[Note: this transcription was produced by an automatic OCR engine]

688 MALEKULA
two minutes. Then, all being ready, he takes one very deep
breath, and, sometimes shaking all over with the strain, performs
the magic, holding his breath throughout, until at the very end
he mutters the imprecation, which is the parting shot of the rite,
releasing, as it were his concentrated emotion.
We can see then, that the performance of any magical act is
composed really of three parts : ï¬Årstly, the elaborate and often
very lengthy preparation for the act, by a rigorous asceticism,
by means of which the performer at once safeguards himself and
gains power ; secondly, the magical rite itself, " the experimental
arrangement and manipulation by which the intensity
accumulated by the preparation is made to become effective
towards a deï¬Ånite object " ; and thirdly, the words uttered, or
other means employed (as, for instance, making a feint with
spear or blow-gun), both to " shoot off" the magic and direct
it, and to act as a flood-gate for the pent»up strain of the
performer. About this Deacon stated 2' "I think this second
function oi the spell is more or less recognized by the natives."
Summing up and Commenting on the nature of Malekulan
magic, Deacon wrote :—
“It seems to me that much more attention needs to be paid
to the antecedents of the magical act; that to a considerable
extent the sympathetic-contagious principle which Frazer brought
out is employed in preparing the channel or mechanism through
which the magic is to act (similar, for instance, to a system of
pulleys in mechanics), hut that the power or force is something
distinct, owing its genesis to the whole ‘psychological series’
leading up to the moment at which the sympathetic~contegious
mechanism is released. So far as I can see, the acceptance oi the
syrnpathetic~contagious principle is absolutely im licit ; it is what
‘ logic ' or ‘ common-sense ’ is with us, a thing unthinkable to deny,
inevitable, universal. It is as impossible for the native to think a
proposition based on this principle untrue as it is for us to think
an obvious logical proposition untrue. . . 4 Again and again a
discussion has ended by my realizing that the magical principle
was to my partner in the discussion so implicitly accepted as to
make any consciousness of it or generalization about it unthinkable.
With the greatest intelligence he would prepare to doubt or discuss
any one particular method, its eflicacy, etc., but as for a suspicion
that there was some fundamental mental process entering into aU
his magic~no, never I This leads up to the point that the native
sorcerer ormagician is absorbed, not in the mechanism of the
magic, but in the ‘ psychological series ' preceding the ‘magical
act ’. It seems clear that he is conscious of some entity, capable
oi generalization, though he may be unable to generalize it, which