§ 2 The Wizard’s Pretensions
Whilst societies are formed to promote the common interests of wizards, too severe competition amongst themselves is in some measure avoided by the specialisation of individuals in different branches of their mystery. In pure Magic there is some room for the division of labour to deal with the weather, or fertility, or disease, but the spread of Animism and the multiplication of fetiches and demons open to the sorcerers a wide field for the multiplication of specialists. Amongst the Beloki, says Mr. Weeks,404 there are eighteen classes of specialists; on the lower Congo, fifty.
By spells and rites and charms wizards undertake the general control of Nature. They cause rain or drought, determine the rising of the sun and, for this purpose, may go every morning to a hill-top to summon him. An Australian wizard claimed to have driven away a comet by means of his sacred stones.405 The adept procures a favourable wind for his friends, or for his enemies an adverse; prospers the crops or blights them; controls the game of the hunter, and the cattle of the herdsman. The height of such claims may be read in Medea’s boast in the Metamorphoses.406
In his own person the wizard may have the power of shape-changing into some animal, or into any animal. He can fly through the air to skyland to visit Daramulun; or to help dull imaginations, he throws up a rope and climbs up by it, or throws up a thread (like a spider’s) and climbs up by that.407 Or he may fly to the moon to be the guest of the man whom we see there;408 or to the region of death to visit Erlik Khan.409 By daylight he only flies in the spirit, during a trance; but when it is quite dark he can go bodily. And probably this points to the origin of such beliefs: for to dream that one flies is not uncommon; and as in dreams we visit distant places, and on waking seem suddenly to have returned by no known means, the analogy of flight offers the easiest explanation of such experiences. To fly is one of the most ancient and persistent exploits of the profession: European witches flew upon broomsticks (degenerate from Siberian horse-staves); Dr. Faustus upon his magical cloak; and “levitation” has been exhibited by recent “mediums.”
Wizards cause and cure love and other forms of sickness; slay, or recall the soul to its accustomed habitation; sometimes the same man kills and cures; sometimes he works only evil, or only against evil; the Black and the White Magicians may become well-recognised hostile sects. Wizards discover thieves and murderers, or sell a fetich by whose power an evil-doer walks invisible, if he takes care not to be seen. They administer the ordeal and have in their power the life of every one who undergoes it. They interpret dreams, and prophesy by the flight of birds, the fall of dice, the making of shoulder-blades and the aspect of the stars.
The sorcerer communicates with the ghosts of the dead or with the spirits of nature and, by their aid, accomplishes whatever can be done by Magic. He is possessed by them, and operates or speaks by their power or inspiration; he drives them out of others whom they possess, or sends them on errands, controlling them either by the help of stronger spirits or by his profound knowledge of enchantments. Many of these things he is believed to do best during fits or ecstasy; which he produces in himself by rhythmic drumming and dancing, or by drugs, or by voluntary control of a disciplined temperament, to the astonishment and conviction of all beholders.
Such are the wizard’s pretensions, so well known that a brief recital of them suffices; and whilst they seem to us too absurd for any one to believe, least of all the wizard himself, yet observers assure us that he often does believe in them, and they are certainly taken to be genuine by the majority of his tribesmen. For them his performances are so wonderful as to put to shame the achievements of scientific invention; and probably this partly explains the frequent reports that savages are deficient in wonder. “It takes a good deal to astonish a savage,” say Spencer and Gillen; “he is brought up on Magic, and things that strike us with astonishment he regards as simply the exhibition of Magic more powerful than any possessed by himself.”410 Still the blacks were astonished by the phonograph. Similarly we are told by Stefánson411 that things unusual but of an understood kind—a bow that shoots fifty yards further than any other—may excite endless marvelling amongst the Esquimo; but what seems miraculous—a rifle-shot, or a binocular—is compared with the supposed powers of the shaman, who can kill an animal on the other side of a mountain, or see things that are to happen to-morrow. Our surgery, too, is very inferior to the shaman’s, who can take out a diseased heart or vertebral column and replace it with a sound one.