Magic is very old, and it will perhaps be well in this introductory chapter to present it to the reader, if not in its infancy—for its origins are much disputed and perhaps antecede all record and escape all observation—at least some centuries before its Roman and medieval days. Sir J. G. Frazer, in a passage of _The Golden Bough_ to which we have already referred, remarks that “sorcerers are found in every savage tribe known to us; and among the lowest savages ... they are the only professional class that exists.”[8] Lenormant affirmed in his _Chaldean Magic and Sorcery_[9] that “all magic rests upon a system of religious belief,” but recent sociologists and anthropologists have inclined to regard magic as older than a belief in gods. At any rate some of the most primitive features of historical religions seem to have originated from magic. Moreover, religious cults, rites, and priesthoods are not the only things that have been declared inferior in antiquity to magic and largely indebted to it for their origins. Combarieu in his _Music and Magic_[10] asserts that the incantation is universally employed in all the circumstances of primitive life and that from it, by the medium it is true of religious poetry, all modern music has developed. The magic incantation is, in short, “the oldest fact in the history of civilization.” Although the magician chants without thought of æsthetic form or an artistically appreciative audience, yet his spell contains in embryo all that later constitutes the art of music.[11] M. Paul Huvelin, after asserting with similar confidence that poetry,[12] the plastic arts,[13] medicine, mathematics, astronomy, and chemistry “have easily discernable magic sources,” states that he will demonstrate that the same is true of law.[14] Very recently, however, there has been something of a reaction against this tendency to regard the life of primitive man as made up entirely of magic and to trace back every phase of civilization to a magical origin. But R. R. Marett still sees a higher standard of value in primitive man’s magic than in his warfare and brutal exploitation of his fellows and believes that the “higher plane of experience for which _mana_ stands is one in which spiritual enlargement is appreciated for its own sake.”[15] [Sidenote: Divination in early China.]