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Updated: May 16, 2025
It was therefore a power from without which came into their city to purify them and to carry away out of the city again the impurities of which it had rid the community. It is also characteristic of such semi-magical things that they lose their effects after a few applications, and other things must be sought always more complicated and more strange.
Survivals of this belief that birth is a phenomenon independent of the union of the sexes are found in the existence of numerous semi-magical devices to obtain children, still practised in many parts of Europe, and which were practised on a much more extensive scale during the medieval period; in the ignorance of man concerning physiological functions in general, the existence of Motherright which appears to have universally antedated Fatherright the origin of which he traces to economic causes, and to the animistic nature of primitive beliefs in general.
These beings are usually invisible, but at times of ceremonies they enter the bodies of the mediums, possess them, and thus communicate with the people. On rare occasions they are visible in their own forms, as when Kaboniyan appeared as the antagonist and later as the friend of Sayen. These beings are addressed, first through certain semi-magical formulas, know as diams.
An even more certain method is to have a woman, who was born on the other side of the river, take her weaving baton and plant it on the bank. The water will not rise past this barrier. Blackening of the teeth is a semi-magical procedure.
Now he struck a match, which seemed incongruous in the midst of this semi-magical ceremony, and taking a pinch of the tobacco, lit it and dropped it among the rest. A pale, blue smoke arose from the bowl and with it a very sweet odour not unlike that of the tuberoses gardeners grow in hot-houses, but more searching. "Now you breath smoke, Macumazana," he said, "and tell us what you see.
Yet the mere fact of reliance upon something, the assumption that the world is steady and capable of rational exploitation, even if in a supernatural interest and by semi-magical means, amounts to an essential loyalty to postulates of practical reason, an essential adherence to natural morality.
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