mc gee] THE BEGINNING OF MA THEM A TICS 65 1
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tended by persistent sortilege or thaumaturgy ; and in the higher strata necromancy and soothsaying, spells and enchantments, con- jury and exorcism, oracles and ordeals, and divination by lot or chance, become characteristic. In the higher strata, too, expres- sions supplement or supplant the objective symbols of lower plane, and the jargon of jugglers and the farrago of fakirs take the place of fetishes and idols ; and it is particularly significant that words and verbal formulas come to be regarded as superpo- tent expressions of mystical power. Some savage tribes regard their language as sacred, some have hieratic languages, and among all known tribes personal names are considered magical or tabu in one way or another ; while just within the lower strata of scripto- rial culture (as illustrated by the Arabs and Hindoos and other Eurasians of a few centuries ago, and attested by literary and linguistic and objective vestiges), shibboleths and numerical formulas become rife, and the inscribed talisman and abracada- bra and mystical number, and eventually the magic square, form favorite symbols of occult power. With the growth of
writing and the decadence of tradition, mysticism began to lose control of the human mind ; but innumerable vestiges along the line of Aryan culture, as well as the examples afforded by other lines, demonstrate the potency of this primeval factor and the tenacity of its hold on the human mind.
2. Primitive men are egoists. Knowing little of the exter- nal world, tribesmen erect themselves or their groups into centers about which all other things revolve according to the caprice of their all-potent mysteries ; they act and think in terms of a dominant personality, always reducible to the Ego, and an Ego drawn so large as to stand for person, place, time, mode of action, and perhaps for raison d'etre — it is Self, Here, Now, Thus, and Because. Science shows that the solar system hurtles through space, presumably about an unknown center ; it showed before that the sun is the center of our system ; but the helio- centric system was expanded out of an antecedent geocentric
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