PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 685 



Magic, like religion, is difficult to deiine. Many have been the attempts, 

 more or less successful, to analyse and define both, and I have no intention to 

 add to them. But if magic be held to be something in origin and essence distinct 

 and separate from religion, something parallel with modern science in its faith in 

 the order and uniformity of Nature, and only to be distinguished from it by its 

 false application of the principles of association ; if whenever it invokes the aid 

 of spirits it is no longer pure, but alloyed with religion ; then it must be seriously 

 asked whether pure magic ever occurs, and, if so, where. For, like religion, it is 

 founded, as I have tried to point out, on the primitive interpretation of man's 

 environment in the terms of his own consciousness ; and that interpretation is not 

 scientific, but anthropomorphic. It is that uiterpretation which gives its value to 

 the spell. The spell implies the personality of the objects to which it is addressed. 

 The Arunta sings in his Intichiuma rites. He invites the witchetty grubs to 

 come from all directions and lay their eggs, or the Hakea trees to flower and 

 their blossoms to fill with honey. He chants of the increase in the number of 

 the kangaroos which he is endeavouring to secure. Even when the songs recall 

 transactions in the Alcheringa they are not necessarily more magical than the 

 words of sacred dramas, which everywhere in the lower culture inseparably inter- 

 weave magic and religion. The mighty ancestors (as elsewhere the gods) are 

 present in the rite, either attached to the churinga or in their reincarnations ; and 

 where invitation or command is not issued directly to the object, the 7))ana of the 

 ancestors seems to be invoked for the accomplishment of the end. 



Again, so far from the Arunta medicine-men being practitioners of anything 

 analogous to modern science, they are initiated by, and their power is derived 

 from, the spirits. These spirits are believed to put the candidate to death, to 

 carry him down into the other world, and there to take out his internal organs, 

 replacing them with a new set, planting in his body a supply of magical crystals 

 by which all his subsequent wonders will be performed, and then bringing him 

 to life again. It is true that an imitation of this process can be performed by 

 medicine-men of flesh and blood ; but candidates thus initiated have a lower 

 repute than those initiated directly by the spirits." The crystals are in any 

 case the home and symbols of the magician's powers. They are, in fact, full 

 of 7nana. If they be lost the magician ceases to be a magician. All over 

 Australia, so far as we know, the same influence is attributed to them. On 

 the eastern side of the continent, where something like a tribal All-Father is 

 believed in, he is regarded, like Odin, as the mightiest of magicians, and the 

 crystals are, as well as the bull-roarer or churinga, among his special attributes. 

 Let me observe, too, in passing that it is not a little significant that, as in the 

 witchcraft of Europe and Africa, portions of dead bodies are in great request in 

 Australia for magical purposes. The ' pointing bone,' to which I referred just 

 now, is part of a dead man's leg or arm. A portion of his personality inheres in 

 it ; consequently, even before it is * sung,' it is endowed with his mana, which the 

 singing only enhances. For the same reason human fat and a dead man's hair are 

 important parts of the Australian native's magical apparatus. 



The initiation of the medicine-man by spirits, often the spirits of the dead, is 

 practically the universal belief in Australia. In this respect the Australian 

 medicine-man, or shaman, is in line with his brethren all over the world. The 

 Andaman Islanders are, perhaps, at a lower stage of civilisation than the Aus- 

 tralian blackfellows. According to our accounts, which are probably imperfect, 

 magic is little developed among them. Their shamans are called by a word signi- 

 fying dreamer. In dreams they communicate with ' the invisible powers of good 

 and evil,' they see the spirits of the departed and of those who are sick ; and the 

 beginning of what we may call their professional life is ' an extraordinary dream,' 

 in which future events are revealed to them,- In Siberia, the Gilyak shamans are 

 chosen vessels, to whom their tutelary gods reveal their high calling in vision or in 

 trance. From the moment that this is done the gods instal themselves as the new 



^ Spencer and Gillen, Central Tribes, p. 522. 



* E. H. Man in Journ, Anthroj). Inst., vol. xii. p. 9G. 



