ssessed in a certain degree by all, may be increased by practice.
Certain individuals come to possess it very strongly: among native
Australians today it is still deliberately cultivated. Magic in healing
seeks to control the demons, or forces; causing disease; and in a way it
may be thus regarded as a "lineal ancestor of modern science" (Whetham),
which, too, seeks to control certain forces, no longer, however,
regarded as supernatural.

Primitive man recognized many of these superhuman agencies relating
to disease, such as the spirits of the dead, either human or animal,
independent disease demons, or individuals who might act by controlling
the spirits or agencies of disease. We see this today among the negroes
of the Southern States. A Hoodoo put upon a negro may, if he knows of
it, work upon him so powerfully through the imagination that he becomes
very ill indeed, and only through a more powerful magic exercised by
someone else can the Hoodoo be taken off.

To primitive man life seemed "full of sacred presences" (Walter Pater)
connected with objects in nature, or with incidents and epochs in life,
which he began early to deify, so that, until a quite recent period, his
story is largely associated with a pantheon of greater and lesser
gods, which he has manufactured wholesale. Xenophanes was the earliest
philosopher to recognize man's practice of making gods in his own image
and endowing them with human faculties and attributes; the Thracians,
he said, made their gods blue-eyed and red-haired, the Ethiopians,
snub-nosed and black, while, if oxen and lions and horses had hands
and could draw, they would represent their gods as oxen and lions and
horses. In relation to nature and to disease, all through early history
we find a pantheon full to repletion, bearing testimony no less to the
fertility of man's imagination than to the hopes and fears which led
him, in his exodus from barbarism, to regard his gods as "pillars of
fire by night, and pillars of cloud by day."

Even so late a religion as that of Numa was full of little gods to be
invoked on special occasions--Vatican, who causes the infant to utter
his first cry, Fabulinus, who prompts his first word, Cuba, who keeps
him quiet in his cot, Domiduca, who watches over one's safe home-coming
(Walter Pater); and Numa believed that all diseases came from the gods
and were to be averted by prayer and sacrifice. Besides the major gods,
representatives of Apollo, AEsc