e which
science has accumulated and of the mental habits of enquiry and causal
explanation which have been fostered by it. These habits and this
knowledge have become such a part of us that we are not fully conscious
of them and of their importance. They are like the clothes we wear or
the forms of politeness which we go through with automatically. It is
only after the twentieth-century man delves into folklore or reads
accounts of the beliefs and practices of the past, that he realizes
that he stands on the shoulders of innumerable generations as the
inheritor of a long process of mental evolution. Nothing, perhaps, can
make him realize this fact more vividly than a study of magic.

What is magic? The best answer is to give examples {45} of magic. "In
the Malay Peninsula the magician makes an image like a corpse, a
footstep long. If you want to cause sickness, you pierce the eye and
blindness results; or you pierce the waist and the stomach gets sick.
If you want to cause death, you transfix the head with a palm twig;
then you enshroud the image as you would a corpse and pray over it as
if you were praying over the dead; then you bury it in the middle of
the path which leads to the place of the person whom you wish to charm,
so that he may step over it." Ancient agriculture is full of magic
rites designed to ward off evils. "To this day a Transylvanian sower
thinks he can keep birds from the corn by carrying a lock in the
seedbag." To this day, again, in Roumania, Serbia and parts of
Germany, the peasants try to bring on a rain by sprinkling water on a
young girl. It is supposed that nature will follow suit, and send a
beneficent shower upon the thirsty earth. Magic is, then, an ingenious
way of making or leading nature to do what you want it to do. As
Professor Murray writes: "Agriculture used to be entirely a question of
religion; now it is almost entirely a question of science. In
antiquity, if a field was barren, the owner of it would probably assume
that the barrenness was due to pollution, or offense somewhere. He
would run through all his own possible offenses, or at any rate those
of his neighbors and ancestors, and when he eventually decided the
cause of the trouble, the steps that he would take would all be of a
kind calculated not to affect the chemical constitution of the soil,
but to satisfy his own emotions of guilt and terror, or the imaginary
being he had offended. A modern man in the sa