506 Darwinism and the Study of Religions 
The Iroquois! of North America have a word, orenda, the meaning 
of which is easier to describe than to define, but it seems to express 
the very soul of magic. This orenda is your power to do things, your 
force, sometimes almost your personality. A man who hunts well 
has much and good orenda; the shy bird who escapes his snares has 
a fine orenda. The orenda of the rabbit controls the snow and 
fixes the depth to which it will fall. When a storm is brewing the 
magician is said to be making its orenda. When you yourself are in 
a rage, great is your orenda, The notes of birds are utterances of 
their orenda. When the maize is ripening, the Iroquois know it is 
the sun’s heat that ripens it, but they know more; it is the cigala 
makes the sun to shine and he does it by chirping, by uttering his 
orenda. This orenda is sometimes very like the Greek @uyés, your 
bodily life, your vigour, your passion, your power, the virtue that is 
in you to feel and do. This notion of orenda, a sort of pan-vitalism, 
is more fluid than animism, and probably precedes it. It is the 
projection of man’s inner experience, vague and unanalysed, into 
the outer world. 
The mana of the Melanesians? is somewhat more specialised—all 
men do not possess mana—but substantially it is the same idea. 
Mana is not only a force, it is also an action, a quality, a state, at 
once a substantive, an adjective, and a verb. It is very closely 
neighboured by the idea of sanctity. Things that have mana are 
tabu. Like orenda it manifests itself in noises, but specially 
mysterious ones, it is mana that is rustling in the trees. Mana is 
highly contagious, it can pass from a holy stone to a man or even 
to his shadow if it cross the stone. “All Melanesian religion,” 
Dr Codrington says, “consists in getting mana for oneself or getting 
it used for one’s benefit®.” 
Specially instructive is a word in use among the Omaka‘, wazhin- 
dhedhe, “directive energy, to send.” This word means roughly what 
we should call telepdthy, sending out your thought or will-power to 
influence another and affect his action. Here we seem to get light 
on what has always been a puzzle, the belief in magic exercised at a 
distance. For the savage will, distance is practically non-existent, 
his intense desire feels itself as non-spatial’. 
1 Hewitt, American Anthropologist, tv, 1. p. 32, 1902, N.S. 
2 Codrington, The Melanesians, pp. 118, 119, 192, Oxford, 1891. 
% Codrington, The Melanesians, p. 120, Oxford, 1891. 
4 See Prof. Haddon, Magic and Fetishism, p. 60, London, 1906. Dr Vierkandt (Globus, 
July, 1907, p. 41) thinks that Fernzauber is a later development from Nahzauber. 
5 This notion of mana, orenda, wazhin-dhedhe and the like lives on among civilised 
peoples in such words as the Vedic bréhman in the neuter, familiar to us in its masculine 
form Brahman. The neuter, brdhman, means magic power of a rite, a rite itself, formula, 
charm, also first principle, essence of the universe. It is own cousin to the Greek dévaus 
and gicis. See MM. Hubert et Mauss, ‘‘ Théorie générale de la Magie,” p. 117, in L’Année 
Sociologique, vi1. 
