The Golden Bough - The Original Classic Edition. Frazer Sir

power from

       a certain physical sympathy with nature. He is not merely the receptacle of a divine spirit. His whole being, body and soul, is so

       delicately attuned to the harmony of the world that a touch of his hand or a turn of his head may send a thrill vibrating through

       the universal framework of things; and conversely his divine organism is acutely sensitive to such slight changes of environment as

       would leave ordinary mortals wholly unaffected. But the line between these two types of man-god, however sharply we may draw it

       in theory, is seldom to be traced with precision in practice, and in what follows I shall not insist on it.

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       We have seen that in practice the magic art may be employed for the benefit either of individuals or of the whole community, and that according as it is directed to one or other of these two objects it may be called private or public magic. Further, I pointed out that the public magician occupies a position of great influence, from which, if he is a prudent and able man, he may advance step by

       step to the rank of a chief or king. Thus an examination of public magic conduces to an understanding of the early kingship, since

       in savage and barbarous society many chiefs and kings appear to owe their authority in great measure to their reputation as magi-

       cians.

       Among the objects of public utility which magic may be employed to secure, the most essential is an adequate supply of food.

       The examples cited in preceding pages prove that the purveyors of food--the hunter, the fisher, the farmer--all resort to magical

       practices in the pursuit of their various callings; but they do so as private individuals for the benefit of themselves and their families,

       rather than as public functionaries acting in the interest of the whole people. It is otherwise when the rites are performed, not by

       the hunters, the fishers, the farmers themselves, but by professional magicians on their behalf. In primitive society, where uniform-

       ity of occupation is the rule, and the distribution of the community into various classes of workers has hardly begun, every man

       is more or less his own magician; he practises charms and incantations for his own good and the injury of his enemies. But a great

       step in advance has been taken when a special class of magicians has been instituted; when, in other words, a number of men have

       been set apart for the express purpose of benefiting the whole community by their skill, whether that skill be directed to the healing

       of diseases, the forecasting of the future, the regulation of the weather, or any other object of general utility. The impotence of the

       means adopted by most of these practitioners to accomplish their ends ought not to blind us to the immense importance of the institution itself. Here is a body of men relieved, at least in the higher stages of savagery, from the need of earning their livelihood

       by hard manual toil, and allowed, nay, expected and encouraged, to prosecute researches into the secret ways of nature. It was at

       once their duty and their interest to know more than their fellows, to acquaint themselves with everything that could aid man in his

       arduous struggle with nature, everything that could mitigate his sufferings and prolong his life. The properties of drugs and minerals,

       the causes of rain and drought, of thunder and lightning, the changes of the seasons, the phases of the moon, the daily and yearly journeys of the sun, the motions of the stars, the mystery of life, and the mystery of death, all these things must have excited the

       wonder of these early philosophers, and stimulated them to find solutions of problems that were doubtless often thrust on their

       attention in the most practical form by the importunate demands of their clients, who expected them not merely to understand

       but to regulate the great processes of nature for the good of man. That their first shots fell very far wide of the mark could hardly

       be helped. The slow, the never-ending approach to truth consists in perpetually forming and testing hypotheses, accepting those

       which at the time seem to fit the facts and rejecting the others. The views of natural causation embraced by the savage magician no

       doubt appear to us manifestly false and absurd; yet in their day they were legitimate hypotheses, though they have not stood the test

       of experience. Ridicule and blame are the just meed, not of those who devised these crude theories, but of those who obstinately

       adhered to them after better had been propounded. Certainly no men ever had stronger incentives in the pursuit of truth than these

       savage sorcerers. To maintain at least a show of knowledge was absolutely necessary; a single mistake detected might cost them their

       life. This no doubt led them to practise imposture for the purpose of concealing their ignorance; but it also supplied them with the

       most powerful motive for substituting a real for a sham knowledge, since, if you would appear to know anything, by far the best

       way is actually to know it. Thus, however justly we may reject the extravagant pretensions of magicians and condemn the deceptions

       which they have practised on mankind, the original institution of this class of men has, take it all in all, been productive of incalcu-

       lable good to humanity. They were the direct predecessors, not merely of our physicians and surgeons, but of our investigators and

       discoverers in every branch of natural science. They began the work which has since been carried to such glorious and beneficent

       issues by their successors in after ages; and if the beginning was poor and feeble, this is to be imputed to the inevitable difficulties

       which beset the path of knowledge rather than to the natural incapacity or wilful fraud of the men themselves.

       2. The Magical Control of Rain

       OF THE THINGS which the public magician sets himself to do for the good of the tribe, one of the chief is to control the

       weather and especially to ensure an adequate fall of rain. Water is an essential of life, and in most countries the supply of it depends

       upon showers. Without rain vegetation withers, animals and men languish and die. Hence in savage communities the rain-maker is a

       very important personage; and often a special class of magicians exists for the purpose of regulating the heavenly water-supply. The

       methods by which they attempt to discharge the duties of their office are commonly, though not always, based on the principle of

       homoeopathic or imitative magic. If they wish to make rain they simulate it by sprinkling water or mimicking clouds: if their object is

       to stop rain and cause drought, they avoid water and resort to warmth and fire for the sake of drying up the too abundant moisture.

       Such attempts are by no means confined, as the cultivated reader might imagine, to the naked inhabitants of those sultry lands like

       Central Australia and some parts of Eastern and Southern Africa, where often for months together the pitiless sun beats down out

       of a blue and cloudless sky on the parched and gaping earth. They are, or used to be, common enough among outwardly civilised

       folk in the moister climate of Europe. I will now illustrate them by instances drawn from the practice both of public and private

       magic.

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       Thus, for example, in a village near Dorpat, in Russia, when rain was much wanted, three men used to climb up the fir-trees of an old sacred grove. One of them drummed with a hammer on a kettle or small cask to imitate thunder; the second knocked two firebrands together and made the sparks fly, to imitate