(_b_) By Animism, prior to philosophical reflection, the spirit is not conceived of as strictly incorporeal; its force, which is magical, is quasi-mechanical. Hence, in South-East Australia, spirits can carry off a man in a bag[314] (made, no doubt, of bag-soul-stuff). But spirits may act upon a man very effectually without being mechanically felt; as among the Ekoi, where ghosts are either good or bad, and generally a good goes with a bad one to counteract his malevolence; but should a bad one wander forth alone, and should a man without the gift of seeing ghosts (which depends upon his having four eyes) run against it in the street, the ghost will not step aside, but strikes the man in the face; who then has lock-jaw, and dies.[315] As we have reason to believe that this is not the natural ætiology of lock-jaw, the ghost’s action is plainly magical: like that of the corpse-candle which, not long ago, on a slope of Plinlimmon one rainy night, a man inadvertently ran against, and was “struck down dead as a horse.”[316] The mere apparition of a ghost (at least, to any one who has not four eyes) is magical. The sending of a bird as an omen is magical. This immediate power of the gods is nowhere shown more emphatically than in their metamorphoses: that these are sometimes wrought by spells or other enchantments proves that the operation is magical. Australian wizards transform themselves into kangaroos and other animals; and, in Arunta mythology, in the earliest Alcheringa (period of mythical ancestors), the Ungambikula—so called from having arisen out of nothing—with stone knives cut men out of rudimentary masses of unorganised matter (inapertua), and then transformed themselves into little lizards.[317] So this sort of self-conjuring may be said to begin at the beginning; and it cannot be necessary to accumulate examples of metamorphosis.