at any time; because, by tradition, they are lucky or unlucky. Or practically the same result may be reached by philosophy: as with those Stoics who explained that omens are prophetic not as sent by the gods, but as involved in the same procession of fatal events. Fate, before any laws of nature had been discovered, was nothing but all-comprehensive Magic: which left out or mediatised the gods, because, in a philosophical consideration of the world, they are worse than useless.
(c) As to prayers, in any rational conception of them, the form of words conveying them cannot matter to a god, as long as they are piously meant and devoutly meditated. Yet everywhere there has been a tendency to reduce them to strict formulæ, any departure from which may, it is feared, impair their efficacy. So far as this occurs, their operation is magical; they have become spells. Such is the result of custom, with mental inertia too dull to think; of an irreligious temperament, getting quickly through an uncongenial task; of a superstitious unimaginative spirit, afraid to omit any traditionary means of safety and for whom a praying-wheel is the way of peace. To rob prayer of its religious meaning, there is the ever-present example of the magical spells that operate by their own force. A form of words, whether magical or supplicatory, that has been among the antecedents of a time of peace or of gain, seems to be amongst its causes, and is repeated that such a time may continue. Of the countless cases in which prayers have degenerated into spells, none is more instructive than the one recorded by Dr. Rivers in his account of the dairy-ritual of the Todas. The prayers offered during this ritual are uttered in the throat, so that the words are undistinguishable; and they are divided into two parts: first, a list of sacred beings and objects mentioned by sacred names, much of it unintelligible; and, secondly, a petition for the protection and welfare of the buffaloes: the former is now the more important; the latter is apt to be slurred over, or perhaps omitted.289 Of the Roman public prayers, Mr. Warde Fowler says: “The idea that the spoken formula (derived from an age of Magic) was efficient only if no slip were made, seems to have gained in strength instead of diminishing, as we might have expected it to do with advancing civilisation.”290 To justify the belief in formulæ it may be asserted that the gods themselves prescribed them: an excuse for the superstitious dread of altering what is traditionary, and for the persuasion that the form itself has mysterious virtue.
(d) That other religious ceremonies, repeated from age to age, have the same tendency as prayers to become dead forms from which the spirit of communion or devotion has departed—though under favourable conditions it may return from time to time—is too well known; and if in their emptiness they are still believed somehow to serve their purpose, it can only be as magical rites. One may be surprised to find at what an early stage of culture this tendency is fully realised. William Ellis, the celebrated missionary, says of the people of Raiatea: “The efficacy of their [religious] services consisted in the rigid exactness with which sacred days were kept, and religious ceremonies performed, without the least regard to the motives and dispositions of the devotees.... In their idol-worship, however costly the sacrifice, and however near its close the ceremony might be, if the priest omitted or misplaced any word in the prayers, or if his attention was diverted by any means so that the prayer was broken, the whole was rendered unavailing: he must prepare other victims and repeat his prayers over from the commencement.”291 How this concern for details must be a relapse into magical notions may be read in the account of rites to stop the rainfall in Torres Straits; where (we are told) if the wizard omit any detail, the rain continues.292 Perhaps the notion of the perfect definiteness of causation (though not consistently adhered to in other matters) arose from this meticulous anxiety of superstition: it also, however, furnishes excuses for failure both to priests and wizards.
(e) In Magic there must be something deeply satisfying to the average mind: it precedes Religion, supplies the basis and framework of religious practices, and remains when Religion is in ruins; and when people change their Religion, they retain their Magic. Among the Fijians,293 those who were Christianised lost their dread of witchcraft last of all the relics of their heathenism. Among the Cherokees, “Gahuni, like several others of their Shamans, combined the professions of Indian conjuror and Methodist preacher.”294 In Norway, after the general acceptance of Christianity, Lapland witchcraft was still valued. The victory of the insurgents at Stiklestad, where St. Olaf fell, was thought to have been due to the magic armour of reindeer-skin that Thore Hund had brought from Lapland; though all St. Olaf’s men wore the cross upon helmet and shield.295
Since then the spiritualising of Magic and the despiritualising of Religion are both real processes of evolution, it may be difficult, or even impossible, to say of any given magical practice, without particular knowledge of its history, whether it is primitive or residuary. Sir E. B. Tylor writes: “Charm formulas are in very many cases actual prayers, and as such are intelligible. Where they are merely verbal forms, producing their effect on nature and man by some unexplained process, may not they, or the types they were modelled on, have been originally prayers, since dwindled into mystic sentences?”296 The circumstances of each case must guide our judgment. What shall we say, for example, of the addresses to spirits in Melanesia, where it is difficult to find in any dialect a word for prayer, “so closely does the notion of efficacy cling to the form of words employed”?297 Are spells there rising into prayers, or prayers sinking back into spells?