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simply as magic — in existence. It fills many treatises on other things; its dark seams run across the pages of practically every work on comparative religion ; investigations on early law touch on its domain ; primitive institutions are seen to have in it many of their roots; and it is from these outside angles that we get our impressions of its mysterious role. But apart from a single essay, which claims to be only a sketch, and to which we refer below, there is no satisfactory treatment of magic as magic and not as an adjunct to something else. There are no encyclopedias of magic science. It is as if it had effectively protected itself from the modern investigator by the power of its own taboos. I believe that in Paris, where such taboos are most likely first to meet their revolutionary tribunal, such an exhaustive treat- ment has been projected ; but until it appears we are without any satisfactory analysis, and therefore all the more without any satisfactory synthesis which will explain the phenomena and the role of magic. Meanwhile, however, we are supplied with some provisional treatments, which we may regard as working hy- potheses, and it is to these, not as final results, but as possible interpretations, that I wish to direct your attention tonight.
Let us take first that great compilation from which most English readers derive their ideas of comparative religion. The Golden Bough by J. G. Frazer. According to Frazer,* magic is the opposite of religion. It is a rude and mistaken science, in which man began his struggle with the mysterious forces of the world. By spell and by charm he met those dangerous powers whose presence he saw revealed in the multifold crises of his life: in sickness and death, in the chances of the hunt or the perils of war, in birth, in sexual relations, in the terror of spilt blood, in the gloom of the night, in the march of the storm, in all the terrible and the wonderful in his miracle-wrought uni- verse. Such as he was, Frazer thinks, this brute man of the eoliths, whether of the prehistoric past or of Australia today, turned his dawning consciousness upon the problem of a direct struggle with the elements. No god was invoked in that chatter-
- In the second edition of the Golden Bough, accepting the distinction drawn
by F, B. Jevons in his Introduction to the History of Religion.
