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PARTISAN REVIEW
terious powers, of ends accomplished by forces analogous to human
emotions and subject to partial control by magic compulsion. To most
savages, gods and spirits exist only in an end accomplished; the spirits
become brightly real or fade into impersonality as a desired effect is
more or less successfully brought about. The world becomes vibrant
in an end accomplished: as Radin says, the savage's world then be–
comes "a blaze of reality."
The idea of discreet spirits inhabiting and motivating objects is
not primary as E. B. Tylor and Herbert Spencer thought; it is second–
ary
and does not take into account the universal practice of magic.
To the savage,
mana
or preternatural power is impersonal; he ap–
prehends it as an immediate quality of things, just as color, sound,
size, shape and motion are immediate qualities.
As
the savage en–
velops the world in
his
own emotions, things assume dramatic quali–
ties: they are, in the words of Dewey, "poignant, tragic, beautiful,
humorous, settled, disturbed, comfortable, annoying, barren, harsh,
consoling, splendid, fearful; are such immediately and in their own
right and behalf." Magic, and all the benefits it is supposed to bring,
depends upon this fusion of power, quality and object: without it
"things fall apart;" the world becomes chaotic and dangerous when
it can no longer be enveloped in the tissue of human emotion. When
objects and qualities become efficacious by being fused with power,
they are subject to the compulsive techniques of magic. Besides being
a compulsive technique-a pseudo-science as Frazer says- magic is
obviously an aesthetic activity. Magic is immediately available to art,
and art to magic. Primitive literature is shot through with magic and
we may regard it as mythical when it fortifies the magical view of
things, when it reaffirms the vibrant dynamism of the world, when it
fortifies the ego with the impression that there is a magically potent
brilliancy in the world. Myth is not vaporous, abstract, or unreal;
it is a "blaze of reality."
3. Like other kinds of literature, myth performs the cathartic
function of dramatizing the clashes and harmonies of life ia a social
and natural environment. But myth can be understood as the aesthetic
leaven which heals or makes tolerable those deep neurotic disturb–
ances which in primitive culture are occasioned
by
the clashing at–
titudes of magic and religion. This collision of forces, as Radin points
out in his
Primitive Religion,
is partly the result of the priest's strug–
gle to achieve a dominant economic position. Coincident with his war
upon the people is his war against magic. For magic is the prerogative
of mankind in general; it exalts human power; it places the world
