enables persons quite easily to be united, or brought into contact, with power. Modes of contact for example are,—seeing, touching, spitting on, speaking to, the use of hair, faeces, images, or name, the giving of presents, and, in some cases, the payment of money. Union or contact with power is the foundation of magic, and in religion communion with the divinity is the basic idea: sacrifice has ultimately, as its raison d'être, the bringing into contact of worshipper and God.[1] The agent brings himself voluntarily into contact or union with a beneficent power, as, for example, in the cases of union with the healing well or sacred tree.[2] Further, of course, this union may be effected for the benefit of someone by a third party. Thus Tûm, Safekht, and Thoth inscribe the name of Rameses II. on the sacred tree of Heliopolis, thereby endowing him with eternal life.[3]
But magic, no less than religion, is based on this notion of contact or union. The medicine man can add to his mana. The possession of the kin gives the Australian the magic power which is in them; the power of the migis passes to the Mide into whom it is shot. By eating a dead enemy you may add his power to your own. The religious sacrament is to some extent a self-surrender. There contact with a stronger power is undertaken, but the power is known to be beneficent; in union the worshipper is absorbed, but not annihilated, by the divinity. But, in the case of the accumulation of mana, the power is absorbed by the stronger party. When Isis knew Ra by his name, the god's power passed into the goddess. Thus, magical encounter is at once a union and a conflict. For union is fatal to that party whose identity is absorbed by
- ↑ Messrs. Hubert and Mauss have made it clear that the main function of sacrifice is to bring into union God and worshipper. The ritual of sacrifice primarily exists for the purpose of minimising the risk attendant on the contact of sacred and profane. Cf. "Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice," Mélanges d'Histoire des Religions, pp. 1-130.
- ↑ Hartland, The Legend of Perseus, vol. ii.
- ↑ Clodd, Tom Tit Tot, p. 160, (quoting Wiedemann).
