for fear that they should do harm to others,[1] and, in the East, Ahura Mazda advises mankind in much the same fashion.[2] Again, it is the sick and weak that witchcraft easiest attacks. Infants before baptism, i.e. before they have a spiritual personality, are easy victims to dangers which have no power to harm adults. The evil eye most easily assails infants, animals, and young animals.[3] Adults possess a power which, if alert, will serve for their defence. In Apuleius' story of Thelyphron (Metamorphoses, ii. 21), if the watcher of the corpse relaxed his attention, the body was mutilated by witches, but so long as he kept awake all was well. This innate power in every grown human being is a motive for the secrecy of magic. The ideal plan presumably is to work magic secretly, and then let your enemy know that you have done it and he will die of fright. In any case, if the aggressor's mana is not strong enough for a direct attack, he effects by secrecy a breach in the enemy's defence. He secures, unknown, his image or his hair; he takes him off his guard. When the Iroquois goes hunting, his orenda conquers the orenda of his quarry.[4] A similar conflict underlies all magical usage. The existence of a modicum of power in every human being of necessity implies it.
Now the so-called sympathetic magic is based, not on a supposed axiomatic law that like causes like, but on the contagion of qualities. But qualities are, as it were, mana specialised, and the belief in the contagious infection of qualities is but an extension of the belief that mana affects that with which it is brought into contact. The wide area of personality as it is conceived in the Lower Culture
- ↑ Hartland, The Legend of Perseus, vol. ii., p. 68, note 5.
- ↑ Reinach, Orpheus, p. 99.
- ↑ Plutarch, Quaestiones Conv., v. 7; Virgil, Eclogues, iii. 103; Elworthy, The Evil Eye, pp. 9-10; Dalyell, The Darker Superstitions of Scotland, pp. 4, 10-12.
- ↑ Hewitt, American Anthropologist, N.S. vol. iv., p. 38.
