t is of no importance to our present enquiry whether magic
precedes religion or not. It is at all events certain that they are very
closely connected, and that conditions which foster the belief in magic
likewise serve to strengthen religious belief. Witchcraft, as Tylor
says, is part and parcel of savage life. Death is very frequently
attributed to the magical action of wizards, and the savage lives in
perpetual fear lest some of his belongings, or some part of his person,
should be bewitched by malevolent sorcerers. Sir Richard Burton says
that in East Africa his experience taught him that among the negroes,
what with slavery and what with black magic, no one, especially in old
age, is safe from being burnt at a day's notice. When from savage life
we mount to societies enjoying a higher culture, we still find the witch
and the wizard in evidence. Both in Greece and Rome the belief in
witchcraft existed. There were made direct laws against its practice,
although neither the Greeks nor the Romans stained their civilisation
with the judicial murder of thousands of victims such as occurred later
in Christian Europe.

But the belief in witchcraft is continuous. So also are the methods
practised, and the modes of detection. The proofs offered in support of
sorcery in the seventeenth century are precisely similar to those
credited by savages in the lowest stage of human culture. The power of
transformation possessed by the accused, the ability to bewitch through
the possession of hairs belonging to the afflicted person, the making of
little effigies and driving sharp instruments into them, and so
affecting the corresponding parts of people, transportation through the
air, etc., all belong to the belief in and practice of witchcraft
wherever found. Had a Fijian been transported to a seat on the judicial
bench by the side of Sir Matthew Hale, when that judge condemned two old
women to death for witchcraft, he would have found himself in a quite
congenial atmosphere. Allowing for difference in language, he would have
found the evidence similar to that with which he was familiar, and he
would have been able to endorse the judge's remarks with tales of his
own experience. On this point, the level of culture attained by savages,
and that of the inhabitants of the overwhelming majority of European
countries little more than two hundred years ago, were substantially the
same. Even to-day cases are continually occurring which prove th