76 Science Religion and Reality 



desired end. To most features of magical spell, to the commands, 

 invocations, metaphors, there corresponds a natural flow of words, 

 in malediction, in entreaty, in exorcism, and in the descriptions of 

 unfulfilled wishes. To every belief in magical efficiency there 

 can be laid in parallel one of those illusions of subjective experience, 

 transient in the mind of the civilised rationalist, though even there 

 never quite absent, but powerful and convincing to the simple man 

 in every culture, and, above all, to the primitive savage mind. 



Thus the foundations of magical belief and practice are not 

 taken from the air, but are due to a number of experiences actually 

 lived through, in which man receives the revelation of his power to 

 attain the desired end. We must now ask : What is the relation 

 between the promises contained in such experience and their 

 fulfilment in real life ? Plausible though the fallacious claims of 

 magic might be to primitive man, how is it that they have remained 

 so long unexposed ? 



The answer to this is that, first, it is a well-known fact that 

 in human memory the testimony of a positive case always over- 

 shadows the negative one. One gain easily outweighs several 

 losses. Thus the instances which affirm magic always loom far 

 more conspicuously than those which deny it. But there are 

 other facts which endorse by a real or apparent testimony the 

 claims of magic. We have seen that magical ritual must have 

 . originated from a revelation in a real experience. But the man who 

 from such an experience conceived, formulated, and gave to his 

 tribesmen the nucleus of a new magical performance — acting, 

 be it remembered, in perfect good faith — must have been a man of 

 genius. The men who inherited and wielded his magic after him, 

 no doubt always building it out and developing it, while believing 

 that they were simply following up the tradition, must have been 

 always men of great intelligence, energy, and power of enterprise. 

 They would be the men successful in all emergencies. It is an 

 empirical fact that in all savage societies magic and outstanding 

 personality go hand in hand. Thus magic also coincides with 

 personal success, skill, courage, and mental power. No wonder 

 that it is considered a source of success. 



This personal renown of the magician and its importance in 

 enhancing the belief about the efficiency of magic are the cause 

 of an interesting phenomenon : what may be called the current 

 mythology of magic. Round every big magician there arises a halq 



