lion, he BECOMES one. His reaction, his terror, is the same
as if the real lion were there. It is this childlike power of utter
impersonation, of BEING the thing we act or even see acted, this
extension and intensification of our own personality that lives deep
down in all of us and is the very seat and secret of our joy in the
drama.
A child's mind is indeed throughout the best clue to the understanding
of savage magic. A young and vital child knows no limit to his own will,
and it is the only reality to him. It is not that he wants at the outset
to fight other wills, but that they simply do not exist for him. Like
the artist he goes forth to the work of creation, gloriously alone. His
attitude towards other recalcitrant wills is "they simply must." Let
even a grown man be intoxicated, be in love, or subject to an intense
excitement, the limitations of personality again fall away. Like the
omnipotent child he is again a god, and to him all things are possible.
Only when he is old and weary does he cease to command fate.
The Iroquois (Hewitt, "American Anthropologist", IV. I. page 32, 1902,
N.S.) of North America have a word, orenda, the meaning of which is
easier to describe than to define, but it seems to express the very soul
of magic. This orenda is your power to do things, your force, sometimes
almost your personality. A man who hunts well has much and good orenda;
the shy bird who escapes his snares has a fine orenda. The orenda of the
rabbit controls the snow and fixes the depth to which it will fall. When
a storm is brewing the magician is said to be making its orenda. When
you yourself are in a rage, great is your orenda. The notes of birds
are utterances of their orenda. When the maize is ripening, the Iroquois
know it is the sun's heat that ripens it, but they know more; it is the
cigala makes the sun to shine and he does it by chirping, by uttering
his orenda. This orenda is sometimes very like the Greek thumos, your
bodily life, your vigour, your passion, your power, the virtue that is
in you to feel and do. This notion of orenda, a sort of pan-vitalism, is
more fluid than animism, and probably precedes it. It is the projection
of man's inner experience, vague and unanalysed, into the outer world.
The mana of the Melanesians (Codrington, "The Melanesians", pages 118,
119, 192, Oxford, 1891.) is somewhat more specialised--all men do not
possess mana--but substantially it is the same idea. Mana is not on
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