expressions fitting into one another and into the whole, according to what could be called a magical order of thinking, or perhaps more correctly, a magical order of expressing, of launching words towards their aim. It is clear that this magical order of verbal concatenations—I am purposely avoiding the expression ‘magical logic’ for there is no logic in the case—must be known and familiar to anyone who wishes really to understand the spells. There is therefore a great initial difficulty in ‘reading’ such documents, and only an acquaintance with a great number makes one more confident and more competent.
III.
In the ordinary routine of working out such texts, I tried to obtain from the magician the equivalents, word for word, of the more cryptic expressions. As a rule the magician himself knows a good deal more than anyone else about the mythical references, and about certain esoteric expressions contained in the spell. There are some unintelligent old men, unfortunately, who rattle off a formula, and who evidently never were interested about its significance or else forgot all about it, and are no good as commentators. Often a fairly good informant, quite capable of reciting a spell slowly and intelligibly, without losing his thread, will be of no use as linguistic informant, that is in helping to obtain a definition of a word, in assisting to break it up into its formative parts; in explaining which words belong to ordinary speech, which are dialectic, which are archaic, and which are purely magical compounds. I