III

We can start from the question of how the natives imagine their magic to have originated. If we would ask even the most intelligent informant some such concretely framed questions as: “Where has your magic been made? How do you imagine its invention?”—they would necessarily remain unanswered. Not even a warped and half-suggested reply would be forthcoming. Yet there is an answer to this question, or rather to its generalised equivalent. Examining the mythology of one form of magic after the other, we find that there are in every one either explicitly stated or implied views about how magic has become known to man. As we register these views, compare them, and arrive at a generalisation, we easily see, why our imaginary question, put to the natives, would have to remain unanswered. For, according to native belief, embedded in all traditions and all institutions, magic is never conceived as having been made or invented. Magic has been handed on as a thing which has always been there. It is conceived as an intrinsic ingredient of everything that vitally affects man. The words, by which a magician exercises his power over a thing or a process, are believed to be co-existent with them. The magical formula and its subject matter were born together.

In some cases, tradition represents them literally as being ‘born’ by the same woman. Thus, rain was brought forth by a woman of Kasana’i, and the magic came with it, and has been handed on ever since in this woman’s sub-clan. Again, the mythical mother of the Kultur-hero Tudava gave birth, among other plants and animals, also to the kalala fish. The magic of this fish is also due to her. In the short myth about the origin of kayga’u magic—the one to protect drowning sailors from witches and other dangers—we saw that the mother, who gave birth to the Tokulubweydoga dog, also handed the magic over to him. In all these cases, however, the myth does not point to these women’s inventing or composing the magic; indeed, it is explicitly stated by some natives that the women had learned the magic from their matrilineal ancestors. In the last case, the woman is said in the myth to have known the magic by tradition.

Other myths are more rudimentary, yet, though less circumstantial about the origin of the magic, show us just as unmistakably that magic is a primeval thing, indeed, in the literal sense of the word, autochthonous. Thus, the Kula magic in Gumasila came out of the rock of Selawaya; the canoe magic out of the hole in the ground, brought by the men, who originally emerged with it; garden magic is always conceived as being carried from underground by the first ancestors, who emerged out of the original hole of that locality. Several minor forms of magic of local currency, such as fish magic, practised in one village only, wind magic, etc., are also imagined to have been carried out of the ground. All the forms of sorcery have been handed over to people by non-human beings, who passed them on but did not create them. The bwaga’u sorcery is due to a crab, who gave it to a mythical personage, in whose dala (sub-clan) the magic was carried on and from it distributed all over the islands. The tokway (wood-sprites) have taught man certain forms of evil magic. There are no myths in Kiriwina about the origin of flying witch magic. 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 to him. He has grown up into a world where certain processes, certain activities have their magic, which is as much an attribute of theirs’ as anything else. Some people have been traditionally instructed how this magic runs, and they know it; how men came by magic is told in numerous mythical narratives. That is the correct statement of the native point of view. Once arrived at this conclusion inductively, we can of course, test our conclusions by direct questions, or by a leading question, for the matter of that. To the question: “where human beings found magic?” I obtained the following answer:—

“All magic, they found long ago in the nether world. We do not find ever a spell in a dream; should we say so, this would be a lie. The spirits never give us a spell. Songs and dances they do give us, that is true, but no magic.”

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.

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.”

All these considerations have brought us very near to the essential problem: what does magic really mean to the natives? So far, we have seen that it is an inherent power of man over those things which vitally affect him, a power always handed over through tradition.2 About the beginnings of magic they know as little, and are occupied as little as about the beginnings of the world. Their myths describe the origin of social institutions and the peopling of the world by men. But the world is taken for granted, and so is the magic. They ask no questions about magiogony any more than they do about cosmogony.