The threshold of religion / by R.R. Marett.

  • Robert Ranulph Marett
Date:
[1914]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The threshold of religion / by R.R. Marett. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the “ devil, in the spear, in himself, or in some tertium quid that possesses it or him. In any case the power is represented quasi-personally. I am quite prepared to believe with Mr Lang that gods tend at first to be conceived as exercising their power precisely as a magician does.1 But it does not there- fore follow, as it must if Dr Frazer’s theory of magical as mechanical causation be accepted, that in some sense the early gods came down to men “ from out of a machine. We have been hitherto considering the magical act from the point of view of the operator. Let us now inquire what sort of character is imposed by it on the other party to the transaction, namely, the victim. If our previous hypothesis be correct, that to the operator the magical act is generically a projection of imperative will, and specifically one that moves on a supernormal plane, it follows that the position of the victim will be, in a word, a position compatible with rapport. As the operator is master of a supernormal “ must, so the victim is the slave of that same “ must. Now surely there is nothing in such a position on the part of the victim that is incompatible with the possession of what we know as will. On the contrary, might we not expect that the operator, as soon as he comes to reflect on the matter at all, would think of his power as somehow making itself felt by his victim, as somehow coming home to him, as somehow reaching the unwilling will of the man and bending it to an enforced assent? On this theory a magical transaction ought, hardly if at all 1 Myth, Ritual and Religion, i. 120,
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