The conclusion certainly seems to be justified that the most advanced animal progenitors of mankind, who lived and died unreasoning, the mere puppets of natural forces which they neither could, nor tried to, understand and control, were "happier" than the "rebel" man when he first conceived the notion that he could detect cause and effect, not only as between a blow and the production of a serviceable flint implement, but in the beneficent or injurious relations of the things around him to one another and to himself. Primitive men seem at a very remote period to have elaborated in regard to such vital matters a series of conclusions--differing in various races according to place and circumstance--to which they were led by erroneous observation and imperfect reasoning--reasoning which was arrested and distorted by fear, desire, haste, and imagination. The word "magic" is now used to indicate those beliefs and conclusions in all their variety, because the "magi" or priests of Zoroaster (Zarathustra), the founder of the religion of the ancient Persians, taught them in an elaborated form, and practised a system of supposed control of natural forces and of spirits, good and evil, in connexion with such beliefs. Magic is, therefore, defined as the general term for the practice and power of wonder-working as dependent on the employment of supposed supernatural or "occult" agencies. It forms a vast field of study and one of the greatest interest in the attempt to follow out the history of the workings of the human mind, its extraordinary envelopment in error and delusion, and its gradual emancipation therefrom.
In origin "magic" and "religion" are one. The priest and the magician were originally one. Man tried to control Nature by the use of spells and fantastic procedures, based on imagined powers and correspondences in natural objects. He excogitated (as a modern child sometimes does) a sort of fancifully assumed system of fixed laws of natural relations and interactions, of causes and effects which were suggested by superficial likenesses and wild guesses at connexion and sequence, accepted without criticism. Thus, we have the widespread doctrines of "sympathetic magic" and of "contagious magic." An example of the first is the belief that a certain tree or animal is the sympathetic representative of a certain man, and that as the one flourishes or suffers and dies so will the other. This is extended into a belief that a drawing or image, or even an unshaped stone, may sympathetically represent a man or an animal. The American medicine-man draws the picture of a deer on a piece of bark, and expects that shooting at it will cause him to kill a real deer the next day. He mistakes a connexion which exists only in the mind of the sorcerer for a real bond independent of the human mind. Thus, too, waxen or clay images of an enemy are made and melted before fire or wasted in water, or pierced with pins (even at this day in Scotland, as witness a clay figure in the museum at Oxford), in the belief that the enemy himself will be similarly injured. The belief in "contagious magic" leads to the procuring of a drop of the blood, or of a piece of the hair, the toenails, the clothing, or even a part of the unconsumed food of another individual, in order that a sorcerer may, by acting upon it or repeating "incantations" over it, influence the actions and life of that individual for good or for ill.