Themis, a study of the social origins of Greek ... - Warburg Institute

iv] Psychology of Magic 85
above all not calculable and observable, but wilful and mysterious,
a thing a man learns to know not by experiment but by initiation,
a thing not of 'a natural law' but mystical entirely, halting always
between an essence and a personality. Without this belief in mana,
Wa-korc'-da, there would be acts of psychological discharge, but
there could scarcely be a system of magic 1
.
This notion of the continuous medium in which magic can act,
and which anything like advanced magic seems to presuppose, is in
a sense an abstraction or at least a pluralization, and must have
been a gradual growth. One of the means and methods of its
growth it is possible to trace. This brings us back to our medicineman
on the Dipylon fragment.
In the centre of the design, as already noted, is a great
shield, not worshipped, for the medicine-man, as we
' Mycenaean '
have seen, is making rain on his own account, but manifestly, from
its place on the altar, ' sacred.' Why is the shield sacred ? The
prompt answer will probably be returned, ' because it is the shield
of a god '— perhaps of the sky-god. We have the usual a priori
anthropomorphism. Man conceives of god in his own image.
Savage man is a warrior, so his god is a warrior. He has a
battle-axe, a shield. The battle-axe, the shield are sacred, divine,
because they are the weapons, the attributes, of a w&v-god.
Because in our theology we have borrowed from the Semites the
Lord is a Man of War, because to us, ' there is none other that
fighteth for us,' we straightway impose a war-god on the savage
and the primitive Greek. Let us look at facts—savage facts first.
The Omaha, arch-spiritualists as they are, believe they can act
on, they can direct, such Wa-kon'-da as they have by a sort of
immediate telepathy on their fellows. They have a word for this
— Wa-zhin-dhe-dhe, wazhin, directive energy, dhe-dhe, to send- ; by
1 See especially MM. Hubert et Mauss, Theorie Generale de la Magie, Annee
Sociologique, 1902-3, p. 108.
2 Miss Alice Fletcher, On the import of the totem among the Omahas, Proceedings
of the American Assoc, for the Advancement of Science, 1897, p. 326.
See also Notes on certain beliefs concerning Will-Power among the Siouan tribes, a
paper read by Miss Fletcher before the American Association for the Advancement
of Science, Buffalo Meeting, Aug. 1896. For my knowledge of this interesting paper
I am indebted to the kindness of Dr A. C. Haddon.