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or the prophet whose miraculous power was transferred in his mantle were both dealing in contagious magic. Further examples would be out of place here.
This simple scheme of Frazer serves fairly well as a pro- visional basis of classification of the phenomena of magic. A vast mass of magic processes is covered by it, and the rest can be adjusted to it. But it is obviously not an explanation of magic at all, but merely a description of how magic works. It is almost as far from being an explanation of magic as a history of lit- urgies would be from a description of Christianity. As a matter of fact, one of these lines of action, the one Frazer has most in mind when he defines magic as a science — that homeopathic doctrine that like cures like — leads nowhere, while the other — the idea of contagion — opens up the whole field for further analysis. Contagion implies that there is something to be trans- mitted. In that something, (which Frazer still ignores), we may find, as Sidney Hartland puts it, the idee mere not only of magic but of religion as well.*
The study of this contagion has been most thoroughly taken up in connection with the investigation of sexual taboos. One of the first general surveys of such phenomena was Ernest Crawley's article in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute for 1895 on "Sexual Relations." Later Crawley elaborated his theories in a curious and somewhat uncritical medley, which nevertheless still remains the best single guide to the sources for the phenomena of contagion. The Mystic Rose. Other studies, including Floss's Das Weih in der Natur und Volkerkunde sup- plied numerous instances of the danger with which primitive man invested women, particularly in the crises of life. In 1896 a sug- gestive contribution was made by E. Durkheim in the first num- ber of the Annee sociologique, where he carried back the idea of contagion underlying sexual taboos to a principle of primitive repulsion such as is seen in the attitude of men toward spilt blood. A preoccupation about totems prevented him seeing where he had got. (There was a time when one could not see the woods
•Cf. Folklore, 1904, p. 359.
