and by magic only. There is no such thing as natural recovery, return to health being always due to the removal of the evil magic by means of magical counter-action.
All those crises of life, which are associated with fear of danger, with the awakening of passions or of strong emotions, have also their magical accompaniment. The birth of a child is always ushered in by magic, in order to make the child prosper, and to neutralise the dangers and evil influences. There is no rite or magic at puberty; but then, with this people, puberty does not present any very definite crisis in the life of the individual, as their sexual life starts long before puberty arrives, and gradually shapes and develops as the organism matures. The passion of love, however, has a very elaborate magical counterpart, embodied in many rites and formulæ, to which a great importance is attached, and all success in sexual life is ascribed to it. The evil results of illicit love—that is love within the clan, which, by the way, is considered by these natives as the main class of sexual immorality—can also be counteracted by a special type of magic.
The main social interests, ambition in gardening, ambition in successful Kula, vanity and display of personal charms in dancing—all find their expression in magic. There is a form of beauty magic, performed ceremonially over the dancers, and there is also a kind of safety magic at dances, whose object is to prevent the evil magic of envious sorcerers. Particular garden magic, performed by an individual over his crops and seeds, as well as the evil magic which he casts on the gardens of his rivals, express the private ambitions in gardening, as contrasted with the interests of the whole village, which are catered for by communal garden magic.
Natural forces of great importance to man, such as rain and sunshine, the appropriate alternative operation of which makes his crops thrive; or wind, which must be controlled for purposes of sailing and fishing, are also governed by magic. The magic of rain and sunshine can be used for good, as well as for nefarious purposes, and in this they have a special interest in the Trobriands, because the most powerful system of this magic is in the hands of the paramount chiefs of Kiriwina. By bringing about a prolonged drought, the chiefs of Omarakana have always been able to express their general displeasure with their subjects, and thus enhance their wholesale power, independently of any other mechanism, which they might have used for forcing their will on private individuals or on whole communities.
The basic, food-providing economic activities, which in the Trobriands are mainly gardening and fishing, are also completely magic-ridden. The success of these pursuits is of course largely due to luck, chance or accident, and to the natives they require supernatural assistance. We had examples of economic magic in describing the construction of a canoe, and the fishing for kaloma shell. The communal garden-magic and the fishing magic of certain village communities show to a higher degree even than the cases described, the feature which we found so distinct in canoe magic, namely: that the rites and formulæ are not a mere appendage, running side by side with economic efforts, without exercising any influence over these. On the contrary, it may be said that a belief in magic is one of the main, psychological forces which allow for organisation and systemisation of economic effort in the Trobriands.1 The capacity for art, as well as the inspiration in it, is also ascribed to the influence of magic.
The passions of hatred, envy, and jealousy, besides finding their expression in the all powerful sorcery of the bwaga’u and mulukwausi , are also responsible for many forms of witchery, known by the generic term of bulubwalata . The classical forms of this magic have as their object the estrangement of the affections of a wife or a sweetheart, or the destruction of the domestic attachment of a pig. The pig is sent away into the