as
there will always be among forms and ceremonies, of which it is man's
nature to be tenacious. But religion, once firmly established,
invariably seeks to exclude magic; and the priest does his best to
discredit the magician, as claiming to exercise mysterious powers
outside the pale of the legally recognised methods of propitiation and
worship. As Dr. Tylor observed long ago, the more civilised the race,
the more apt it is to associate magic with men of inferior
civilisation.[85] In the Jewish law, though magic was well known to the
Jews and privately practised, there is no recognition of it; the magical
books attributed to Solomon were suppressed, according to tradition, by
the pious king Hezekiah.[86] So too at Rome, where the outward forms of
religion were also very highly systematised, magic, as it seems to me,
was rigorously excluded from the State ritual, though it continued in
use in private life under certain precautions taken by the State; in the
few genuine examples of it in the rites belonging to the _ius divinum_
(_i.e._ those used and sanctioned for the purposes of the community),
it is nothing more than a survival of which the magical meaning was
unknown to the writers from whom we hear of it.

A good example of such survivals is the curious ceremony of
the _aquaelicium_, without doubt a genuine case of magical
"rain-making"--one of the many inadequate and blundering attempts on the
part of primitive man to obtain what he needs. Probably it may be
classed under the head of "sympathetic magic," but the evidence as to
what was done in the ceremony is not quite explicit enough to allow us
to do this confidently.[87] It was, of course, not included in the
religious calendar, as it would be only occasionally called for, and
could not be fixed to a day; but there is clear evidence that it was
sanctioned by the State, for the pontifices took part in it, and the
magistrates without the _toga praetexta_, and the lictors carrying the
fasces reversed.[88] A stone, which lay outside the walls near the Porta
Capena, was brought into the city by the pontifices, so far as we can
make out the details, and it has been conjectured that it was taken to
an altar of Jupiter Elicius on the Aventine hard by, this cult-title of
the god of the sky having possibly some relation to the technical name
of the ceremony. What was done with the stone we unluckily do not know;
but it has been reasonably conjectured that it was a hollow