. PRESIDENTIAL ADDUES?!. 683 



by ptircliasc, or by study aud practice in the conventional luctliod?, Las acquired 

 the most powerful vvenda. Siiuilarly, the professional priest is he who in these 

 ways, or by prayer and fasting, has acquired the favour of the imaginary 

 personalities believed to influence or control the aflairs of men — who has, in a word, 

 possessed himself of their orenda. The union of these two professions in one 

 person is not adventitious ; it is probably fundamental ; it is at least so general 

 that in describing the society of savages and peoples in low stages of culture 

 observers are often at a loss whether to call their functionaries priests, or wizards, 

 or medicine-men. Consequently the custom has arisen among anthropological 

 writers of using the word shaman, borrowed from some of the Siberian tribes, and 

 including all three meanings. For in that condition of society the functions of 

 priest and sorcerer and medicine-man are, as Dr. Frazer says, ' not yet difi'erentiated 

 from each other.' We of course are familiar with the distinction between magic 

 and religion. As society evolved, according to Spencer's famous formula, from an 

 indefinite, incoherent homogeneity towards a definite, coherent heterogeneity, step 

 by step religion became severed from magic. Yet it has never become so wholly 

 severed that the primitive connection may not be traced. Priests have become 

 organised into a separate order. Triumphant religions have proscribed the 

 conquered faiths, and have repudiated their practices as magical. The conquered 

 faiths under this repression have carried on their religious worship mixed with 

 magical rites, and tending more and more to be degraded into pure magic, yet 

 never losing all religious elements. Even the magic of the Middle Ages, and 

 later, in Europe, if we may trust the confessions of the judicial victims themselves, 

 was mingled with the worship of a being in whom they recognised the devil, 

 perhaps the last avatar of a heathen god ; and witchcraft was one of the commonest 

 charges against heretics. On the other hand, not even the highest religions have 

 been able to free themselves wholly from what are in eiiect magical rites, by which 

 their followers have striven to compass union with the objects of worship, to 

 possess themselves of their ovenda, to locate it in their own persons or in the 

 images and implements of their cult, to intensify their own orenda, and to exercise 

 it for the benefit, spiritual, corporal or pecuniary, of themselves and others. 



The sketch which I have thus tried to draw embodies what seem to me to be 

 the results of the latest inquiries and discussions on a subject still obscure. 1 do 

 not pretend it is complete. I do not pretend it is original. And I must of course 

 admit that it is a speculation. We can never obtain direct evidence as to what took 

 place in that archaic period when man had only just begun to be man and had 

 hardly reached even the bottom rung of the ladder of civilisation. That is matter 

 of inference — of guesswork perhaps— but the guesswork of one who has to fit 

 together the scattered and disordered pieces of a puzzle. In putting our puzzle 

 together we have to assemble and classify our facts, and whatever guess (or let us 

 dignify it by the name of theory) colligates the facts in the most satisfactory 

 manner — that is lik<?ly to be nearest the actual truth. 



I may be told that I have ignored whole series of facts — prominent among 

 them the customs and superstitions of the Arunta, that tiresome people of Central 

 Australia who have made hay of so many beautiful anthropological theories. 

 Well, I do not know what other series of facts I have ignored, but I have been 

 considering the question all the time with one eye fixed on the Arunta and their 

 neighbours. The Arunta have been represented to be the lowest and least evolved 

 of known humanity in their beliefs and institutions : in a word, they are in the stage 

 of primitive atheism from which it is said we have all been developed. Now none 

 of the Australian tribes are, strictly speaking, in a primitive condition. The civili- 

 sation of all of them has evolved to fome extent. It has evolved, speaking in 

 general terms, along similar lines ; and these lines have been conditioned by the 

 environment. It is admittedly significant tliat, in a land where so many archaic 

 types of the lower animals have survived we should find archaic types of human 

 culture. The environment and the isolation of ages have in both cases preserved 

 them. Yet the most archaic types of Australian culture are far from being primi- 

 tive. So far are they that the social organisation is of a most complex character, 

 the product of a long succession of stages of development. The least archaic types 



