Magic Science and Religion 67 



then pull it back with a sudden jerk. Thus not only is the act of 

 violence, of stabbing, reproduced, but the passion of violence has 

 to be enacted. 



We see thus that the dramatic expression of emotion is the 

 essence of this act, for what is it that is reproduced in it ? Not its 

 end, for the magician would in that case have to imitate the death 

 of the victim, but the emotional state of the performer, a, state 

 which closely corresponds to the situation in which we find it and 

 which has to be gone through mimetically. 



I could adduce a number of similar rites from my own experi- 

 ence, and many more, of course, from other records. Thus, when 

 in other types of black magic the sorcerer ritually injures or 

 mutilates or destroys a figure or object symbolising the victim, 

 this rite is, above all, a clear expression of hatred, and anger. 

 Or when in love magic the performer has really or symbolically 

 to grasp, stroke, fondle the beloved person or some object repre- 

 senting her, he reproduces the behaviour of a heart-^sick lover who 

 has lost his common sense and is overwhelmed by passion. In 

 war magic, anger, the fury of attack, the emotions of combative 

 passion, are frequently expresssed in a more or less direct manner. 

 In the magic of terror, in the exorcism directed against powers of 

 darkness and evil, the magician behaves as if himself overcome by 

 the emotion of fear, or at least violently struggling against it. 

 Shouts, brandishing of weapons, the use of lighted torches, form 

 often the substance of this rite. Or else in an act, recorded by 

 myself, to ward off the evil powers of darkness, a man has ritually 

 to tremble, to utter a spell slowly as if paralysed by fear. And 

 this fear gets hold also of the approaching sorcerer and wards 

 him off. 



All such acts, usually rationalised and explained by some 

 principle of magic, are prima facie expressions of emotion. The 

 substances and paraphernalia used in them have often the same 

 significance. Daggers, sharp-pointed lacerating objects, evil- 

 smelling or poisonous substances, used in black magic ; scents, 

 flowers, inebriating stimulants, in love magic; valuables, in economic 

 magic — all these are associated primarily through emotions and 

 not through ideas with the end of the respective magic. 



Besides such rites, however, in which a dominant element 

 serves to express an emotion, there are others in which the act does 

 forecast its result, or, to use Sir James Frazer's expression, the rite 



