This statement, expressing the belief in a very clear and direct manner, I had confirmed, reiterated with variations and amplifications, by ever so many informants. They all emphasise the fact that magic has its roots in tradition, that it is the most immutable and most valuable traditional item, that it cannot leak into human knowledge by any present human intercourse with spirits or with any non-human beings such as the tokway or tauva’u. The property of having been received from previous generations is so marked that any breach of continuity in this succession cannot be imagined, and any addition by an actual human being would make the magic spurious.
At the same time, magic is conceived as something essentially human. It is not a force of nature, captured by man through some means and put to his service; it is essentially the assertion of man’s intrinsic power over nature. In saying that, I, of course translate native belief into abstract terms, which they would not use themselves for its expression. None the less it is embodied in all their items of folk-lore and ways of using magic and thinking about it. In all the traditions, we find that magic is always in possession of man, or at least of anthropomorphic beings. It is carried out from underground by man. It is not conceived as having been there somewhere outside his knowledge and then captured. On the contrary, as we saw, often the very things which are governed by magic have been brought forth by man, as for instance rain, the kalala fish; or disease, created by the anthropomorphic crab.
The close sociological association of magic with a given sub-clan emphasises this anthropocentric conception of magic. In the majority of cases indeed, magic refers to human activities or to the response of nature to human activities, rather than to natural forces alone. Thus, in gardening and in fishing, it is the behaviour of plants and animals tended or pursued by man; in the canoe magic, in the carver’s magic, the object is a human-made thing; in the Kula, in love magic, in many forms of food magic, it is human nature on to which the force is directed. Disease is not conceived as an extraneous force, coming from outside and settling on the man, it is directly a man-made, sorcerer-made something. We may, therefore, amplify the above given definition, and say that magic is a traditionally handed on power of man over his own creations, over things once brought forth by man, or over responses of nature to his activities.
There is one more important aspect of the question of which I have spoken already—the relation of magic to myth. It has been stated in Chapter XII, that myth moves in the realm of the supernatural, or better, super-normal, and that magic bridges over the gap between that and present-day reality. Now this statement acquires a new importance; magic appears to us as the essence of traditional continuity with ancestral times. Not only, as I have emphasised in this chapter, is it never conceived as a new invention, but it is identical in its nature with the supernatural power which forms the atmosphere of mythical events. Some of this power may have been lost on its way down to our times—mythical stories relate how it has been lost; but never has anything been added to it. There is nothing in it now which has not been in it in the ancient, hoary times of myth. In this the natives have a definitely regressive view of the relation between now and before; in this they have their counterpart to a Golden Age, and to a Garden of Eden of sorts. Thus we fall back upon the recognition of the same truth, whether we approach the matter by looking for beginnings of magic, or by studying the relations between the present and the mythical reality. Magic is a thing never invented and never tampered with, by man or any other agency.