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Updated: May 29, 2025
Time is the hound of the gods; but it hath been said of old that he will one day turn upon his masters, and seek to slay the gods, excepting only MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI, whose dreams are the gods themselves dreamed long ago. Slid said: "Let no man pray to MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI, for who shall trouble MANA with mortal woes or irk him with the sorrows of all the houses of Earth?
The theory of mana includes the belief that special supernatural power resides in the persons of tribal leaders, such as magicians, chiefs, priests. These things must be avoided: their food must not be eaten by common folk; their houses and other property must not be used; their nail-cuttings must be buried so that danger may be averted from the community; their names must not be mentioned.
He peopled woods and fields and sky with invisible agents who could do almost all they wanted to do, and with no hindrance from distance. We may put it this way: man had no idea of spatial process but thought of all events as acts of will. The gods had mana, or power, just as the medicine man had, only greater.
Yet it is no greater than the contrast between the primitive world we have been studying, with its mana and taboos and magic, and the modern world with its knowledge of chemistry and electricity and its deep probing into the very soul of man. But we must return to the explanation of the popular tendency to exalt the man Jesus over the Pauline Christ. Is the explanation far to seek?
+235+. Mana is itself, strictly speaking, a scientific biological conception, but it necessarily enters into alliance with religion. Belief in it exists along with belief in ghosts, spirits, and gods it is not a rival of these, but an attachment to them. As a thing desirable, it is one of the good gifts that the great Powers can bestow, and it thus leads to worship.
Or ordinary human actions might be imitated: a stick thrown or pointed toward an enemy, it was believed, would cause a spear to enter his body; a hostile glance of the eye, indicating desire to inflict injury, might carry ill luck. In such cases the fundamental conceptions are the sympathy that comes from unity and the activity of the pervasive mana.
If we may regard the copies of Sumerian laws, which have come down to us from the late Assyrian period, as parts of the code in use under the early Sumerians, we must conclude that at this earlier period the law was still more in favour of the husband, who could divorce his wife whenever he so desired, merely paying her half a mana as compensation.
Nor do I think that the idea of 'Mana' can be lightly dismissed as 'an ordinary case of relics. The influence may well be something entirely apart from the continued existence of the ancestor, an independent force, assisting him in life, and transferring itself after death to his successor.
Man had sore need of help, and so he adopted all the means which accident, fancy and ignorance suggested. If certain acts gave him the mana of his god or brought pressure to bear upon a supernatural agent, so much the better. Much of early liturgy is a mingling of spell and prayer, and it is strictly true that much of Christian liturgy bears traces of this origin.
They also recall the rites of the Passover though in this latter the blood was no longer drunk, nor the flesh eaten raw. The human tribe partakes of the mana or life-force of the animal, and is strengthened; the animal tribe is sympathetically renewed by the ceremonial and multiplies exceedingly. This is well illustrated by a ceremony of the 'Emu' tribe referred to by Dr. Frazer:
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