It is another difficulty that the more man ought to be finding out the
fallacy of magic, the less does he find it out. Mr. Frazer chooses the
Arunta of Central Australia as a people wholly without religion, but
universally magicians. I have frequently read the account of Arunta
magic by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, but I never found that it included
a belief like this: 'A man god.... draws his extraordinary power from a
certain sympathy with nature.' He is defined not as an incarnation of
a god 'of an order different from and superior to man,' but as only a
superior sorcerer where most men are sorcerers. 'He is not merely the
receptacle of a divine spirit.' We have just been told that he is not
the receptacle of a divine spirit at all, and we shall take it to be
so. 'His whole being, body and soul, is so 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.[34]....'
But you will look in vain for this portentous belief among the Arunta,
who, not having found out the fallacy of magic, have not invented
beings superior to man. For this sorcerer of the very highest magic
you have to go to the civilisation of Japan, or to the peoples on the
Congo, much more civilised than the Arunta.[35]These peoples, by Mr.
Frazer's theory, had experience and intelligence enough to find out the
fallacy of magic, and had gods in great plenty. But they have carried
the belief in magic, in a magician much superior to his neighbours, to
a pitch infinitely beyond the Arunta. Yet the Arunta have no gods with
whom to draw comparisons invidious and unfavourable to magicians; they
have, it is said, no gods at all.
Just as magic thus reaches its highest power, according to Mr. Frazer,
where there is most religious competition (while the reverse should
be the case by his theory), so religion flourishes most in Australia,
exactly where, by Mr. Frazer's theory, the circumstances are most
unfavourable to religion and most favourable to magic. Magic, by the
hypothesis, must prosper most, its fallacy must be latest discovered,
it must latest give place to religion, where it appears to be most
successful, and _vice versâ_. Yet Mr. Frazer assures us that in
Australia magic flourishes alone, where every circumstance demonstrates
its failure; and religion begins to blossom precisely where magic must
seem to its devotees a relative success.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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