hey are acceptable. In other
words, the centre of religious interest at first lies in approaching
the god, that is in the desire to restore the normal state of
relations, which calamity shows to have been disturbed. But in the
end, religious interest is concentrated on, and expressed by, the
feast which terminates the ceremony and marks the fact that the
reconciliation is effected. What is at first accepted by the god at
the feast comes to be regarded as belonging to him and sacred to him:
the worshippers may not touch it until a portion of it, the
first-fruits, has been accepted by him. Thus the rite which indicates
and marks his acceptance becomes more than ever the centre of
religious interest. The rite may thus become of more importance than
the god, as in Australia seems to be the case; for the performance of
the rite is indispensable if the community is to be admitted to eat of
the harvest. When this point of view has been reached, when the
performance of the rite is the indispensable thing, the rite tends to
be regarded as magical. If this is what has happened in the case of
the Australian rite, it is but what tends to happen, wherever ritual
flourishes at the expense of religion. If it were necessary to assume
that only amongst the Australian black-fellows, and never elsewhere,
did a rite, originally religious, tend to become magical, then it
would be _a priori_ unlikely, in the extreme, that this happened in
Australia. But inasmuch as this tendency is innate in ritual, it is
rather likely that in Australia the tendency has run its course, as it
has done elsewhere, in India, for example, where, also, the
sacrificial rite has become magical. Whether a rite, originally
religious, will become assimilated to magic, depends very much on the
extent to which the community believes in magic. The more the
community believes in magic, the more ready it will be to put a
magical interpretation on its religious rites. But the fact that, in
the lower communities, religion is always in danger of sinking into
magic, does not prove that religion springs from magic and is but one
kind of magic. That view, once held by some students, is now generally
abandoned. It amounts simply to saying once more that in the earliest
manifestations of religion there was no religion, and that religion is
now, what it was in the beginning--nothing but magic. If that position
is abandoned, then religious rites are, in their very nature, and from
th