70 Science Religion and Reality 



Thus, in Central Australia, all magic existed and has been 

 inherited from the alcheringa times, when it came about like 

 everything else. In Melanesia all magic comes from a time when 

 humanity lived underground and when magic was a natural 

 knowledge of ancestral man. In higher societies magic is often 

 derived from spirits and demons, but even these, as a' rule, originally 

 received and did not invent it. Thus the belief in the primeval 

 natural existence of magic is universal. As its counterpart we 

 find the conviction that only by an absolutely unmodified immacu- 

 late transmission does magic retain its efficiency. The slightest 

 alteration from the original pattern would be fatal. There is, 

 then, the idea that between the object and its magic there exists 

 an essential nexus. Magic is the quality of the thing, or rather, of 

 the relation between man and the thing, for though never man- 

 made it is always made for man. In all tradition, in all mythology, 

 magic is always found only in the possession of man and through 

 the knowledge of man or man-like being. It implies the per- 

 forming magician quite as much the thing to be charmed and the 

 means of charming. It is part of the original endowment of 

 primeval humanity, of the mura-mura or alcheringa of Australia, 

 of the subterrestrial humanity of Melanesia, of the people of the 

 magical Golden Age all the world over. 



Magic is not only human in its embodiment, but also in its 

 subject-matter : it refers principally to human activities and states, 

 hunting, gardening, fishing, trading, love-making, disease, and 

 death. It is not directed so much to nature as to man's relation 

 to nature and to the human activities which affect it. Moreover, 

 the effects of magic are usually conceived not as a product of nature 

 influenced by the charm, but as something specially magical, 

 something which nature cannot produce, but only the power of 

 magic. The graver forms of disease, love in its passionate phases, 

 the desire for a ceremonial exchange and other similar mani- 

 festations in the human organism and mind, are the direct product 

 of the spell and rite. Magic is thus not derived from an obser- 

 vation of nature or knowledge of its laws, it is a primeval possession 

 of man to be known only through tradition and affirming man's 

 autonomous power of creating desired ends. 



Thus, the force of magic is not a universal force residing 

 everywhere, flowing where it will or it is willed to. Magic is the 

 one and only specific power, a force unique of its kind, residing 



