spotless
cleanliness of their clothing. As Diodorus remarks, so evenly ordered
was their whole manner of life that it was as if arranged by a learned
physician rather than by a lawgiver.

Two world-wide modes of practice found their earliest illustration in
ancient Egypt. Magic, the first of these, represented the attitude of
primitive man to nature, and really was his religion. He had no idea
of immutable laws, but regarded the world about him as changeable and
fickle like himself, and "to make life go as he wished, he must be able
to please and propitiate or to coerce these forces outside himself."(8)

(8) L. Thorndike: The Place of Magic in the Intellectual
History of Europe, New York, 1905, p. 29.

The point of interest to us is that in the Pyramid Texts--"the oldest
chapter in human thinking preserved to us, the remotest reach in the
intellectual history of man which we are now able to discern"(9)--one of
their six-fold contents relates to the practice of magic. A deep belief
existed as to its efficacy, particularly in guiding the dead, who
were said to be glorious by reason of mouths equipped with the charms,
prayers and ritual of the Pyramid Texts, armed with which alone could
the soul escape the innumerable dangers and ordeals of the passage
through another world. Man has never lost his belief in the efficacy
of magic, in the widest sense of the term. Only a very few of the most
intellectual nations have escaped from its shackles. Nobody else has
so clearly expressed the origins and relations of magic as Pliny in
his "Natural History."(10) "Now, if a man consider the thing well,
no marvaile it is that it hath continued thus in so great request and
authoritie; for it is the onely Science which seemeth to comprise in
itselfe three possessions besides, which have the command and rule
of mans mind above any other whatsoever. For to begin withall, no man
doubteth but that Magicke tooke root first, and proceeded from Physicke,
under the presence of maintaining health, curing, and preventing
diseases: things plausible to the world, crept and insinuated farther
into the heart of man, with a deepe conceit of some high and divine
matter therein more than ordinarie, and in comparison whereof, all
other Physicke was but basely accounted. And having thus made way and
entrance, the better to fortifie it selfe, and to give a goodly colour
and lustre to those fair and flattering promises of things, which our
natur