DIVINATION AND PALMISTRY 369 



the practice and power of wonder-working as dependent 

 on the employment of supposed supernatural or " occult " 

 agencies. It forms a vast field of study and one of the 

 greatest interest in the attempt to follow out the history 

 of the workings of the human mind, its extraordinary 

 envelopment in error and delusion, and its gradual 

 emancipation therefrom. 



In origin " magic " and " religion " are one. The 

 priest and the magician were originally one. Man tried 

 to control Nature by the use of spells and fantastic 

 procedures, based on imagined powers and correspon- 

 dences in natural objects. He excogitated (as a modern 

 child sometimes does) a sort of fancifully assumed 

 system of fixed laws of natural relations and interactions, 

 of causes and effects which were suggested by superficial 

 likenesses and wild guesses at connexion and sequence, 

 accepted without criticism. Thus, we have the wide- 

 spread doctrines of " sympathetic magic " and of " con- 

 tagious magic." An example of the first is the belief 

 that a certain tree or animal is the sympathetic repre- 

 sentative of a certain man, and that as the one flourishes 

 or suffers and dies so will the other. This is extended 

 into a belief that a drawing or image, or even an un- 

 shaped stone, may sympathetically represent a man or 

 an animal. The American medicine-man draws the 

 picture of a deer on a piece of bark, and expects that 

 shooting at it will cause him to kill a real deer the next 

 day. He mistakes a connexion which exists only in 

 the mind of the sorcerer for a real bond independent of 

 the human mind. Thus, too, waxen or clay images of 

 an enemy are made and melted before fire or wasted in 

 water, or pierced with pins (even at this day in Scotland, 

 as witness a clay figure in the museum at Oxford), in 

 the belief that the enemy himself will be similarly injured. 

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