n it; and after going over that evidence once more I
can emphatically state my conviction that Wissowa's theory will not hold
water for a moment. I shall return to the subject in a later lecture
dealing with the religious history of the second Punic war; at present I
merely express a belief that, whatever be the history of the accessories
of the rite,--and they are various and puzzling,--the actual immersion
of the puppets is the survival of a primitive piece of sympathetic
magic, the object being possibly to procure rain. It is, in my opinion,
quite impossible to resist the anthropological evidence for this
conclusion, though we cannot really be certain about the object; for
this evidence I must refer you to my _Roman Festivals_, and to the
references there given.[105]

This rite of the Argei, then, was a case of genuine magic, and exercised
by a State priesthood, virgins to whom certain magical powers were
supposed to be attached; it was, I think, a popular performance, like
one or two others which are also outside the limit of the Fasti,[106]
and was embodied in a more complicated ceremonial long after that
calendar had been drawn up. In the ritual authorised by the State, with
public objects in view, _i.e._ for the benefit of society as a whole,
there is hardly a trace of anything that we can call genuine magic
apart from the examples I have just been explaining. There were, I need
not say, many survivals of magical processes of which the true magical
intent had long been lost--ancient magical deposits in a social stratum
of religion, which I shall notice in their proper place. This is not
peculiar to the religion of the Romans; it is a phenomenon to be found
in all religions, even in those of the most highly developed type, and
it is one apt to cause some confusion as to the true distinction between
magic and religion.[107] It is easy to find magical processes even in
Christian worship, if we have the will to do so; but if we steadily bear
in mind that the true test of magic is not the nature of an act, but the
intent or volition which accompanies it, the search will not be an easy
one.

The modern French school of sociologists, which now has to be reckoned
with in investigating the early history of religion, claims that magic
was not originally, as we now see it, a matter of individual skill, but
a sociological fact, _i.e._ it was used for the benefit of the
community, as religion came to be in a later age. If th