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Once more they sang the praises of the mighty white hunters, and the magical air craft in which they moved about. With the elephants previously killed, the buffaloes provided material for a great feast, preparations for which were at once gotten under way, in spite of the fact that the blacks had hardly stopped eating since the big hunt began. But it was about all they had to do.
"Perceiving now that our African merchant was a proficient in all the magical arts of his country, we wished to decline his aid, and have nothing further to do with him; but he flatly refused to restore our money, and left us not without uttering some threats of vengeance upon us.
As a matter of fact, however, the idea of dependence upon Christ alone has been often, indeed, one may say generally, associated with a conception of salvation widely different from that of Schleiermacher. It has been oftenest associated with the notion of something purely external, forensic, even magical.
Yet when the image of the handsome Italian arose before her, so calmly noble, so proudly composed, her resolution forsook her, and she felt that he held her, heart and soul, under some strange and magical fascination. 'Yes, I love him, she cried, bursting into a passionate flood of tears 'devotedly, madly love him.
The books which instruct in the black art are known as 'black books. Those which treat of medicine are termed 'blue books. Medical knowledge is handed down from father to son. The doctors know the virtues of in any of the plants of the country, quantities of which they mix up together while reciting magical formulas.
J. Barton Brooks's back-parlour from the dining room came a gracious emanation of scent and colour. I stopped for a moment in the doorway, and saw, abloom there before me, a magical maze of flowers. Flowers! Oh, multifold fragrance and tints divine which so ineffably enrich our lives! Does anyone know whence they come?
Similarly a Central Australian headman of the Kaitish tribe strictly abstains from marital relations with his wife all the time that he is performing magical ceremonies to make the grass grow; for he believes that a breach of this rule would prevent the grass seed from sprouting properly.
For should he, too, conjure by the Name of Heaven and Earth, he might look for a similar deliverance; and his recital of the myth itself would tend to clinch the magical effect of his own incantation. The description of Ziusudu has also great interest in furnishing us with a close parallel to the piety of Noah in the Hebrew Versions.
Apparently holiness, magical virtue, taboo, or whatever we may call that mysterious quality which is supposed to pervade sacred or tabooed persons, is conceived by the primitive philosopher as a physical substance or fluid, with which the sacred man is charged just as a Leyden jar is charged with electricity; and exactly as the electricity in the jar can be discharged by contact with a good conductor, so the holiness or magical virtue in the man can be discharged and drained away by contact with the earth, which on this theory serves as an excellent conductor for the magical fluid.
As you pass through the country on Sundays, as on week-days, you see the people toiling in the fields. And as dusk draws on, the dark figures may be seen moving about so long as there is light to see by. It is the peasants working the land, and it is their own. Such is the "magical influence of property," said Arthur Young, when he observed the same thing.
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