From other districts, however, I have obtained rudimentary information pointing to the fact that they were instructed in this magic by a mythical, malevolent being called Taukuripokapoka, with whom even now some sort of relations are kept up, culminating in nocturnal meetings and sexual orgies which remind one very strongly of the Walpurgisnacht.
Love magic, the magic of thunder and lightning, are accounted for by definite events. But in neither of them are we led to imagine that the formula is invented, in fact, there is a sort of petitio principii in all these myths, for on the one hand they set out to account for how magic came, and on the other, in all of them magic is represented as being there, ready made. But the petitio principii is due only to a false attitude of mind with which we approach these tales. Because, to the native mind, they set out to tell, not how magic originated, but how magic was brought within the reach of one or other of the Boyowan local groups or sub-clans.
Thus it may be said, in formulating a generalisation from all these data, that magic is never invented. In olden days, when mythical things happened, magic came from underground, or was given to a man by some non-human being, or was handed on to descendants by the original ancestress, who also brought forth the phenomenon governed by the magic. In actual cases of the present times and of the near-past generations whom the natives of to-day knew personally, the magic is given by one man to another, as a rule by the father to his son or by the maternal kinsman. But its very essence is the impossibility of its being manufactured or invented by man, its complete resistance to any change or modification by him. It has existed ever since the beginning of things; it creates, but is never created; it modifies, but must never be modified.
It is now easy to see that no questions about the origins of magic, such as we formulated before, could have been asked of a native informant without distorting the evidence in the very act of questioning, while more general and quite abstract and colourless inquiries cannot be made intelligible