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WE have now concluded our examination of the
general principles of sympathetic magic. The examples by which I have
illustrated them have been drawn for the most part from what may be called
private magic, that is from magical rites and incantations practised for
the benefit or the injury of individuals. But in savage society there is
commonly to be found in addition what we may call public magic, that is,
sorcery practised for the benefit of the whole community. Wherever
ceremonies of this sort are observed for the common good, it is obvious
that the magician ceases to be merely a private practitioner and becomes
to some extent a public functionary. The development of such a class of
functionaries is of great importance for the political as well as the
religious evolution of society. For when the welfare of the tribe is
supposed to depend on the performance of these magical rites, the magician
rises into a position of much influence and repute, and may readily
acquire the rank and authority of a chief or king. The profession
accordingly draws into its ranks some of the ablest and most ambitious men
of the tribe, because it holds out to them a prospect of honour, wealth,
and power such as hardly any other career could offer. The acuter minds
perceive how easy it is to dupe their weaker brother and to play on his
superstition for their own advantage. Not that the sorcerer is always a
knave and impostor; he is often sincerely convinced that he really
possesses those wonderful powers which the credulity of his fellows
ascribes to him. But the more sagacious he is, the more likely he is to
see through the fallacies which impose on duller wits. Thus the ablest
members of the profession must tend to be more or less conscious
deceivers; and it is just these men who in virtue of their superior
ability will generally come to the top and win for themselves positions of
the highest dignity and the most commanding authority. The pitfalls which
beset the path of the professional sorcerer are many, and as a rule only
the man of coolest head and sharpest wit will be able to steer his way
through them safely. For it must always be remembered that every single
profession and claim put forward by the magician as such is false; not one
of them can be maintained without deception, conscious or unconscious.
Accordingly the sorcerer who sincerely believes in his own extravagant
pretensions is in far greater peril and is much more likely to be cut
short in his career than the deliberate impostor. The honest wizard always
expects that his charms and incantations will produce their supposed
effect; and when they fail, not only really, as they always do, but
conspicuously and disastrously, as they often do, he is taken aback: he is
not, like his knavish colleague, ready with a plausible excuse to account
for the failure, and before he can find one he may be knocked on the head
by his disappointed and angry employers. 1
The general result is that
at this stage of social evolution the supreme power tends to fall into the
hands of men of the keenest intelligence and the most unscrupulous
character. If we could balance the harm they do by their knavery against
the benefits they confer by their superior sagacity, it might well be
found that the good greatly outweighed the evil. For more mischief has
probably been wrought in the world by honest fools in high places than by
intelligent rascals. Once your shrewd rogue has attained the height of his
ambition, and has no longer any selfish end to further, he may, and often
does, turn his talents, his experience, his resources, to the service of
the public. Many men who have been least scrupulous in the acquisition of
power have been most beneficent in the use of it, whether the power they
aimed at and won was that of wealth, political authority, or what not. In
the field of politics the wily intriguer, the ruthless victor, may end by
being a wise and magnanimous ruler, blessed in his lifetime, lamented at
his death, admired and applauded by posterity. Such men, to take two of
the most conspicuous instances, were Julius Caesar and Augustus. But once
a fool always a fool, and the greater the power in his hands the more
disastrous is likely to be the use he makes of it. The heaviest calamity
in English history, the breach with America, might never have occurred if
George the Third had not been an honest dullard. 2
Thus, so far as the
public profession of magic affected the constitution of savage society, it
tended to place the control of affairs in the hands of the ablest man: it
shifted the balance of power from the many to the one: it substituted a
monarchy for a democracy, or rather for an oligarchy of old men; for in
general the savage community is ruled, not by the whole body of adult
males, but by a council of elders. The change, by whatever causes
produced, and whatever the character of the early rulers, was on the whole
very beneficial. For the rise of monarchy appears to be an essential
condition of the emergence of mankind from savagery. No human being is so
hide-bound by custom and tradition as your democratic savage; in no state
of society consequently is progress so slow and difficult. The old notion
that the savage is the freest of mankind is the reverse of the truth. He
is a slave, not indeed to a visible master, but to the past, to the
spirits of his dead forefathers, who haunt his steps from birth to death,
and rule him with a rod of iron. What they did is the pattern of right,
the unwritten law to which he yields a blind unquestioning obedience. The
least possible scope is thus afforded to superior talent to change old
customs for the better. The ablest man is dragged down by the weakest and
dullest, who necessarily sets the standard, since he cannot rise, while
the other can fall. The surface of such a society presents a uniform dead
level, so far as it is humanly possible to reduce the natural
inequalities, the immeasurable real differences of inborn capacity and
temper, to a false superficial appearance of equality. From this low and
stagnant condition of affairs, which demagogues and dreamers in later
times have lauded as the ideal state, the Golden Age, of humanity,
everything that helps to raise society by opening a career to talent and
proportioning the degrees of authority to men’s natural abilities,
deserves to be welcomed by all who have the real good of their fellows at
heart. Once these elevating influences have begun to operate—and they
cannot be for ever suppressed—the progress of civilisation becomes
comparatively rapid. The rise of one man to supreme power enables him to
carry through changes in a single lifetime which previously many
generations might not have sufficed to effect; and if, as will often
happen, he is a man of intellect and energy above the common, he will
readily avail himself of the opportunity. Even the whims and caprices of a
tyrant may be of service in breaking the chain of custom which lies so
heavy on the savage. And as soon as the tribe ceases to be swayed by the
timid and divided counsels of the elders, and yields to the direction of a
single strong and resolute mind, it becomes formidable to its neighbours
and enters on a career of aggrandisement, which at an early stage of
history is often highly favourable to social, industrial, and intellectual
progress. For extending its sway, partly by force of arms, partly by the
voluntary submission of weaker tribes, the community soon acquires wealth
and slaves, both of which, by relieving some classes from the perpetual
struggle for a bare subsistence, afford them an opportunity of devoting
themselves to that disinterested pursuitof knowledge which is the noblest
and most powerful instrument to ameliorate the lot of man. 3
Intellectual progress, which reveals itself in the growth of art and
science and the spread of more liberal views, cannot be dissociated from
industrial or economic progress, and that in its turn receives an immense
impulse from conquest and empire. It is no mere accident that the most
vehement outbursts of activity of the human mind have followed close on
the heels of victory, and that the great conquering races of the world
have commonly done most to advance and spread civilisation, thus healing
in peace the wounds they inflicted in war. The Babylonians, the Greeks,
the Romans, the Arabs are our witnesses in the past: we may yet live to
see a similar outburst in Japan. Nor, to remount the stream of history to
its sources, is it an accident that all the first great strides towards
civilisation have been made under despotic and theocratic governments,
like those of Egypt, Babylon, and Peru, where the supreme ruler claimed
and received the servile allegiance of his subjects in the double
character of a king and a god. It is hardly too much to say that at this
early epoch despotism is the best friend of humanity and, paradoxical as
it may sound, of liberty. For after all there is more liberty in the best
sense—liberty to think our own thoughts and to fashion our own
destinies—under the most absolute despotism, the most grinding tyranny,
than under the apparent freedom of savage life, where the individual’s lot
is cast from the cradle to the grave in the iron mould of hereditary
custom. 4
So far, therefore, as the public profession of magic has
been one of the roads by which the ablest men have passed to supreme
power, it has contributed to emancipate mankind from the thraldom of
tradition and to elevate them into a larger, freer life, with a broader
outlook on the world. This is no small service rendered to humanity. And
when we remember further that in another direction magic has paved the way
for science, we are forced to admit that if the black art has done much
evil, it has also been the source of much good; that if it is the child of
error, it has yet been the mother of freedom and truth.
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