Magical Element in Primitive Ritual ;><>:; 



"soul" without lapsing into a sensuous mythology. The Cartesians' 

 sharp distinction between res externa non cogitans and res cogtiam 

 non externa is remote. 



So far then man, through the processes of his thinking, has provided 

 himself with a supersensuous world, the world of sense-delusion, of 

 smoke and cloud, of dream and phantom, of imagination, of name 

 and number and image. The natural course would now seem to 

 be that this supersensuous world should develop into the religions 

 world as we know it, that out of a vague animism with ghosts of 

 ancestors, demons, and the like, there should develop in due order 

 momentary gods (Augenblicks-Gotter), tribal gods, polytheism, and 

 finally a pure monotheism. 



This course of development is usually assumed, but it is not 

 I think quite what really happens. The supersensuous world as we 

 have got it so far is too theoretic to be complete material of 

 religion. It is indeed only one factor, or rather it is as it were a 

 lifeless body that waits for a living spirit to possess and inform it. 

 Had the theoretic factor remained uninformed it would eventually 

 have separated off into its constituent elements of error and truth, 

 the error dying down as a belated metaphysic, the truth developing 

 into a correct and scientific psychology of the subjective. But man 

 has ritual as well as mythology ; that is, he feels and acts as well as 

 thinks ; nay more he probably feels and acts long before he definitely 

 thinks. This contradicts all our preconceived notions of theology 

 Man, we imagine, believes in a god or gods and then worships. The 

 real order seems to be that, in a sense presently to be explained, 

 he worships, he feels and acts, and out of his feeling and action, pro- 

 jected into his confused thinking, he develops a god. We pass 

 therefore to our second factor in religion : — ritual. 



The word " ritual " brings to our modern minds the notion of a 

 church with a priesthood and organised services. Instinctively we 

 think of a congregation meeting to confess sins, to receive absolution, 

 to pray, to praise, to listen to sermons, and possibly to partake of 

 sacraments. Were we to examine these fully developed phenomena 

 we should hardly get further in the analysis of our religious 

 conceptions than the notion of a highly anthropomorphic god 

 approached by purely human methods of personal entreaty and 

 adulation. 



Further, when Ave first come to the study of primitive religions 

 we expect a priori to find the same elements, though in a ruder 

 form. We expect to see "The heathen in his blindness bow down 

 to wood and stone," but the facts that actually confront us are 

 startlingly dissimilar. Bowing down to wood and stone is an occu- 



