Presidential Address. 27
right of desert. If it come, it comes as a boon, as something bestowed by act of grace, something received humbly with fear and wonder. This is made plain by the evidence relating to the making of the medicine-man in Australia. The man who finds in himself a special capacity for ecstatic experience proceeds of his own initiative to develop it by means of a long and painful initiation.[1] In a word, he has a 'call' and obeys it. But, if desert cannot command the gift, want of desert can at any time cause it to depart. We remember the Kurnai doctor who confessed to Howitt that he had taken to drinking and then lost all his power.[2] Once again, by a slightly different train of thought, we are brought to see that the savage will for power is, at its most conscious, a will to be strong in spite of, rather than for the sake of, the animal nature. Such a will is fitly associated with a spirit of humility, because the man in us is ever afraid of the brute. Hence, if the monster leave him in freedom even for a brief space, he is ready to offer thanks to some divine Helper.
Lastly, the power thus willed and sought involves a capacity for social service, though as it were indirectly and by way of implication. At first sight the savage conception of supernatural power may seem to be quite unmoral. The wonder-working healer and the baneful sorcerer, the good spirit and the bad, are alike powerful in a transcendent way. That there should be some ambiguity in the notion is inevitable. A judgment from heaven is easily mistaken for a plague from hell. Or, again, magic and religion are wont to borrow weapons from each other's armouries, the black mass parodying the sacred rites of the Church, while the exorcist defeats the wizard simply by reversing the machinery. Nevertheless, at the most primitive levels of thought, as the facts of language prove, there is a clear distinction drawn between powers of light and powers of
- ↑ Cf. H. Hubert et M. Mauss, Mélanges d'Histoire des Religions (1909), 171.
- ↑ A. W. Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia (1904), 409.
