680 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 



personalities ; but there can be no doubt, I think, that the two ideas are essentially 

 the same, and that that of ?«««« has become more limited by appropriation. An 

 important step bas thus been taken by the Melanesian mind towards differentiating 

 between human and superhuman attributes and potentialities. 



Although the idea oi orenda, or mana, may not receive everywhere the same 

 explicit recognition, it is implied in the customs and beliefs of mankind through- 

 out the world. It underlies the practice of Taboo. When a Malagasy sticks up 

 in his field a figure or scarecrow to keep off robbers, it is not that they may dread 

 prosecution with all the rigour of the law, though that, perhaps, will be the result 

 if they are caught. What is threatened is sickness, mysteriously induced by the 

 power of the owner of the field, or by power which he has caused to be conjured 

 into the scarecrow.^ A Samoan in the same way suspends to a cocoa-nut palm a 

 small figure of a shark, made with the leaves of the tree ; it is notice to the robber 

 that he will be inevitably devoured by a shark.'^ The Siberian Chukchi, whose 

 fire has gone out on the cold and timberless tundra, cannot borrow fire from his 

 neighbour, for ' the fire of a strange family is regarded as infectious and as har- 

 bouring strange spirits. Fear of pollution extends also to all objects belonging to 

 a strange hearth, to the skins of the tent and the sleeping-room, and even to the 

 keepers and worshippers of strange penates. The Chukchi from far inland, who 

 travel but little, when they come to a strange territory fear to sleep in tents or to 

 eat meat cooked on a strange fire, preferring to sleep in the open air and to subsist 

 on their own scant food supply. On the other hand, an unknown traveller, 

 coming unexpectedly to a Chukchi camp, can hardly gain admittance to a tent, 

 a difficulty of which the writer I am here quoting had personal experience.^ It is, 

 of course, impossible to discuss the subject of taboo in detail. Suffice it to say 

 that the universal avoidance of a dead body, the taboos of women, the taboos 

 observed by priests, by chiefs, by hunters and warriors, the taboos of temple and 

 shrine, of times and seasons, of speech and act, may all be traced to the same root- 

 idea. Our words sanctity, pollution, infection feebly and partially translate the 

 intuitive dread of orenda which is embodied in a taboo. 



Take, again, the Evil Eye as a striking example of orenda which has survived 

 into civilised communities. Here the whole maleficent potentiality of a person is 

 concentrated in a glance ; and the amulets which are worn on the body, or sus- 

 pended on the wall, or at the door of a house, are directed to intercepting and so 

 exhausting the influence. What foundation there may be for the modern psycho- 

 logical doctrine of Telepathy it is not my business to determine. But I should 

 like to point out its resemblance to the Iroquoian doctrine of orenda. Telepathic 

 communication may result from conscious or unconscious exertion of will ; it may 

 occur at a supreme crisis of fate or at a casual moment ; it is, in either case, the 

 product of a potentiality which we call mijstic for want of a better name, and 

 which attaches to or flows from some personalities more strongly than others. We 

 are all conscious of occasionally meeting, or receiving a letter from, someone on 

 whom our thoughts have been more or less insistently dwelling, and whom we do 

 not expect immediately to see or to hear from, Goethe is reported by his friend 

 Eckermann as having told him: 'I have often enough had the experience in my 

 youthful years of a powerful longing for a beloved maiden taking possession of me 

 during a lonely walk ; and I thought about her and thought about her until she 

 really came and met me.' We need, however, no such commonplace illustration 

 to convince us of Goethe's orenda. 



Now, without multiplying illustrations which will spring to the mind of every 

 anthropologist, it seems to me that in this potentiality, this atmosphere, this 

 orenda, mana, call it by what name you will, we have the' common root of magic 

 and of religion. He for whom the world is full of personal beings, and hardly 

 anything else — a universe of objects interpreted in the terms of conscious per- 

 sonality and projected on a background of the Unknown with all its possibilities — 



' Van Gennep, Tahou et Totemisvie a Madagascar, p. 184. 

 ^ lUd., p. 185, note. Cf. Codrington, op. cit., p. 215. 

 ' W. Bogoras, in Amer. Anthrop., vol. ill. p. 97. 



