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Updated: June 8, 2025
+890+. Since religion and magic have in common the purpose to establish relations with extrahuman Powers the dividing line between the two is in some cases not easily fixed the same procedure may be held to belong in the one category or the other, according as it invokes or does not invoke the aid of a god in friendly and submissive fashion.
These tendencies may be examined in the order just given. +968+. In all the religious systems so far considered the existence of human suffering is assumed. The sole object of religious practices, in all cults except the highest, has been to secure extrahuman or superhuman aid and comfort in the ills of life.
Totemism is not essentially religious if religion be held to involve worship of superhuman or extrahuman beings; it has, however, in many cases coalesced with religious practices and ideas, and it is sometimes difficult to draw the line distinctly between it and religion proper.
Doubtless he thinks of the forms of these various actors as being all of the same sort, a sublimated manlike body; but he keeps them in different categories, and in the course of time the tendency is for ghosts and spirits to sink out of sight and for the gods to absorb all extrahuman activities.
Deities proper came into existence as embodiments of the sense of an extrahuman government of the world by anthropomorphic beings; they are direct products of the constructive imagination. When the true gods appear the totemic and individual half-gods disappear.
Mysterious potencies in the shape of souls, spirits, gods, or mana are held to preside over and control all affairs birth, sickness, death, hate and love, hunting and war, sowing and reaping. There is no dogma except belief in this extrahuman influence no conception of moral effort as based on and sanctioned by a definite moral ideal, no struggle of the sort that we call spiritual.
It is this second category that is covered by the term 'taboo, a Polynesian word said to mean 'what is prohibited. Prohibitions arising from natural human relations constitute civil law; those arising from extrahuman or other magical influences constitute taboo.
Their magical power belongs to them primarily as living things, but came to be attributed to extrahuman beings. +265+. Plants as living things were supposed to possess souls. Probably the soul was conceived of at first as simply the vital principle, and the power of the plant was thought of as similar to the power of an animal or any other living thing.
Thus there arose tree-spirits, river-spirits, and other similar extrahuman beings. It is convenient to employ the term 'spirit' as the designation of the soul in a nonhuman object, isolated and independent, and regarded as a Power to be treated with respect. The term is sometimes used of a disembodied human soul, and sometimes of a deity resident in an object of nature.
Everything outside this sphere will be ascribed to extrahuman agency so sickness, death, and sometimes birth.
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