506 Darwinism and the Study of Religions 



The Iroquois 1 of North America have a word, orenda, the meaning 

 of which is easier to describe than to define, but it seems to express 

 the very soul of magic. This orenda is your power to do things, your 

 force, sometimes almost your personality. A man who hunts well 

 has much and good orenda ; the shy bird who escapes his snares has 

 a fine orenda. The orenda of the rabbit controls the snow and 

 fixes the depth to which it will fall. When a storm is brewing the 

 magician is said to be making its orenda. When you yourself are in 

 a rage, great is your orenda. The notes of birds are utterances of 

 their orenda. When the maize is ripening, the Iroquois know it is 

 the sun's heat that ripens it, but they know more ; it is the cigala 

 makes the sun to shine and he does it by chirping, by uttering his 

 orenda. This orenda is sometimes very like the Greek dv/Mos, your 

 bodily life, your vigour, your passion, your power, the virtue that is 

 in you to feel and do. This notion of orenda, a sort of pan-vitalism, 

 is more fluid than animism, and probably precedes it. It is the 

 projection of man's inner experience, vague and unanalysed, into 

 the outer world. 



The mana of the Melanesians 2 is somewhat more specialised — all 

 men do not possess raana — but substantially it is the same idea. 

 Mana is not only a force, it is also an action, a quality, a state, at 

 once a substantive, an adjective, and a verb. It is very closely 

 neighboured by the idea of sanctity. Things that have mana are 

 tabu. Like orenda it manifests itself in noises, but specially 

 mysterious ones, it is mana that is rustling in the trees. Mana is 

 highly contagious, it can pass from a holy stone to a man or even 

 to his shadow if it cross the stone. "All Melanesian religion," 

 Dr Codrington says, " consists in getting mana for oneself or getting 

 it used for one's benefit 3 ." 



Specially instructive is a word in use among the Omaka 4 , wazhin- 

 dhedhe, "directive energy, to send." This word means roughly what 

 we should call telepathy, sending out your thought or will-power to 

 influence another and affect his action. Here we seem to get light 

 on what has always been a puzzle, the belief in magic exercised at a 

 distance. For the savage will, distance is practically non-existent, 

 his intense desire feels itself as non-spatial 5 . 



1 Hewitt, American Anthropologist, iv. i. p. 32, 1902, N.S. 



2 Codrington, The Melanesians, pp. 118, 119, 192, Oxford, 1891. 



3 Codrington, The Melanesians, p. 120, Oxford, 1891. 



* See Prof. Haddon, Magic and Fetishism, p. 60, London, 1906. Dr Vierkandt (Globus, 

 July, 1907, p. 41) thinks that Fernzauber is a later development from Nahzauber. 



5 This notion of mana, orenda, wazhin-dhedhe and the like lives on among civilised 

 peoples in such words as the Vedic brahman in the neuter, familiar to us in its masculine 

 form Brahman. The neuter, brahman, means magic power of a rite, a rite itself, formula, 

 charm, also first principle, essence of the universe. It is own cousin to the Greek duvafus 

 and <p6ais. See MM. Hubert et Mauss, " Th^orie generate de la Magie," p. 117, in V Annie 

 Sociologique, vn. 



