This deplorable result is attributable to the suspicion of antisocial ends. It is this kind of magic which alone is reprobated in the lower culture. Death is very generally regarded as unnatural. If not caused by open violence, it must be due to spirits or to magic. Magic indeed is often deemed responsible for deaths by violence, or deaths credited to the immediate action of the spirits. Magic sets both causes in motion. Hence at a death, however occasioned, an inquest is commonly held to ascertain who is responsible; the accused is required to undergo an ordeal, and is punished if found guilty--as he usually is. But it is not the practice of magic that is condemned; it is the application of magic to the injury of the community. The chieftain of a tribe of Bantu “smells out” and puts to death the witch who has slain his father. The same chieftain will habitually practise magic on another chief before fighting with him. He {160} will make rain, or employ a wizard for the purpose. His sacrifices and acts of worship are inextricably mingled with magic. Even when the schism between magic and religion has attained much wider dimensions than anywhere among the Bantu, it is rather magic in its antisocial aspect than in itself that is reprobated and punished. The departure from established custom and established belief involves a severance from the community and an imputation of antisocial ends. The pursuit of individual desires and hatreds at odds with the general interest is what arouses the anger of society. Practices essentially magical may be incorporated in religious rites and exercised for what is believed to be the public good; and they will continue to be exercised with general assent, even in the highest forms of religion. THE BOLDNESS OF THE CELTS {161} Ælian, writing of the boldness of the Celts, relates that many of them await the overflowing sea, some throwing themselves armed into the waves and receiving their onset with drawn swords and threatening spears, just as if they could scare back or wound them.[161.1] This report seems to have come to him in the shape of gossip; nor does he assign it to any tribe or definite locality. That there was some ground for it, however, is to be inferred from the existence in the Book of Ballymote, an Irish manuscript of the end of the fourteenth century, of a short tradition, obviously of much earlier date, concerning Tuirbhe Trághmar, the father of Gobán Saer, who owned Tráigh Tuirbhi. “’Tis from that heritage he, standing on Telach Bela (the Hill of the Axe), would hurl a cast of his axe in the face of the flood-tide, so that he forbade the sea, which then would not come over the axe.”[161.2]