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.
This, of course, means that it is so in native belief. It hardly needs explicitly stating that in reality magic must constantly change. The memory of men is not such, that it could hand over verbally exactly what it had received, and, like any other item of traditional lore, a magical formula is in reality constantly being re-shaped as it passes from one generation to another, and even within the mind of the same man. As a matter of fact, even from the material collected by me in the Trobriands, it can be unmistakably recognised that certain formulæ are much older than others, and indeed, that some parts of spells, and even some whole spells, are of recent invention. Here I cannot do more than refer to this interesting subject, which, for its full development, needs a good deal of linguistic analysis, as well as of other forms of “higher criticism.”