Mana: A History of a Western Category, (Supplements to Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 10) 9004348700, 9789004348707

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Mana

Supplements to Method & Theory in the Study of Religion Editorial Board Aaron W. Hughes (University of Rochester) Russell McCutcheon (University of Alabama) Kocku von Stuckrad (University of Groningen)

Volume 10

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/smtr

Mana A History of a Western Category

By

Nicolas Meylan

Cover illustration: “Carte de l’Océanie ou cinquième partie du monde”, drawn by Maire, Paris, Langlumé et Peltier, 1837. The photograph was made by Laurent Dubois, the map belongs to the Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire - Lausanne. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2017021921

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2214-3270 ISBN 978-90-04-34870-7 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-34924-7 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

À Bisou et Coin-Coin

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Contents Acknowledgements

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1 Introduction 1 2 The First Century of Mana

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3 Bringing Mana Within Theory 4 The Domestication of Mana

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5 Mana in the North 106 6 The Physics of Mana: From Substance to Unit 7 Energy for a New Paganism 148 Epilogue

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Bibliography Index 201

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Acknowledgements I have had a longstanding interest in mana, a word I first encountered at a friend’s kitchen table late in 1994, printed on the cards of a game called Magic: The Gathering. From then on, mana became part of my vocabulary, although used only when engaging in games. This changed in 1998 when I began studying the history of religions. Shortly thereafter—not entirely by chance as it turns out—I once again came across the term, this time on the printed page of Hubert and Mauss’s classical study of magic, Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie. I was struck at the time by what I took to be a coincidence, and it is from that surprise (and delight) that was born the project behind the present book. In one way or another I have been thinking and talking about mana for some twenty-two years, a period during which I have accumulated a great number of debts, both personal and professional, which are just too many to enumerate fully. I would like, however, to thank Arthur Bissegger, Didier Matthey-Doret, Clément Fredembach, Serge Gariglio, François Kissling, Sandro Stettler, and the many other MtG players in Lausanne and Chicago who have made talking about mana so entertaining. I have incurred another sort of debt since I began working on this project in earnest in 2011. I have benefitted from the insights of many colleagues, in Switzerland and elsewhere, which it is my pleasure to acknowledge. In the former, my thanks go to Philippe Borgeaud, Françoise Briegel, Claude Calame, Yann Dahhaoui, Séverine Desponds, Manéli Farahmand, Christian Grosse, Dominique Jaillard, Silvia Mancini, Philippe Matthey, Georges Meylan, Frank Müller, Matthieu Pellet, Raphaël Rousseleau, Jörg Stolz, and Youri Volokhine. Many colleagues and friends outside of Switzerland have likewise helped me in various ways, among whom Lourens van den Bosch, Carole Cusack, Laurent Di Filippo, Carrie Dohe, Alex Golub, Aaron Hughes, Greg Johnson, Bruce Lincoln, and Jon Peterson. Special thanks go to Lucy Perry for her meticulous copyediting, Jean-François Bert, who has been most generous with his time and vast erudition, Christoph Uehlinger who read and commented on the whole manuscript, and to Daniel Barbu, my jumeau de travail, who has been a most exacting sparring partner on this and other projects. I would also like to express my gratitude to the members of the Department of Religious Studies of the University of Zürich, and in particular to Dorothea Lüddeckens, who have agreed to consider the present text as part of the requirements for a habilitation. I am also pleased to acknowledge an institutional debt to the Swiss National Science Foundation which supports an ongoing project directed by Do-

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minique Jaillard at the University of Geneva, entitled “Des concepts problématiques pour l’histoire des religions: dieu(x), panthéons” (n° 100015_166059), which has provided a challenging yet friendly forum for some of the ideas developed in the present book. It goes without saying, however, that I bear full responsibility for all errors and infelicities remaining in the text. My deepest and fullest gratitude goes as ever to Séverine Desponds, whose support, understanding, and critical acumen have been instrumental in seeing this project to its end. Hopefully she, as well as Sidonie and Etienne to whom the book is dedicated, will forgive me for my (foul) moods, my absences, and for talking altogether too much about mana.

Chapter 1

Introduction It has become something of a commonplace for critical discussions of a word, concept, or category to open by noting the undesirability of providing at the outset a clear and concise definition thereof. By this I do not mean to say that it would be impossible to define ‘mana’; indeed, much ingenuity and ink have been spilt in the wake of Robert Codrington’s seminal definition of mana as (impersonal) supernatural power—without which ink the present book would not exist.1 I am nevertheless going to jump on the critical bandwagon and refrain from giving any synthetic definition of mana at the outset. In doing (or rather not doing) so, my aim is to point both to a theoretical stance and to the nature of the object at hand. It is a means of both acknowledging the multiplicity of definitions and maintaining scholarly agnosticism in questions of authenticity, an issue all the more pregnant in that mana is a loan word from Oceanic languages and is being used today by indigenous political movements in colonized Polynesia in an attempt to secure self-determination (for example, Johnson 2004, 46–47; Tengan 2008, 158–59; Tomlinson and Tengan 2016, 8–10); but most importantly, it signals that the object of the present book is not what mana is, but rather how it has been and is used. The primary focus of this book will accordingly be on the competing, contradictory, and, at times, convergent uses of mana, as well as on the political, scholarly, and religious agendas embedded in these uses. As implied above, there are a great many definitions and uses of mana, but I have chosen to restrict myself to a specific portion of these. To put it in schematic terms, the uses of mana can be divided into two groups, Oceanic and Western, or, to put it somewhat differently, the colonized and the colonizers. It is the latter’s story that I have decided to tell here. There are two reasons for this choice. The first one is practical. To deal with the mana of the Oceanic group would require detailed linguistic and ethnographic knowledge of a great many Polynesian and Melanesian societies I simply do not possess. Indeed, it is not surprising that the most significant, wide-ranging study of the understandings of mana in various Oceanic societies takes the form of a collective 1 A great many studies have sought to ascertain the meaning of mana in various Polynesian and Melanesian languages and cultures, among which may be mentioned here Codrington (1891), Best (1924), Prytz-Johansen (1954, 84–98), Bowden (1979), Sahlins (1981), Keesing (1984), Valeri (1985, 95–104), Shore (1989), Kolshus (2013), and Grijp (2014).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 | DOI 10.1163/9789004349247_002

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undertaking (Tomlinson and Tengan 2016). It should be noted that I include in this group the (Western) ethnographers who have sought to describe and account for these Oceanic mana as a vernacular, context-bound issue. The second reason has to do with my broader interest for the history of the academic disciplines studying religion. The story of the Western uses of mana is tightly linked to the story of the scholarly disciplines studying religion and so has much to teach us about them. Indeed, mana came to be so pervasive during the late Belle Époque scholarship that it provides us with an almost real-time view of the evolution of scholarly debates on religion in that period. Accordingly, mana allows for more than a glimpse into how and to what end a scholarly, theoretical category was constructed. But mana is not any old scholarly category. While I will stand by my decision to refrain from giving a definition of mana, I will nonetheless observe at the outset that in Westerners’ understanding of mana, one rather ominous term comes up again and again: power. Thus, by focusing on Western uses of mana, I have also sought to investigate critically the ways, explicit or implicit, students of religion have conceptualized, or rather mystified, power in conjunction with their primary object, religion. While the tenure of mana in the Academy looms large in the present book, it does not exhaust the Western understandings and mobilizations of mana. Although most discussions of mana begin with Codrington’s scholarly study of the Melanesians in 1891, numerous Westerners, travelers, missionaries, colonial administrators, had thought and written about mana before him. Likewise, Westerners did not stop using the term because scholars proclaimed its demise. And indeed, mana has enjoyed considerable success since the later part of the twentieth century, not least for the millions of Westerners sensu lato who, like me, have sat at a kitchen table or in front of a computer to engage in fantasy-themed gaming. In this sense the present history of mana breaks with most other discussions of Western (scholarly) understandings of mana in telling a story that begins in the late eighteenth century and continues today, within and outside the walls of the Academy.2 In doing so, I have sought not exhaustiveness (which I did not pursue, if only for fear of tedious2 The Western history of mana has not, to the best of my knowledge, been told in a booklength study. Rudolf Lehmann’s efforts came close but ultimately the aim of his studies of Western scholarship on mana was to determine what Oceanic mana really is and how very wrong other scholars were (Lehmann 1915; 1922; 1966). Recent scholars who have discussed the academic life of mana include Carmela Pignato (2001, 59–89), Jonathan Z. Smith (2004, 117–44), Martin Holbraad (2007, 192–201), Christopher Bracken (2007, 119–28). Tomlinson and Tengan’s chapter (2016, 1–36) represents an exception as not only do they trace mana’s academic tenure but they also focus on its life outside of the Academy.

Introduction

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ness) but rather to provide a backdrop against which scholarly practices may be confronted and evaluated. My narrative is consequently organized around a series of important shifts in the Western usages of mana. The most readily obvious shift is geographical. The story of the Western imagination of mana is one of movement away from colonized Oceania toward the imperial West. At the same time, this is a story of conceptual shifts. Before the introduction of mana into the vocabulary of the history and anthropology of religion, Westerners sailing the Pacific generally linked mana with the Polynesian institution of chiefdoms, in other words with issues of power and politics. A century after the word had come to the attention of the West, however, Oceanic mana was reclassified as a thoroughly religious concept under the authoritative pen of the missionary and scholar Robert Codrington. This reconceptualization of (emic, mainly Melanesian) mana paved the way for yet a third shift when mana made, in the years around 1900, a triumphant entrance onto the international scholarly scene as a second-order (etic) category of universal application. Thus, the word was raised from the status of vernacular and exotic lexeme to that of universal and theoretical category useful for the analysis of (Western) religion, society, and/or psyche. And, indeed, the years that followed saw mana become a fundamental object for generalist students of religion. But, by the beginning of the 1960s, there came a fourth shift. Essentially abandoned by scholars who had long questioned its theoretical relevance and usefulness, mana made its way into American and European popular culture where it was to enjoy a new lease of life as “magical power,” a useful concept indeed! Most conspicuously, mana became the supernatural equivalent of the kilowatt, powering the magical spells of fantasy and science-fiction novels and games. But it was not only gamers who found themselves in need of a theory of magic, proponents of new religious movements likewise seized on a religious concept which held the promise of vindicating their use of magic in a seemingly disenchanted world. The story begins with the first century of the life of mana on Western pages. Opening with the mention of the word by Captain James Cook in his journal for 1777, chapter two follows the ways Western visitors to Oceania accounted for that exotic term up to Robert Codrington, a missionary in Melanesia, who in 1878 gave a highly influential description of mana as the central religious concept of the Melanesians. Focusing on lexicographical and protoethnographic sources, the chapter identifies three main ways in which mana came into the orbit of Western consciousness: incidental uses of mana where neither translation nor explanation were supplied; translations of the lexeme, chiefly in Polynesian language dictionaries; and developed discussions of mana in the context of New Zealand. These discussions show that mana

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became an object of more intense interest for Westerners in the context of challenges to British sovereignty over the archipelago by indigenous Māori. As well as establishing the correlation in Western sources between its various definitions and the context of production of these definitions, these early occurrences indicate that in its early Western life mana was not typically defined as a religious concept. Chapter three picks up the question why did the Indo-Europeanist Max Müller quote a letter by Robert Codrington dealing with mana—defined as an impersonal supernatural power—as the primary object of the religion of the Melanesians. The answer—that mana provided Müller with ‘proof’ that his rival Edward B. Tylor’s theory of religion (“animism”) was wrong—heralds a new phase in the life of mana as, for the first time, it was mobilized outside of a purely Oceanic context, being put to work in the service of a general theory of religion. The chapter then turns to Codrington’s seminal writings on mana, pointing out both his hesitations and the role of theological and scholarly factors in his conceptualizations of Melanesian mana. The final part of chapter three looks at the series of scholars who, between 1892 and 1904, raised mana from localized lexeme to universal category in order to advance their own theories of religion and/or magic. Despite major differences in their contents and perspectives, the theories discussed all sought to challenge the dominant theory of the day, Tylor’s animism, and reached the same solution: to raise mana to second-order status as ‘impersonal supernatural power.’ The fourth chapter covers the heyday of mana and closes with its academic decline (1904–1949). This was a time when it no longer functioned as an argument raised against Tylor’s theory of religion but rather was a key concept in its own right. Accordingly the development of the scholarly paradigm centered on mana, often called “dynamism,” is discussed. At the same time, the chapter highlights the ongoing geographical shift as mana was increasingly uprooted from its Oceanic home and reconfigured to address more specifically Western issues, a movement culminating in its recuperation by figures in the phenomenology of religion, in Christian theology, and depth psychology. The demise of mana as a scholarly category is, in the concluding section, ascribed to progress in both ethnographic descriptions of Oceanic mana (challenging its definition as impersonal power as well as its supposed universality) and theoretical work on the category religion, notably through the rise of functionalism and symbolism. The discrediting of mana as a scholarly category, at least among anthropologists and historians of religions, did not lead to its death. The subsequent chapters thus focus on the various ways mana survived that fateful pronouncement. I have chosen, however, to organize the material not in chronological or-

Introduction

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der, as in the earlier chapters, but thematically as mana overflowed the banks of scholarly discourse to enter popular culture, leading several lives concurrently. Chapter five thus focuses on mana as power by turning to an unexpected case, medieval Scandinavian studies, where the category was mobilized to enforce the border between religion and politics. I follow in particular the uses of mana in conjunction with the ideologically-charged concept of Germanic “sacred kingship,” which neatly illustrates the extent to which scholarly mana was designed—whether consciously or not—to mystify hierarchical power relationships. The final two chapters examine the recuperation of mana within nonacademic contexts. In chapter six I follow mana’s move from academic category to fixture of fantasy and science-fiction literature and the closely allied world of (video-)gaming. The narrative is organized around the recurrent analogy between mana and physical notions such as force, energy, and electricity. This analogy, adopted in the late nineteenth century, allowed scholars of religion to cloak magic and religion—and thus ritual efficacy—in an aura of facticity, but also resulted in a substantivization of mana that would eventually lead to its outright quantification by game designers. Indeed, by the 1970s, game designers had redefined mana as the supernatural resource expended by magicians, thus transforming it into the magical counterpart of the kilowatt or joule. Beyond discussing the genealogy of gaming mana, this chapter also takes up the argument of the previous chapter by showing how scholars, and others, constructed mana as an instrument to misrepresent political power. The final chapter deals with another related recuperation of mana in popular culture, Neo-Pagan magic. I discuss three influential practitioners of magic: two witches and a druid who claim to achieve real-word effects by means of magical spells and who have turned to mana—conceptualized once more as a form of energy—in order to describe and authorize their practice in the face of opposition from mainstream (scientific) ideas of causality. I conclude the chapter by noting how this universal, second-order mana appears to be tailormade for these adepts of a typically Western new religious movement, a fit that may function as a critical evaluation of the work of the early twentiethcentury scholars of religion who constructed mana. Finally, there is a typographical issue I must address. In the literature on mana discussed throughout the book, the term variously appears in italics and in roman type. When quoting other authors, I have maintained the author’s usage. In my own text, however, I have resorted to italics to indicate emic, Oceanic usage whereas roman lettering indicates that we are dealing with the word as part of the Western lexis, whether as a second-order category or as a loan-word into the various European languages.

Chapter 2

The First Century of Mana The word has been bandied about a good deal of late years, and meanings have been often attached to it by Europeans which are incorrect, but which the natives sometimes accept because it suits their purposes. This same word mana has several meanings … and it is quite impossible to find any one single word in English … which will give the full and precise meaning of mana. Maning 1863, 204–05

∵ Although most scholarly discussions of mana open with the seminal studies of Melanesian culture by Robert H. Codrington, he was hardly the first Westerner to have written down the word ‘mana.’ At the time of the publication of his The Melanesians (Codrington 1891), mana had enjoyed over a century of literary life, not to mention its far longer oral existence (Keesing 1984, 140; Blust 2007; Blevins 2008). The word first appeared in print in 1784 in Dr. John Douglas’s edition of the journals of Captain James Cook’s third voyage (1776–1780) under the title A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (Cook 1784; see Lehmann 1966, 215–16). This voyage, during which Cook famously lost his life in a Frazerian tragedy in the Sandwich Islands (Hawai’i; see Sahlins 1985), had been undertaken to discover the Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific, and to advance various other branches of knowledge, including astronomy and comparative philology. In comparative philology, Cook benefitted from the help of Omai, a Tahiti native who had sailed to London in 1773 and who now was returning to Polynesia, functioning as interpreter. Omai’s knowledge of a Polynesian dialect allowed him to communicate with natives from various archipelagoes, thus giving Cook material to establish comparative tables of various Polynesian words. In one such table compiled in March 1777, there appears “manna,” a term translated as “Great, or powerful” (Cook 1784, 177–78).1 1 I have not seen the spelling manna elsewhere in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts. As will be seen in Chapter 6, however, this spelling has found meaningful echoes in the twentieth century.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 | DOI 10.1163/9789004349247_003

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Scant as it is, Cook’s table yields three observations: Manna is an adjective; it is a Mangaian word and has no counterpart in Tahitian; thirdly, Cook situated it within the lexis of political power as the table indicates that Manna is “an adjunct to the last,” the last being the Polynesian term for senior chief, “Ereekee or Eree” (Cook 1784, 178; the term is usually spelled Ariki or Ari’i; Koskinen 1960). Subsequent visitors to the Pacific quickly amended Cook’s first two observations. The German naturalist Ernst Dieffenbach (1811–1855), for instance, interpreted mana as a noun (1843, 371), and the Tahitian and English Dictionary (Davies 1851, 8, 129) documented the presence of mana in the Tahitian lexis as adjective, noun, and verb. The third observation, however, that there was a link between mana and chiefs, and thus political power, was to prove more enduring. The decades that followed Cook’s final voyage saw a sharp increase in the number of Europeans in the Pacific, some of whom would stay there for longer periods of time, whether for missionary, administrative, or commercial ventures (Denoon and Mein-Smith 2000; Barbe 2008; Laux 2011). A number of these men, and some women, produced travel narratives, scientific reports, mission histories, etc., in which one occasionally finds occurrences of the word mana. These occurrences in texts written in European languages, in the century before Codrington began publishing about Melanesian mana, can be broken down into three categories.2 First, mana occurs as a “glossed item of exotic native terminology” (Smith 2004, 125) within a more general scene. While a translation is provided, mana as such is not an object of interest. Second, mana appears as an object of lexicographical inquiry, but is not made the subject of an extended discussion. Thirdly, in New Zealand mana caught the interest of Europeans and became an object of detailed expositions. These uses and their consequences will be the object of the present chapter.

Incidental Mana The incidental appearances of mana in written publications from the first part of the nineteenth century point to the fact that for many European (and Christian) authors mana simply was not an issue in itself. It was neither perceived

2 Insofar as the present book is concerned with the Western history of mana, I do not take into account the occurrences of the word mana in texts written in Oceanic languages, which would not have been accessible to European and American audiences. For a discussion of such occurrences in Hawaiian, see Silva (2016).

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nor employed as a meaningful and analytically useful category. In fact, numerous books on Polynesian matters published in the century after Cook altogether failed to mention the term despite their marked interest for indigenous languages, politics, and religion.3 These occurrences of mana, however, are of interest insofar as they neither served an explicit analytical purpose nor were subsumed under a more general category (such as religion or politics). They thus offer what might be labelled an unmarked use of the term in contrast to the conceptualizations of mana by later anthropologists and historians of religions. Examples of such incidental instances of mana are found in the accounts written by two members of the United States Exploring Mission (1838– 1842) tasked with the reconnaissance and survey of the Pacific and its coastal regions. Its leader, Lt. Charles Wilkes (1798–1877) wrote a long account of the voyage in which he gave ethnological information concerning the inhabitants of the various archipelagoes the expedition visited. In his chapter dealing with the non-Christian “customs of the Feejee group,” Wilkes writes concerning a marriage that: During this ceremony, the girls are engaged in chewing the ava, on which the priest directs the water to be poured, and cries out, ‘Ai sevu.’ He then calls upon all the gods of the town or island … He concludes the ceremony by calling out ‘mana,’ (it is finished;) to which the people respond ‘ndina,’ (it is true). Wilkes 1849, 393 In two other contexts (speeches before battle and prayer, both in Fiji), Wilkes gives the single phrase mana (e)ndina and glosses it as “it is true” and “amen” (Wilkes 1849, 383, 436). These various translations point to the difficulty of

3 For texts discussing indigenous religion and power structures without recourse to mana, see, for example, Voyage aux îles du grand Océan by the “ethnographer” Jacques-Antoine Moerenhout (1796–1879), who served as United States consul to Tahiti in 1835–1836 and as French consul there from 1842 to 1843 (Moerenhout 1837, 382ff.); A Narrative of Missionary Entreprises by John Williams (1796–1839), an English missionary active in the Society and Cook Islands who was killed by Melanesian natives in the New Hebrides (Williams 1837); The History of the Hawaiian Islands by James Jarves (1818–1888), who was also the American editor of the Polynesian, a Hawaiian newspaper (Jarves 1847); Gems from the Coral Islands by William Gill (1828–1896), an English missionary active in the Cook Islands (Gill 1856); the Polynesian Reminiscences of Tahiti-born William Pritchard (1829–1907), who served as British consul in the Samoa and Fiji islands and was married to a Samoan (Pritchard 1866). For an early Māori-English dictionary failing to mention mana, see Lee (1820, 174).

The First Century of Mana

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translating mana into English and, in the case of “amen,” a tendency toward ethnocentrism. Yet for all its inadequacies, “amen” (‘let it be’) points to the function of the phrase: “mana” was uttered in Fiji to declare a new (or desired) state of things.4 In other words, the phrase is to be understood as a performative speech act of the “declarative” type whose aim is “to create a new fact [or state] corresponding to the propositional content” (Austin 1965; Searle 1989, 549; Tomlinson and Bigitibau 2016, 239–40). Horatio Hale (1817–1896), who was the expedition’s ethnographer and philologist and would later collaborate with the anthropologist Edward B. Tylor, offers a similar reading. The phrase “Mana, e ndina!” is glossed as “Amen! It is true!” and occurs in a description of a funeral ceremony in the same archipelago, although elsewhere in his text, Hale notes that the word mana is in fact “ubiquitous” in the Pacific (Hale 1846, 64, 314). The phrase is uttered as a wishful response to the king’s declaration: “the end of death” (64). Here too, therefore, it functions as a performative speech act signaling a professed change in the state of things. Other writers who had sojourned in the same archipelago provided similar reports. Thomas Williams (1815–1891), an English missionary who spent thirteen years working in Fiji, gives “Mana dina li, So let it be, truly” as a response to a chief’s rather rhetorical wish that “peace prevail in the land” (Williams and Calvert 1860, 121). The same pragmatic, discursive function for the phrase is again evidenced in Mary Davis Wallis’s (1804–1865) chronicle of the five years she spent among “the cannibals of Fiji,” with her trader husband.5 The field anthropologist Arthur Hocart (1883–1939), active in Fiji in the early twentieth century, confirmed this interpretation and noted how it corresponded closely to what he had seen elsewhere in the Pacific: Exactly the same definition [as the Solomon islanders] is given by Fijians, who likewise do not distinguish ‘true’ and ‘right.’ Says one informant: ‘If it is true (ndina), it is mana; if it is not true, it is not mana.’ In fact the words

4 For ‘amen,’ the online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary has: “A solemn expression of concurrence in, or ratification of, a prayer, or wish; Be it so really!” http://www.oed. com/view/Entry/6291?rskey=rC7Rye&result=2&isAdvanced=false#eid (accessed February 1, 2017). 5 For instance: “This morning Thakombau came on board early, and soon after, Namosimalua and Retova came. Thakombau was seated on the sofa … when the two chiefs entered the cabin. The chiefs, with their Matavanuas and other officers, seated themselves on the floor. No one spoke when they entered, nor for some time after … At length the Matavanua of Vewa said that ‘It was good that Retova had come to see them.’ To which they all responded, ‘Mana, ndina,’ and slowly clapped their hands” (Wallis 1851, 76).

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Chapter 2 are almost interchangeable, and natives will speak of a sacred stone as mana or ndina (‘true’) … In winding up a prayer the words mana and ndina are always coupled; ‘mana ē i ndina’ (‘Let it mana, let it be true’), is the Fijian ‘Amen.’ Hocart 1914, 98

The early occurrences of mana, which were echoed in Jules Verne’s novel L’île à hélice written in 1895,6 thus agreed on mana’s discursive function, the occasional profession of bafflement notwithstanding,7 an agreement that foreshadowed the linguistic analysis of Roger Keesing, according to whom mana “is in Oceanic languages canonically a stative verb,” meaning to “be efficacious, potent, successful, true …” often used in “verbal invocatory form” (Keesing 1984, 138, 142). This agreement points to a possible explanation for the early lack of interest in mana. These authors neither felt the need to conceptualize it nor did they choose to link it to particular institutions (such as religion) because mana referred to states rather than substances, and because its meaning did not appear to be linked to any specific type of occasion or context.8 For these authors, and a fortiori for those who altogether eschewed the term, mana mattered no more than the discrete words composing other speech acts such as greetings.

Lexicographers’ Mana There were texts on Polynesian matters, however, that did not avoid altogether some measure of systematization concerning mana, most conspicuously lan6 Speaking of Fijian kava, Verne writes: “On ne le moud pas, ce poivre, on le mâche, on le triture entre les dents, puis on le crache dans l’eau d’un vase, et on vous l’offre avec une insistance sauvage qui ne permet guère de le refuser. Et, il n’y a plus qu’à remercier, en prononçant ces mots qui ont cours dans l’archipel: « E mana ndina », autrement dit: amen.” (This pepper is not grinded, it is chewed, it is triturated with the teeth, then it is spat into the water of a vase, and it is given to you with savage insistence so that you have no choice but to accept it. There is nothing to do but give thanks, by uttering the customary words in the archipelago: “E mana ndina,” or in other words: amen) (Verne 1980, 344). 7 Mana baffled early observers and linguists because it seemed to be variously noun, verb, adjective, and adverb; for comments on the fluidity of Polynesian grammatical categories, see, for example, Hale (1846, 277), Hocart (1914, 97), Hubert and Mauss (Mauss 1950, 101). This apparent incoherence has been explained away linguistically, see Keesing (1984). 8 In Williams and Calvert’s Fiji and the Fijians (1860), mana appears in the chapter entitled “Manners and Customs,” when the same text has chapters on “Religion,” “War,” and “Polity.”

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guage dictionaries. Such texts contributed to the representation of mana in various ways. They provided grammatical analyses of mana as a discrete lexeme, confirmed the idea of the word’s widespread presence throughout the Pacific, and placed mana within conceptual networks. Nineteenth-century lexicographers agreed that mana was a noun, but some added that it also functioned as adjective, verb, and even adverb.9 Under the form of an adjective, most scholars agreed that mana meant “powerful” (Ellis 1859, 4: 295; Andrews 1836, 98; Hale 1846, 314; Davies 1851, 129; Andrews 1865, 382), and “effectual, efficient” (Williams 1844a, 172; Hazlewood 1850, 76). As a noun, however, mana proved more divisive with three basic translations competing: “power,” “miracle,” and “supernatural power.” Most authors agreed that mana denoted “power” (for example, Hale 1846, 314). Additional glosses help us clarify what was meant by this notoriously difficult word. William Ellis (1794–1872), a protestant missionary in Tahiti and Hawai’i, suggests that the term belongs to the vocabulary of politics: “the priests … assured the chiefs that … the hau and mana, government and power, would be with the gods of Tahiti” rather than with the God of the Christians (Ellis 1859, 2: 155). Ernst Dieffenbach (1811–1855), a German naturalist sent by the New Zealand Company to survey the islands as part of its colonizing activities, gave mana the following translations in his Māori-English glossary: “command, authority, power” (Dieffenbach 1843, 371). The Anglican Bishop of Waiapu (North East New Zealand) William Williams (1800–1878) followed Dieffenbach in defining mana as “power, influence” (Williams 1844b, 59), whereas John Davies (1772–1855), Ellis’s colleague who worked for fifty-five years for the London Missionary Society in Tahiti, added the nouns “might, influence” (Davies 1851, 129). In these examples, mana is an abstract noun referring to the type of power that is wielded by chiefs and other leaders, gods included, in the pursuit of their will, with little to suggest that mana was conceptualized in objective terms (wealth, troops, etc.). Mana denotes rather personal power of some sort (including physical strength) and only occasionally are there indications of a more institutionally-based power, as for instance on the Hawaiian archipelago, which saw a developed native-controlled kingship 9 Mana as noun: Mariner and Martin (1817, 2: 462), Ellis (1859, 2: 155, this text was first published in 1829), Dieffenbach (1843, 371), Mosblech (1843, 64), Humboldt (1843, 109), Herbert Williams (1844a, 172), William Williams (1844b, 59), Hale (1846, 314, 399), Hazlewood (1850, 76), Davies (1851, 129), Andrews (1865, 382). As adjective: Ellis (1859, 4: 295), Mosblech (1843, 64), Humboldt (1843, 109), Hale (1846, 314), Hazlewood (1850, 76), Davies (1851, 129), Andrews (1865, 382). As verb: Humboldt (1843, 109), Davies (1851, 129), Andrews (1865, 382). As adverb: Hazlewood (1850, 76).

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and where mana could mean “official power or authority” (Andrews 1865, 382).10 Westerners’ accounts of mana in the Fiji group—on whose status as Polynesian or Melanesian early ethnographers hesitated11—yield a different picture. Mana, in Hale’s Fijian-English glossary, is glossed as “miracle” (Hale 1846, 399; see also Williams and Calvert 1860, 171).12 While this seems to place mana squarely within the province of (Christian) religion, Hazlewood’s more substantial entry in his Fijian-English dictionary, however, provides some nuance to this impression. There, he gives: “a sign, or omen; a wonder, or miracle” (Hazlewood 1850, 76). These words are grouped as two contrastive pairs in which the varying, incidental element is the natural versus supernatural quality of the event at hand. What is common to these terms, however, has to do with efficiency or success rather than religion sensu stricto, the focus being on the result rather than the means employed or even the putative agent. Significantly, situating mana within a religious context is only one possibility among others. Moreover, Keesing has noted in connection with Hazlewood’s entry that these meanings occur “mainly with reference to natural (meteorological?) phenomena” (Keesing 1984, 144; see also Blust 2007), an idea corroborated by Mariner’s early lexicon of the Tonga language where “ma’na” is glossed as “thunder; also an omen; a sign” (Mariner and Martin 1817, 2: 462). Lorrin Andrews’s Dictionary of the Hawaiian Language (1865) provides yet a different reading of mana, placing it unambiguously within the province of religion, and thus anticipating Codrington’s influential definition. Andrews gave the following: Ma-na, s. Supernatural power, such as was supposed and believed to be an attribute of the gods; power; strength; might. See Oihk. [the Hawaiian version of the biblical book of Leviticus] 26:19. Applied under the christian system to divine power. Lunk. [the Hawaiian version of Judges] 6:14. 10

11

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The hints provided by the dictionary entries mentioned may be supplemented by later ethnographies of political power in Polynesia, see, for example, Sahlins (1963), Bowden (1979), Koskinen (1960), Valeri (1985, esp. 97–104). See also Hale (1846, passim). Fiji plays a particular role in Oceania both in nineteenth-century texts and later anthropology as it is described as spatially Melanesian but culturally closer to Polynesia, see Hale (1846, 47–69), Sahlins (1963, 286). It should be noted that in Hale’s ethnographical section on Fiji, this meaning is not reflected: mana appears, but as a declarative, as discussed in the previous section. Mosblech, a French catholic missionary, provides an instance of a similar meaning in French Polynesian: “hoomana, adorer, rendre homage; faire de grandes choses, des miracles” (Mosblech 1843, 29).

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2. Spirit; energy of character. 2 Nal. [Hawaiian version of Kings] 2:9. Official power or authority; o kona mau kaikuahine ka mana kiai. Laieik. [a Hawaiian novel] 101. 3. Glory; majesty; intelligence; ka ihiihi, ka nani, ka ike. … Ma-na, adj. Powerful; strong. 1 Sam. [Hawaiian version of Samuel] 2:4. Ma-na, v. … 3. Hoo. To reverence or worship, as a superior being, i.e., of superhuman power; a hoomana aku la i ua alii la e like me ka hoomana akua, they worshiped that chief as if they worshiped a god. 4. To worship; to render homage to. Puk.[Hawaiian version of Exodus] 20:5. Ma-na, s. Hoo. Worship; reverence; adoration. Andrews 1865, 382 Although it shares common elements with previous definitions, Andrews’s work represents an important break with them insofar as it conceptualizes mana within the discourse of Christian theology.13 Andrews foregrounds mana as “supernatural power,” and qualifies it as an attribute of both the preChristian gods and their Christian counterpart. As a verb, Andrews’s mana is not stative but transitive, meaning to worship superhuman beings (akua, ‘gods’). The same shift toward religious discourse is present even when the meaning is purely mundane, as when human physical strength is exemplified through biblical texts. While later dictionaries came to corroborate this religious understanding (see Tregear 1891, 203; Codrington and Palmer 1896, 67), Andrews’s conceptualization of mana remains somewhat of an exception among early lexicographical studies of Polynesian languages.14 This religious shift, however, can be accounted for by the author’s selection of source material. In the preface to his Dictionary, Andrews discusses the material from which the meanings of words are reconstructed. As might be expected, this includes written documents by Hawaiians to Hawaiians (though there is a bias in favor of chiefly productions) while excluding “works of Foreign Authors.” This guideline was disregarded in one particular case: 13

14

In 1836, Andrews had published a Vocabulary of Words in the Hawaiian Language which was a compilation of previous word lists by English and American visitors to the islands. The noun mana is glossed as “power, might, supernatural power, divine might” (Andrews 1836, 98). The absence of biblical references and the secondary position of the religious variety of power locate this text in the sort of discourses exemplified by the texts given above. It should be noted, however, that as early as 1855, Richard Taylor, a missionary in New Zealand, had written of mana as “the virtue of the god,” which could be transferred from an idol to a patient (Taylor 1855, 74). Unfortunately, Taylor does not develop this gloss.

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Chapter 2 The translation of the Bible, however, from the great care exercised in translating—the frequent and thorough reviews by parties distinct from the original translators—and in all cases with Hawaiians sitting by and assisting, who were distinguished for intelligence and skill in their own language—is the principal exception. Andrews 1865, iv

The problem is all too apparent. Andrews’s reconstruction of mana depended on highly skewed uses of the term by non-Polynesians to refer to nonPolynesian concepts. The mana whose definition he sought to reconstruct was itself the synthetic product of a process of translation, with all the categorical deformations this implies (see Smith 2004). Andrews’s decision to rely almost exclusively on Bible translations to define mana meant that he was bound to find not Hawaiian islanders’ uses thereof but European conceptualizations of power. The Christiano-centric character of the work was reinforced by the explicit choice to steer away from native, non-Christian sacerdotal usages; indeed Andrews stated that “the language employed by the priests when drawing on their gods for assistance, are but partially presented in the definitions of this Dictionary” (Andrews 1865, vi). To put it bluntly, with mana he was defining a Western politico-religious concept, a misrepresentation which must have come in handy in his missionary work. Andrews’s Dictionary of the Hawaiian Language provides our first clear insight into the influence of contextual factors and authorial agendas in the conceptualization of mana by Europeans. In this case, the theological coloring of Andrews’s mana is readily explained by his professional interest in Christian religious texts and the conversion of Polynesians to Western religion and culture.15 It was not only missionaries, however, who found mana a useful concept for their purposes in Polynesia. By the time Andrews had published his Dictionary in 1865, others were picking up on its potential and were hard at work producing extended discussions of mana. But this time, the context was New Zealand.

Mana Conceptualized: The New Zealand Case In different ways New Zealand is an exception in the Polynesian area. Most conspicuously, it differs from the other Polynesian archipelagos in size, cli15

Note, however, that this was in no way inevitable, as many early lexicographers were themselves missionaries and did not feel the need to conceptualize mana in such religious terms.

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mate, and natural resources. Less immediately obvious but as important are the cultural differences. Although the Māori, its indigenous inhabitants, had emigrated from other Polynesian islands (possibly in the twelfth-fourteenth centuries) and thus shared much of their culture, language, and social organization, their long isolation had led to independent cultural developments, extending to architecture,16 cuisine, warfare, and tattooing. These natural and cultural peculiarities both impacted European patterns of settlement in New Zealand and influenced the particular interactions between Europeans and Māori. Not least among the particularities was the Māori’s capacity not just to field an army against British imperial power but actually to defeat it in combat in the 1840s and 1860s (Belich 1986, 89–141).17 Such differences also found textual expression. While European accounts of New Zealand history and culture willingly stressed Māori linguistic and cultural continuities with the rest of Polynesia (for example Hale 1846, 5; Taylor 1855, 7, 9), they also revealed numerous points of contrast, one of which was mana.18 Not only did Māori mana become an object of multiple extended discussions but its conceptualization by nineteenth-century Pākehā (inhabitants of New Zealand of European descent) also broke with the denotations given by lexicographers of other Polynesian languages.19 While many nineteenth-century chroniclers of Māori life and institutions either did not mention mana or, as we have already seen, merely included the word in lexical lists,20 some, however, such as John White (1826–1891), felt that mana was an important word that required more than a gloss. The self-educated son of an English blacksmith who had emigrated in 1834, White

16 17

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For instance, in New Zealand, the marae, which elsewhere in Polynesia denotes a religious building (Davidson 1981, 16), was a building-less plaza. Richard Taylor, already in 1855, noted this peculiarity: “Whole races of aborigines have disappeared; they have not been considered entitled to hold their own inheritances … In New Zealand, there is little doubt something similar would have taken place, if the natives had not been too numerous, too warlike, and too intelligent to be thus dealt with” (Taylor 1855, 2). It may also be noted here that some nineteenth-century writers insisted on a developmental difference between Māori and other Polynesians, for example, the missionary Richard Taylor who wrote that they are “a noble race, bodily and mentally superior to most of the Polynesians” (Taylor 1855, 11; see also de Vattel as quoted in Orange 1987, 23). Moreover, when New Zealand mana was conceptualized, it was only under the form of a noun. Those who made no mention of the word include Brown (1845) and Thomson (1859), while Dieffenbach (1843, 371), Williams (1844b, 59), and Taylor (1855, 74), for example, only provided glosses.

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spoke Māori fluently and, possibly under the influence of Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian, collected and published Māori lore.21 His ‘ethnographic’ work attracted the attention of Governor George Grey who hired him as secretary in 1852. His linguistic skills were subsequently employed in the Land Purchase Department and in the Auckland Native Land Court, two institutions whose purpose was despoiling the Māori of their land. At the same time, White produced scholarly works, most notably a multivolume History of the Maori, on various aspects of indigenous culture, including Māori concepts of land tenure, a subject on whose sensitivity he insisted. In 1861, White delivered two lectures at the Mechanics’ Institute in Auckland, the second of which dealt with land and mana (White 1861, 37–48). In these Lectures on Maori Customs and Superstitions, White pointedly stressed the differences between traditional Māori and European conceptions of land ownership. Possession of land, he wrote, was not documented as in England by individual legally-established titles, rather the Māori held lands collectively by virtue of common descent as documented by shared genealogical lore. The land was parceled out among tribe members who jealously guarded their allotted portion, while a chief exercised “authority as guardian for his people” over it (White 1861, 36–37; see Lehmann 1966; Orange 1987, 38). Having established the absence of individual claims, White turned to the various modes of land acquisition, at which point he introduced mana: In war, an assisting tribe was in return for their help presented with a block of land which became the property of all those who had relatives killed in the war for which it was given; in some instances, however, the land was not fully given to the assisting tribes; sometimes only the right of fishing or hunting was granted, and in order that the owners of the district might keep the “mana” or right to the land, the tribe who had received permission to fish or hunt had to render the proceeds of their first day’s sport to the owners of the land. White 1861, 39–40 In the second part of the lecture (White 1861, 41–48), White returned to mana, which he linked exclusively to the chiefly class, whether as individuals or as representatives of their tribe. It is in the latter function that mana comes to be defined as “right to the land.” But this association evinces different, even confusing, forms in the discussion. A tribe may hold mana over land without

21

On John White’s life and scholarly production, see Reilly (1989; 2014).

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necessarily claiming its entirety.22 Mana may be coterminous with, or distinct from, ownership,23 although the owner of the rights may be entitled to “tribute” of some sort (43, 44). White’s focus as an agent of the Land Purchase Department, however, was on the nature and origin of this mana. He accounts for mana over a piece of land in various ways. Māori myth narrates that the archipelago was first settled by men who arrived there on “canoes” (waka; Sinclair 1961, 3–4; Davidson 1981, 5–6, 13). Upon arrival, each crew laid claim to a tract of land and eventually gave rise to tribes, or iwi, bearing the name of their canoe. Thus, paternal descent from these primary settlers granted both membership in the tribe and a claim to the land associated with that canoe (White 1861, 42, 43). Yet, White argues, genealogical claims do not appear particularly authoritative as both marriage (42) and conquest could lead to the eventual acquisition of mana (44). After surveying the modalities of various tribes’ rights to land or mana, White turned to the semantics of the word. Surprisingly, the meanings he proposed (“fulfill … potent … effective … granted … support” (46)) have little to do with land tenure. On the contrary, they point to stative usage analogous to that observed in other parts of Polynesia (see above; Keesing 1984). While White concluded his exposition of the semantics of mana by stating that “It will be seen, therefore, that ‘mana’ expresses in its many shades of meaning, nothing more or less than the unseen determination of that uncontrolled something— the human mind” (White 1861, 46), he nevertheless provided a less poeticallyminded but more effective synthesis of mana and land tenure by turning to the figures that comprised the Māori sociopolitical elite, priests and chiefs. White begins with the mana, or authority, of priests and finds that it is limited to those “matters in which the interference of the gods may be recognized” (46). Should a priest give orders on his own behalf rather than the gods’, he would not be obeyed: “it is therefore the influence of the gods, or the superstitious dread in which they were held by the people, and not human influence, that gave the mana to a priest” (46). The limited scope of an individual’s mana is further brought to the fore in White’s discussion of the mana of chiefs. While an ariki’s mana goes undisputed when dealing with specific issues such 22

23

“Portions of land are claimed by certain tribes who reside in and claim part of a migration district, but who do not own any right of mana to be exercised by the offspring of the original migrators in whose district they are thus located” (White 1861, 42). White thus gives the example of a tribe entrenching themselves on their land in order to “keep the mana of their land” rather than fleeing to the forest or mountains (White 1861, 42–43).

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as burial or lifting of various prohibitions (tapu), issues intimately connected with the gods, White insists that in other matters a chief’s mana is so conditional that neither his office nor his “right of birth” (47) can prevent its loss. Any political influence a chief enjoys is indeed a matter of personal qualities and actions (48).24 As such, although political power tends to be in the hands of the most effective men, it is fundamentally unstable and ephemeral since it rests on its acknowledgment by the masses.25 The conclusion of the second part of the lecture thus echoes that of the first concerning land tenure: mana, i.e. Māori authority, is primarily a collective and thus, from White’s perspective, insecure business. But it is possible to go further. The distinction between mana as individual superstitious power and collective political power is in fact bridged by the fact that both represent in their own ways foils to the contemporary self-representation of Victorian religious and economic rationality and modernity. Indeed, both sorts of mana allow White to assure Western settlers, the audience of his Lectures, that it is for all intents and purposes impossible to deal with backward Māori on their own terms, thus preparing the justification of the colonial government’s (iniquitous and coercive) land policy. Abandoning its semantics, John White chose to conceptualize mana in terms of political power. And if religion does make an appearance, it plays a subordinated role to the text’s polemical, political dimension. Significantly, White constructed this political conceptualization through the question of rights to the land which, in the New Zealand of the mid-nineteenth century represented a most obvious, and sharply contested, manifestation of authority, if not sovereignty. As such, White’s choice points, again, to the role of the wider extra-textual context. Land, Sovereignty, and Mana in New Zealand In 1861, when White tried to explain Māori concepts of land tenure and authority, New Zealand was torn by war between Māori and the British Imperial army, a war that had been waged on and off since 1843 and again flared up

24

25

In White’s text, there are thus two sorts of mana, a personal one, which is ratified by the group, and a divine one, which is linked to specific acts, most conspicuously the imposition and lifting of tapu: “but let it not be supposed that by gaining a certain influence or mana by his superior powers of mind, he had the power to make anything tapu; his mana only went so far as his protecting power and counsel were required” (White 1861, 48; for a discussion of these two terms and their relationship, see Bowden 1979; Shore 1989). “Any influence which may be exercised by an ariki or chief is allowed by the people” (White 1861, 47). For a discussion of authority that is not without relevance in the present context, see Lincoln (1994).

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from March 17, 1860 to March 18, 1861. While the Britanno-Māori wars revolved ultimately around the question of sovereignty (Belich 1986; Orange 1987; Denoon and Mein-Smith 2000, 130), the issue of land regularly played the role of proximate cause of the fighting. This intertwined question of sovereignty and land may be traced back to the first claims made by Captain James Cook as he sailed around the archipelago in 1769–1770.26 Cook’s claims initially went unheeded and New Zealand remained outside British dominion. At first, European presence was limited and transient so that in 1830 there were only some three hundred Europeans residing in New Zealand. There was little cause for conflict as the Māori desired their presence and trade goods, muskets above all. But in 1833, rumors of French plans for annexation and illegal (from the British point of view) European involvement in inter-Māori warfare led to the appointment by the Crown of James Busby as British Resident in New Zealand where he was to assist trade, apprehend escaped convicts, and protect the Māori against Pākehā (i.e. European) delinquency (Orange 1987, 12ff.). Deprived of the means to accomplish his mission and faced with European atrocities and violent inter-tribal conflict, Busby believed that the way to bring about law and order in the independent territory lay in the establishment of collective Māori sovereignty. While he was able to convince some chiefs to adopt a national flag (1834) and declare independence (1835), Busby failed to provide the law and order that the anxious, because outnumbered, Pākehā wished for. In 1837, following a peak in fighting amongst Māori tribes, two hundred settlers and missionaries called for British protection. In the meantime, the economic situation had been rapidly changing. As trade grew, European residents increasingly turned to agriculture (when not simply engaging in land speculation) and thus needed ever more land, which they often bought irregularly. Moreover, the formation of the New Zealand Association (later New Zealand Company) in 1837 gave a new impetus to the colonization of the country. The Company’s scheme, a fundamentally capitalist venture (Sinclair 1961, 43–52; Burns 1989), consisted in buying land cheaply from the Māori and selling it at a profit to fund further colonization. Thus, when in 1839 the Company learned that the British government was sending a consul to obtain sovereignty from the Māori, it rushed an expedition to purchase land and a few months later sent a first group of settlers. 26

There are many accounts of New Zealand History, for the following I have made use of Sinclair (1961), Oliver and Williams (1981), Belich (1986), Orange (1987), Rice (1992), Denoon and Mein-Smith (2000), Barbe (2008), as well as the online encyclopedia Te Ara, available at: http://www.teara.govt.nz/en.

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As a preliminary to annexation, the Colonial Office, possibly influenced by humanitarian evangelicalism, proclaimed Māori rights to the land and declared “that title to New Zealand land would be valid only if derived from or confirmed by the Crown” (Orange 1987, 34). Within a week of the arrival in New Zealand of the British envoy Captain William Hobson, a meeting was arranged between himself and some fifty chiefs at the Resident’s home at Waitangi on February 5 and 6, 1840, which saw the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. This text, hastily prepared by Hobson and Busby, and translated by the missionary Henry Williams, consisted of a preamble followed by three articles dealing respectively with the cession by the chiefs of sovereignty to the Crown, the confirmation of Māori land possession, and the conferment of the rights of British subjects to the Māori. In addition to confirming the chiefs’ and tribes’ possession of their land, the second article gave the Crown the right of pre-emption of all land.27 In addition to paving the way for British colonization, the treaty generated more tension than it relieved. On the one hand, Hobson and his weak government disagreed with the Māori on the nature of the sovereignty the former had acquired (nominal vs. substantial; Belich 1986, 21). On the other, the governor of the new Crown colony began investigating previous land purchases, including those of the missionaries and the New Zealand Company, finding most purchases scandalously wanting. Moreover, the pre-emption clause, which has been shown to have effectively been used to dispossess Māori of their land (Denoon and Mein-Smith 2000, 126), angered both Māori sellers, who were offered lower prices than they expected, and Europeans, who were thus barred 27

The treaty’s second article reads as follows in the English version: “Her Majesty the Queen of England confirms and guarantees to the Chiefs and Tribes of New Zealand and to the respective families and individuals thereof the full exclusive and undisturbed possession of their Lands and Estates, Forests, Fisheries and other properties which they may collectively or individually possess so long as it is their wish and desire to retain the same in their possession: but the Chiefs of the United Tribes and the individual Chiefs yield to Her Majesty the exclusive right of Preemption over such lands as the proprietors thereof may be disposed to alienate at such prices as may be agreed upon between the respective Proprietors and persons appointed by Her Majesty to treat with them in that behalf” (Orange 1987, 258). This version was the one signed by the chiefs at Waitangi and was deemed the official version. Before signing, the chiefs were read aloud the Māori version which is a free and somewhat biased translation. There are thus disturbing suggestions of British disingenuousness (see Orange 1987, 40–42). For instance, in the Māori version, chiefs yield kawanatanga (governor’s authority) but keep rangatiranga (chiefly authority), whereas “in the English language version, there was no mention of chiefly authority, and the Māori ceded both” (Belich 1986, 21).

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from speculating or acquiring land. Four years later, Governor FitzRoy waived the right of pre-emption. For all the claims by the British to protect Māori rights, the colonial government soon compromised with the New Zealand Company, which was busy settling fresh waves of immigrants on dubiously acquired land.28 Land transactions in the North Island thus became a primary site of conflict between Māori and Pākehā as well as among the Māori. Sporadic skirmishes turned to armed conflict in 1844 when the chief Hone Heke challenged British sovereignty (“over land and people”; Belich 1986, 32) by cutting down the Union Jack above the town of Kororareka and leading a thousand Māori to military successes against the British and their Māori allies, before coming to favorable terms with the new governor George Grey. By 1847, fighting had subsided and the right of pre-emption was restored. Grey, who was well versed in Māori lore, set about buying great tracts of land for settlement and incipient pastoralism. Despite Grey’s nod to Māori conceptions of land tenure, many Māori, Heke included, remained unhappy with the purchase of land, perceiving its role, in conjunction with the development of settler government, in Māori disenfranchisement in their own land (Parsonson 1992, 167–98, esp. 173). The situation worsened after Grey’s departure from office in 1853, as the purchasing practices of the Native Land Purchase Department became ever less scrupulous. Starting in 1854, the year the settlers’ parliament met for the first time in Auckland, large inter-tribal meetings developed into a “unity” movement culminating in the election of a Māori king in 1858, which amounted to the creation of a rival independent Māori state (Sinclair 1961, 99; Denoon and Mein-Smith 2000, 194–95). This “King Movement,” united around the desire to keep the land in Māori hands, clashed directly with the interests of the settlers and those among the Māori who wished to sell. In the fertile Taranaki region (South-West of the North Island), the tension was particularly acute. Following a dispute concerning a land sale, murderous feuding among Māori erupted between land-holders and land sellers with the occasional Pākehā involved. In March 1859, Governor Gore Browne met with chiefs to announce that “Maoris fighting on European land would be treated as rebels” (Sinclair 1961, 109), thus ending the general British policy of non-intervention in Māori affairs and making an explicit affirmation of substantial British sovereignty. At this meeting,

28

Between 1839 and 1845, the New Zealand Company sent c. 9000 settlers to the archipelago (Gardner 1981, 60). By 1854, the European population of New Zealand amounted to c. 32’500 (Sinclair 1961, 84). In 1858, there were more Pākehā than Māori in New Zealand (Sinclair 1961, 106).

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Teira, a minor chief, offered to sell land on the Waitara River despite the objections of the senior tribal chief named Wiremu. Gore Browne then explained to settlers that should Wiremu be shown to be an owner of the land, the deal would fall through, but in the opposite case the governor declared that “he would not allow him [Wiremu] to ‘exercise his right of chieftainship’ to prevent the sale” (Sinclair 1961, 109; Belich 1986, 79). Despite warnings against the deal, Gore Browne accepted Teira’s offer to sell, denying Māori concepts of both chiefly authority and collective land tenure, which triggered a series of wars for substantive sovereignty over the Māori and their land (Belich 1986, 78) that would last until 1872 and see the defeat of the last Māori holdouts. Before he gave his lectures in 1861, John White had worked not only for the Land Purchase Department but also, in 1860, as interpreter for the Imperial forces fighting Wiremu and the King Movement (Reilly 2014). Despite his interest for Māori culture, White was hardly a disinterested spectator in the conflict. Conceptualizing mana in terms of political power and land tenure allowed him to take part in the conflict and fire a discursive shot against Māori sovereignty. But White was not alone in finding mana so useful: New Zealand saw other Europeans mobilize the Māori word in defense of their political and economic interests. Mana in New Zealand: From Politics to Magic A similar conceptualization of mana in terms of land tenure is reflected in the writings of Edward Shortland (1812–1893), a Cambridge-educated physician who worked for the colonial government between 1842 and 1846 and again from 1862 to 1865. A scholar of Māori culture and religion, Shortland was the author of Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders (1856), in which he succinctly defined mana as “genius and energy” of a sort that might be inherited by a son and so cause his social preeminence.29 Like White, he was personally interested in questions of land tenure and transfer (Anderson 1990), and later returned to mana in his Maori Religion and Mythology (Shortland 1882), which he analyzed this time as a concept relevant to land tenure. Shortland begins his Maori Religion and Mythology with a comparison between Polynesian and “Aryan” religion and myth focusing on common traits but noting that whereas the former was still current in his days, the latter was 29

“[Tarapipipi’s] father was a celebrated chief, named Te Waharoa, who had been very successful in war: and it was thought that all the mana, or genius and energy of the father had descended to this son. He was, consequently, the most influential young chief of the tribe; for, having bravery and eloquence, he possessed two qualities held in higher estimation by them than any other” (Shortland 1856, 84–85).

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long extinct.30 Shortland then details aspects of Māori myth and ritual, focusing on rites incumbent upon chiefs. The discussion then turns to chiefs, but rather than analyze the institution, Shortland narrates the story of two mythical chiefs named Ihenga and Kahu. While the first part deals with Ihenga’s burial of his father and the subsequent removal by Kahu of the tapu incurred through contact with the dead body (ch. 5), the second part is concerned with their acquisition of land (ch. 6). This myth is given as an illustration of the manners in which land was claimed by the Māori up to Shortland’s own days,31 and shows the place of mana in that context (75). But while mana appears in the myth, it is not explained until the final chapter dealing with Māori land tenure where it is defined as “power, but in its application to land corresponds somewhat with the power of a Trustee” (Shortland 1882, 89–90). Shortland then discusses the nature of a chief’s mana over a tract of land and the ways in which it might be acquired, lost, or transferred (89–93). Surprisingly, considering its title, the book concludes with an exposition of the underpinnings of the rival claims of Teira and Wiremu on the Waitara River (see above), the tract of land that sparked off the war for sovereignty of 1860–1861 (Shortland 1882, 101–04). While this exposition can be read as an attempt to make sense of a complex dispute, Shortland’s final statement suggests that the book’s point exceeds the particulars of the case at hand: “it is a rather mortifying reflection that the astute policy of a Maori chief should have prevailed to drag the Colony and Her Majesty’s Government into a long and expensive war to avenge his own private quarrel” (104). This sentence gives the key to Shortland’s political agenda and reconceptualization of mana in terms of land tenure rather than “genius and energy” (Shortland 1856, 84). By recasting mana and Māori politics more generally in terms of mythology, Shortland was commenting on their value. Having stated that contemporary Polynesians and their culture corresponded to that of the “Aryans,” i.e. the long-gone, primitive ancestors of the British, he was arguing for the Polynesian’s primitiveness, and, thereby, the foolishness of taking into account Māori claims based on mythical and “primitive” concepts such as mana in the fashioning of colonial policy.

30

31

“We can also observe a similarity between the more antient [sic] form of religious belief and mythological tradition of the Aryans and that still existing among the Polynesians” (Shortland 1882, 3). Shortland was not alone in linking the Polynesians to the “Aryans”; see also Fornander (1878, 128–29). Shortland explicitly insists that myths represent a major source of information on Māori land titles (1882, 88).

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John Eldon Gorst (1835–1916), writing in the midst of the contest for substantial sovereignty in New Zealand, provides yet another example of political interpretation of mana, but this time from the Māori perspective. Gorst wrote his analysis of the King Movement, The Maori King (1864), as the British were invading its heartland, the Waikato region south of Auckland. The British government had remained unhappy with the results of the 1860–1861 war and the continued existence of the Movement, which, by obstructing land sale, defied British pretensions to sovereignty over the archipelago and resisted British colonization. A year after his arrival in New Zealand in 1860, Gorst was directly involved with Waikato affairs as resident magistrate then civil commissioner until his expulsion by pro-king Māori in April 1863. Shortly after General Cameron began his campaign on July 11, 1863, the wealthy and Cambridgeeducated Gorst returned to England to write the account of his experiences in New Zealand (Gorst 1864).32 In this text, Gorst documented the Māori people’s own explanations of the causes for their support of the King Movement and its affirmation of Māori sovereignty. These included desire for peace, biblical references, and resistance against colonization, but Gorst noted that the main cause was land: Many of those who joined [the King Movement] in Waikato, and most of those who joined from tribes out of Waikato, did so because the King was to hold the lands of his adherents upon trust not to permit sales to the Crown. Gorst 1864, 65 Gorst went on to qualify this assertion by noting that, to the Māori, land was important not as “soil” but in that they “only cared for what we should call territorial dominion” (Gorst 1864, 65), precisely what the Māori king was entrusted to protect in the face of European encroachment. The concept used by the Māori, however, was not “dominion” but mana. Gorst quotes a Waikato leader, Takerei, who explained to a committee of the New Zealand Assembly that: The people … proposed to elect a King for themselves to protect them, to be a ‘mana’ over them and their land. The idea was this—the Queen

32

The text was most likely finished by the end of 1863 for it does not mention important battles such as Rangiriri (November 20–21, 1863) and Orakau (March 31 to April 2, 1864). On Gorst, see Sorrenson (2013).

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should be a ‘mana’ over the Pakeha and over the land which you have acquired. The same with respect to the Maori King. Gorst 1864, 71 In addition to providing a clear example of political conceptualization of mana, Gorst’s discussion shows that the term could also be mobilized by the Māori to further their own political agendas.33 Mana is here defined in terms of land and sovereignty; indeed Gorst’s Takerei avoids any hint of religion and its potential association with paganism or anti-modernity (unless one should focus on Victoria’s role as Supreme Governor of the Church of England). Moreover, Takerei’s politically savvy comparison of the Māori king and Queen Victoria by virtue of their both being “a mana” (weakly translated by Gorst as “power”; 1864, 71 n2) over their respective people and land, not only recast British claims in Māori language but also claimed for the Māori King a status equal to that of Queen Victoria. By proclaiming the king as a mana, Gorst’s Takerei was effectively proclaiming an independent Māori state. At the same time, Gorst’s text corroborates the claim made here for the context-dependent construction of mana insofar as Māori political unity as instantiated by the King Movement was an alien idea before the mid-1850s (its Māori name, Kingitanga, is itself a loan from English). Moreover, mana was conspicuously lacking from the Māori-language version of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, despite the presence, in the English version, of “sovereignty” or “sovereign authority” (Orange 1987, 258; cf. Ross 1972, 141). I have suggested in the foregoing discussion that the conceptualization of mana may have been influenced by the sociopolitical context and the leanings of their authors. In fact, the authors reviewed in the preceding pages all had stakes in land transactions and sovereignty over the archipelago. They found mana a useful concept and so provided it with definitions and analyses, but these must not be mistaken for an objective and faithful reflection of actual use or meaning of the word. Indeed, even in the days of the wars for sovereignty, it appears that a political conceptualization was hardly inevitable. Frederick E. Maning’s autobiography, Old New Zealand (1863), provides an example of such an alternate conceptualization of mana. In this text, Maning (1811–1883) narrates his early adventures and life in New Zealand among a Māori tribe. Possibly written in order to establish his qualifications for service in the Native Land Court (Steer 2004), the text offers detailed discussions

33

For another example of Māori political use of mana, see Te Ahuru’s speech as quoted in Sinclair (1959, 266).

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of various traditional Māori conceptions, including land tenure and mana.34 Significantly, these conceptions are set within a context of intercultural relations between the Māori, the British government, and Pākehā Māori (Europeans gone native), such as Maning himself. In so doing, the text yields a dynamic picture that, like Maning’s ironic prose, is complex and ambiguous. For instance, in his treatment of land, Maning begins by disparaging the Māori system of land ownership, which confronted him as a buyer,35 but ends with a tirade against the colonial government and its European-style land policy (Maning 1863, 64). Likewise, Maning alternates between solidarity with the Māori and condescension for what he sees as degeneration, asserting the need for British colonialization.36 Maning’s discussion of mana is characterized by irony and ambiguity. Noting that others have attempted to make sense of mana, he acknowledges the problem of cultural translation and its dynamic nature—possibly recognizing the performative character of translation.37 After opening with various English and Latin renditions, which echo standard language dictionaries (for example Dieffenbach 1843, 371; Taylor 1855, 74; Williams 1844b, 59) and point to a stative usage,38 Maning shifts to a more substantial meaning: “Mana sometimes means a more than natural virtue or power attaching to some person or thing … and capable of either increase or diminution” (Maning 1863, 175). In the examples Maning gives, mana oscillates between these two meanings. For instance, in the case of priests, mana is presented as the consequence of

34 35

36

37

38

Maning’s texts on such emic categories as tapu and muru were used by such scholars as James Frazer, Sigmund Freud (Calder 2008, 5), and Andrew Lang (1898, 158). “I really can’t tell to the present day who I purchased the land from, for there were about fifty different claimants, every one of whom assured me that the other forty-nine were ‘humbugs,’ and had no right whatever” (Maning 1863, 60). Pro-Māori: “there is a sort of ‘honour among thieves’ feeling between myself and my Maori friends on certain matters which we mutually understand are not for the ears of the ‘new people”’ (Maning 1863, 77; see also 3); condescension: (36); pro-government: “for our own safety and their preservation, we must give new laws and institutions, new habits of life, new ideas, sentiments, and information,—whom we must either civilise or by our mere contact exterminate” (80; elsewhere, Maning speaks of the “plagues of civilization,” 1863, 2). For Maning’s view of Māori degeneration (30, 49), see also Dieffenbach (1843). For a general statement on his split personality, see Maning (1863, 180). “The word has been bandied about a good deal of late years, and meanings often attached to it by Europeans which are incorrect, but which the natives sometimes accept because it suits their purpose” (Maning 1863, 174). Maning offers the following glosses: “Virtus, prestige [sic, presumably the French word], authority, good fortune, influence, sanctity, luck” (Maning 1863, 175).

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success rather than its ingredient: “The mana of a priest or tohunga is proved by the truth of his predictions, as well as the success of his incantations, which same incantations, performed by another person, of inferior mana, would have no effect” (175). That this passage is meant to be ironic is borne out by Maning’s comments in two previous chapters in which he denounces the fraudulence of priests (including missionaries) who abuse credulity through ventriloquism, equivocal oracles, etc. (116–28). On the other hand, some examples point to a more substantive reading. Thus, Maning writes that Māori “doctors … did not deal much in ‘simples’ [medicines composed of a single ingredient], but they administered large doses of mana” (176). Besides this presentation of mana as the active ingredient in the cure, Maning’s discussion of a doctor’s failure further points to a substantial interpretation. The unfortunate doctor does not lose his mana— as would a chief who lost his power—rather his mana is said to be “getting weak” (176). This supernatural and substantial interpretation of mana is again put forward in his discussion of weapons, some of which have an exceptionally strong mana, which Maning compares to that of “enchanted weapons … in old romances and fairy tales.” He concludes with an invitation to the reader to “give an English word for this kind of mana” (177). To this reader, at least, that word is “magic.” While the exact meaning of mana remains tentative, the examples all suggest that, as a concept, Maning’s mana was not suitable for making sense of (or influencing) contemporary political events; indeed, it appears as little more than a quaint ethnographical curiosity. It is never linked to the issue of land tenure, Maning’s interest therein notwithstanding. If it is possible to attribute mana to chiefs, to the law, or to the Queen, it is clear that it cannot be mistaken with such concepts as sovereignty or power, since possession of mana is presented as an empty consequence of the former.39 Moreover, the introduction of a substantial interpretation tends to push mana away from the realm of political and legal discourse into the abusive ones of magic and superstition, reflecting Maning’s increasingly negative attitude toward the Māori and their culture.40 To what extent this conceptual choice is derived from personal conditions is open to debate, but two elements can be mentioned. First, an important subtext in Old New Zealand is the “incompatibility” of the two 39 40

“When the law of England is the law of New Zealand, and the Queen’s writ will run, then both the Queen and the law will have great mana” (Maning 1863, 178). On magic as a fundamentally polemical category see Styers (2004) and Meylan (2012). After the death of his Māori wife, Maning became progressively estranged from his children and tribe.

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cultures which entails the inadequacy of mana as a political concept in a European New Zealand (Colquhoun 2012). Second, Maning, initially at least, was opposed to the colonial government. He had agitated against the Treaty of Waitangi and did not support British sovereignty over the archipelago (Calder 2008, 12), which he saw as checks to his personal freedom: Many years after the purchase of my land I received notice to appear before certain persons called “Land Commissioners,” who were part and parcel of the new inventions which had come up soon after the arrival of the first governor [W. Hobson in 1840], and which are still a trouble to the land. Maning 1863, 64; see also 1, 3, 67, 165 Mana, for Maning, belonged properly in “Old New Zealand” where there was no place for such things as sovereignty and law. Like the tapu, mana was doomed to disappear with the advent of the Pākehā and their tools, mechanical and conceptual.41 These examples from New Zealand, and beyond in Polynesia, suggest that mana could be conceptualized in different manners in order to speak to various interests. Missionaries seized upon it, as did colonial officials and their opponents, whether Māori or Pākehā, to advance their particular agendas. But the versatility and usefulness of mana were not limited to the South Seas. A hundred and one years after Cook consigned the word in his journal, mana was mobilized by one of the foremost European scholars of religion of his day in support of his general theory of religion.

Mana, Melanesia, and Religion From April to June 1878, Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900) delivered the first Hibbert Lectures at the very heart of the British Empire, Westminster Abbey. Over the course of the lectures, Müller, a then celebrated Indianist, comparative philologist and mythologist, and founder of the “Science of Religion” (Müller 1873; on Müller, see Bosch 2002), developed his general theory of the origin and growth of religion (published as Müller 1878), and in doing so provided yet another conceptualization of mana.

41

Tapu “began long before the time of Moses, and I think that steam navigation will be the death of it” (Maning 1863, 139).

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Mana appears early in the second lecture, after Müller’s philosophical formulation of his theory, which may be summarized as follows. For the romantic and liberal Protestant Müller, religion arose from a “mental faculty of the conscious self” which he calls “faith” and which is distinct from the Kantian sense and reason (Müller 1873, 17; 1878, 22–25). This faculty plays an important role for Müller as it is that which allows the apprehension or perception of the “Infinite,” the fundamental object of all historical religions, which by definition can neither be observed nor comprehended (Müller 1878, 26). Having established the human capacity for religion, Müller went on to offer the myth of its origin amongst a primitive humanity. Mankind was always surrounded by natural phenomena that exceeded the senses and imposed the idea of the Infinite. Among these, Müller gave precedence to the sky.42 Religion, however, truly appears only once the Infinite is given a name. In the earliest phase of religion, mankind’s languages only had substantives and action verbs at its disposal so that the Infinite was referred to in concrete terms. The sky was “the bright one” (in Sanskrit, dyaus), the river “the runner,” etc. (191). As languages changed over time, these common names lost their etymological meaning so that what remained were opaque proper names (Dyaus and his cognates: Zeus, Jupiter, etc.), and with them the personal gods of mythologies. With the development of language and mind, religion moves in the direction of increasingly abstract conceptualizations of the Infinite, and in time arrives to those of his own brand of idealist Protestantism (Müller, 1873; 1878; Bosch 2002, 130–31, 152). In the following lectures, Müller began to flesh out his theory with concrete examples. For the earliest stage, however, he could not rely on his usual sources, as the written record in India or Greece begins with the “mythological” stage of religion (i.e. the Ṛ g Veda, Homer), which for Müller belonged to a later stage of development. But Müller believed that one of his informants, Robert Henry Codrington of the Melanesian Mission, had provided him, in a letter dated July 7, 1877, with just the example he needed: an expression of the Infinite by what Müller qualified as one of “the lowest tribes” (Müller 1878, 53), a tribe so low that it was not yet at the mythological stage:43 42

43

“We must begin with men living on high mountains, or in a vast plain, or on a coral island without hills and streams, surrounded on all sides by the endless expanse of the ocean, and screened above by the unfathomable blue of the sky; and we shall then understand how, from the images thrown upon them by the senses, some idea of the infinite would arise in their minds” (Müller 1878, 39). While this anticipates part of the argument of Chapter 3, it is necessary to note here that Müller misrepresents Codrington’s description of the Melanesians and their conceptions.

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Chapter 2 The religion of the Melanesians consists as far as belief goes, in the persuasion that there is a supernatural power about, belonging to the region of the unseen; and, as far as practice goes, in the use of means of getting this power turned to their own benefit. The notion of a Supreme Being is altogether foreign to them, or indeed of any Being occupying a very elevated place in their world … There is a belief in a force altogether distinct from physical power, which acts in all kinds of ways for good and evil, and which it is of the greatest advantage to possess or control. This is Mana. The word is common, I believe, to the whole Pacific … I think I know what our people mean by it, and that meaning seems to me to cover all that I hear about it elsewhere. It is a power or influence, not physical, and, in a way, supernatural; but it shows itself in physical force, or in any kind of power or excellence which a man possesses. This Mana is not fixed in anything, and can be conveyed in almost anything; but spirits, whether disembodied souls or supernatural beings, have it, and can impart it; and it essentially belongs to personal beings to originate it, though it may act through the medium of water, or a stone, or a bone. All Melanesian religion, in fact, consists in getting this Mana for one’s self, or getting it used for one’s benefit—all religion, that is, as far as religious practices go, prayers and sacrifices. Müller 1878, 55–56

This text breaks with previous descriptions of Oceanic mana in at least three related ways. Least controversial a priori is its assertion of the widespread distribution of the word mana. In making this assertion, Codrington, who had spent time in New Zealand with William Williams, a lexicographer of the Māori language, bridged the racist Melanesian-Polynesian divide which the French Admiral Dumont d’Urville introduced in 1831 and which was regularly enforced by ‘ethnographers’ (for example, Ellis 1829, 2: 16; Hale 1846; Fornander 1878). The Oceanic ubiquity of mana, supported by outstanding linguists such as Müller and Codrington, may have paved the way for the subsequent attempts to universalize mana.44 Second, Müller and Codrington conceptualized mana in purely religious terms. There is, in this text, not a trace of polit-

44

Although a missionary, Codrington neither abused the Melanesians nor their culture, and he certainly did not qualify them as low. On the contrary, he stressed the commensurability of their culture and his own, as well as the common nature of humanity; see, for example, Codrington (1881, 312–13); Davidson (2003). The same year, Abraham Fornander, a Swedish linguist living in Hawai’i, published his Account of the Polynesian Race where he argued for the “Aryan” origin of the Polynesians

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ical usage, not even a link with chiefs or priests. Müller explicitly constructs mana as one linguistic reflection of the universal object of religion, which his own society called the “Divine” (Müller 1878, 53). Moreover, Codrington depicts mana, in the passage Müller quoted,45 as the central concept in both religious discourse and practice (prayers and sacrifices). According to the missionary, mana is a supernatural, impersonal, and substantial power which individuals can acquire, possess, and put to use for ulterior ends by ritual means. How much of a break this conceptualization represents can be illustrated by means of comparison with those of Hazlewood (1850, 76) Taylor (1855, 74), Violette (1880, s.v.) or Tregear (1891, s.v.) for whom mana was but an attribute of gods who were the primary focus of religious activity. Which leads neatly to the third difference: the eminent role of mana in Melanesian religion is accompanied by the absence of gods, or of “Beings occupying a very elevated place.” At best, there are lowly spirits and disembodied souls. To what extent this account was shaped by exterior forces will be explored in the next chapter. For the present we must rest content with the fact that mana could be conceptualized not only as a power that could be used by supernatural beings but as the central concept of an Oceanic religion and as the object of prayers and sacrifices. Incidentally, Codrington’s comment on the absence of “Beings occupying a very elevated place” in Melanesian religion (Müller 1878, 53) may point to an explanation for the lack of discussions of mana in early writings on Polynesian religion. The first Europeans who inquired about religion in Polynesia did so with an implicit, and very much ethnocentric, definition of religion centered on the notion of personal and powerful god(s).46 This definition was articulated through comparisons which allowed these early ‘ethnographers’ both to

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and their language (1878, 128–29). Other linguists and ethnographers followed suit, finding mana outside of Oceania proper, for example Arthur Hocart, who argued for the Sanskrit origin of mana (Hocart 1922). I have not been able to secure the original letter. Judging from the page numbers inserted in Müller’s quotation thereof “(p. 14)”, what we have is only a fraction (Müller 1878, 53). Note that in other publications Codrington insisted on the fact that Melanesian mana was not restricted to a nominal status (Codrington 1891, 119 n1; see below Chapter 3), a fact that would conflict with Müller’s theory. Such a definition is provided explicitly by William Gill in his Gems from the Coral Islands (1856, 2: 13): “But although such was the moral and social degradation of the inhabitants of Rarotonga, yet it must be remembered that they were, nevertheless, a religious people. They believed in the existence of gods; they had convictions of sin; they felt the need of an atonement; and they had a firm hope in a future state, after the death of the body.”

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make sense of what they saw and heard on the field and to justify their use of the term religion for populations they considered as culturally, when not naturally, inferior.47 The expositions of Polynesian religion in this first century of mana regularly juxtaposed the divine figures of Polynesia with those of classical mythology and the Old Testament. Thus, William Ellis, who gave a detailed account of Tahitian religion in his Polynesian Researches, began his discussion of mythology by setting it in the context of ancient religions (Ellis 1829, 2: 190) and when possible identified the Polynesian deities with Greco-Roman ones: “The seventh, Tuaraatai … was the Polynesian Neptune … The tenth was Tearii tabu tura, another Mars” (193–94; see also Moerenhout 1838, 446, 454). Similarly, Horatio Hale noted that: “The religious belief of the Polynesians reminds us of the classical mythology” (Hale 1846, 22). But not only Greco-Roman mythology could furnish comparanda, so did the Old Testament. Thus, both Ellis and Jarves juxtaposed the myth of Maui’s stopping the sun with the (not very) similar deed attributed to the missionaries’ god in Joshua 10:13 (Ellis 1829, 2: 414–15; Jarves 1847, 18).48 Ellis, however, did not stop at myths as various practices such as oracles (Ellis, 1829, 2: 234) were likewise compared to ancient material. Moreover, like Christians but unlike Codrington’s Melanesians, comparison revealed that the Polynesians had a supreme deity, Taaroa or Tangaroa (220), creator of the world and mankind. Some Europeans even went further and identified Taaroa as the Christian god (Moerenhout 1838, 392, 437). Such comparisons, on the one hand, allowed the easy attribution of the category religion and thus commensurability of Polynesians and Westerners, but at the same time set limits to what might fall under the category.

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It may be noted that, although I have not found direct references, this practice may have been influenced by scholars such as Joseph François Lafitau, who, in 1724, published his Mœurs des sauvages amériquains comparées aux mœurs des premiers temps [Customs of the American Savages compared to the customs of Ancient Times] in which he made sense of exotic American customs by comparing them to ancient religious practices, and Charles de Brosses who not only coined the names “Polynesia” and “Australasia” in his Histoire des navigations aux terres australes (1856) [History of the Voyages to the Southern Seas], but also developed a theory of religion by comparing contemporary “savage” and ancient Egyptian religion (de Brosses 1760). It could be also argued that these nineteenthcentury scholars applied what has come to be called interpretatio romana, whereby classical authors applied the names of their own gods to those of foreigners, for example, Tacitus, Germania, ix, 1–2 (Ozanam and Perret 1997, 102). Further instances of comparisons between Polynesian and biblical narratives are provided by Taylor (1855, 68) and Thomson (1859, 1: 96).

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This Christian, god-centered definition of religion most likely contributed to the exclusion of mana from any major role in discussions of Polynesian religion. Again, comparison, or lack thereof, played its part. While the institution of tapu/tabu was quickly paralleled with the prohibitions of the Old Testament, and thus placed within the purview of religion,49 Polynesian mana, in its first century of Western life, was not compared to Judeo-Christian or GrecoRoman institutions (apart from Andrews discussed above), with the consequence that mana remained little more than an exotic vernacular term. To play a major role in religion, mana required no less an anomaly than the absolute absence of “the notion of a Supreme being … or indeed of any Being occupying a very elevated place” (Müller 1878, 55). But just as crucially, it required, if not a Kuhnian paradigm shift, at least a major shift in the definition of religion and in the disciplines dealing with religion, a shift that will loom large in the next chapter. Mana, until 1878, remained a strictly Oceanic datum. When it did reach European consciousness, it was for local reasons. How was one to translate the attributes of the god of the Bible into a Polynesian language? How did the Māori relate to the land? How could the Pacific islanders be shown to be in need of European civilization? As a consequence, the conceptualization of mana, in this first century, was determined just as much by political as by linguistic considerations. The first century of mana was indeed marked by a good deal of semantic fluidity and variation.50 Although there was a core meaning for mana most agreed upon, the notoriously difficult ‘power,’ the cases of Andrews, the translator of the Bible into Hawaiian, and of New Zealand civil servants point to the discursive nature of mana. At one end of the spectrum, Europeans conceptualized mana in political terms to make sense of and act upon such material questions as land tenure and sovereignty. At the other end, mana was constructed in religious terms as the supernatural equivalent of physical notions of force or magical power. In all these cases, however, the

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Thus J.-A. Moerenhout: “Institution qui, ainsi que je crois l’avoir dit, n’a guère d’analogue au monde que l’interdit des anciens Hébreux; avec lequel elle avait plus d’un rapport” (Moerenhout 1837, 528). Other nineteenth-century occurrences of this comparison include Hale (1846, 18), Jarves, who suspected that the Hawaiians were “sprung from the lost ten tribes” of Israel (Jarves 1847, 19), Taylor (1855, 55–56), and Maning (1863, 105). For a recent publication making the link between biblical prohibitions and tapu, see Durand, Guichard, and Römer (2015). This variability of mana is still very much present today as indicated by the Polynesian Lexicon Project Online (Greenhill and Clark 2011), available at: http://pollex.org.nz/entry/ mana1/ (accessed July 3, 2015).

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identity of those defining mana and the context in which they mobilized the term were central in constructing its meaning. Mana was defined in political terms where and when power was most hotly contested (in New Zealand, as colonists and Māori competed militarily and institutionally for sovereignty) by men who had vested interests in that contest. The same is true of religious inflections of mana. Those who chose to define it as a religious concept all had a stake in religion and its definition, whether, like Andrews, Taylor or Codrington, they sought to configure their Christianity as the only proper religion or, as Müller, they were defending a new science of religion. In 1878, mana entered the universal scene. While local, ethnographical and linguistic studies of mana in Oceania continued after this date, with the publication of Müller’s Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, mana began a new life as a theoretical concept in the pursuit of general theories on the origin and nature of religion. With this new, universal status came a stabilized meaning. Codrington’s definition of mana as quoted by Müller quickly achieved canonical status, despite regular attacks by field anthropologists and historians of religions.51 How and why Robert Henry Codrington’s mana was raised to the status of a second-order category will be the object of the next chapter. 51

Anthropologists: Hocart (1914), Hogbin (1936), Capell (1938), Firth (1940); historians of religions: Lehmann (1922), Widengren (1945). Codrington’s relative merits remain an important issue for Oceanists as suggested by the responses to Keesing’s very critical evaluation of Codrington’s work on mana (Keesing 1984); see, in particular, Kolshus (2013, and bibliography therein).

Chapter 3

Bringing Mana Within Theory It is hard to bring the Melanesians within any theory. Lang 1898, 214

∵ Andrew Lang was wrong. If the Melanesians, synecdochically represented by their mana, did prove difficult, it was not because they did not fit into any theory but rather because they did not fit into the dominant theory of religion of Lang’s days, namely Edward Burnett Tylor’s animism. But that very intractability made them a welcome addition to any and all theories of religion seeking to challenge the hegemony of Tylor’s paradigm. Indeed, in the thirty years that followed the introduction of mana by Max Müller into the recently formed study of religion, it was mobilized in support of competing diffusionist and evolutionist, psychological and sociological theories, not to mention Lang’s own High Gods hypothesis. How mana came to play such a protean role in theorizing religion and eventually achieved the status of “category of worldwide application” (Marett 1916, 375) will be the object of this chapter. But to tell this story we must first return to Müller and his Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion (1878). Before introducing mana in the second lecture, Müller had begun by acknowledging the various challenges raised against his theory of religion. Accordingly, he construed the Hibbert Lectures not only as an exposition of his theory but also as a reply to his detractors. In the opening lecture, Müller defended his postulation of a human faculty for faith, different from sense and reason, which enabled the perception of the Infinite, against philosophical (Müller 1878, 23–25, 44) and positivist critiques (26–27; see Stocking 1996, 53). At the end of the first Lecture, Müller announced that he would turn to Indian religion in order to document his theory but, defying expectations, his second lecture consists in the short discussion of mana analyzed in the previous chapter followed by a lengthy discussion of fetishism.1 1 “I shall confine myself to one race only, the ancient Aryans of India … The growth of their religion is very different from the growth of other religions; but though each religion has its

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 | DOI 10.1163/9789004349247_004

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Chapter 3 Max Müller and Edward Tylor: Paradigms Clash

For Müller, fetishism represented a rival theory on the origin and development of religion. He thus takes to task its founder, the President Charles de Brosses (1709–1777) and his book Du culte des dieux fétiches; ou, Parallèle de l’ancienne religion de l’Egypte avec la religion actuelle de Nigritie (1760). In that text, de Brosses makes two critical claims. First, he postulates that contemporary “fetishism,” by which he means the religion of Western Africans,2 is closely comparable to the archaic religions of the ancient world and so represents the very beginnings of religion. Second, de Brosses argues that religions develop through a fixed schema: from fetishism, on to polytheism, and finally monotheism. To counter these theses, Müller criticized the tools (the categories and the method) used by de Brosses. On the one hand, Müller denounces the equation of ancient religions with the religion of contemporary “savages,” and so their comparability: “the savage of to-day … is probably not a day younger than we ourselves” (Müller 1878, 68). For Müller, in no way do “savages” represent an anterior state of humanity. “Savages” are not “primitives,” they have a history just as long as that of Europeans, and if their religion may appear primitive, it is most likely due to degeneration of the purity of primitive perceptions of the Infinite (68–69).3 On the other hand, Müller attacks the use made by the science of religion of ethnographic data, data the philologist rejected on the grounds of their orality and deficiency. Müller, in attacking a theory more than a century old, seems to be flogging a dead horse, but the fact that he was willing to spend seventy-four pages on “fetishism” suggests that it represented a real and actual threat. While de Brosses’s “fetishism” was indeed a dead horse, the method he had used to reconstruct the original state of religion and its ulterior development was in fact very much alive in 1878. In this Lecture, Müller was in fact attacking a central tenet of the newly created discipline of anthropology: the comparative method championed by such scholars as John McLennan (1865, 8–9), John

own peculiar growth, the seed from which they spring is everywhere the same” (Müller 1878, 51). Note also the Lectures’ subtitle: As Illustrated by the Religions of India. 2 De Brosses glossed fetishism as the “worship to animals, or to inanimate things which are changed into gods” (Müller 1878, 61). Note the use of the term “gods” which suggests personality. 3 Müller himself adhered to the degenerationist paradigm, whose origin can be traced to the presentation of religious change in the biblical book of Genesis. This view, which could be applied to human physical diversity as well, admits an original state of purity and perfection from which mankind (or portions thereof) falls.

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Lubbock (1865), and especially Edward Burnett Tylor (1871), which formed the backbone of a rival paradigm, developmentalism or, as it is often called, evolutionism (Stocking 1987, 178; 1996, 10). Moreover, the same Tylor had acknowledged a debt to de Brosses, whom he quoted in the epigraph to his Primitive Culture (Tylor 1871; see also Lang 1887, 2: 343). The publication of Primitive Culture had positioned Edward Tylor (1832– 1917) as a major theorist of religion. By the late 1870s, his theory of the origin and development of religion was proving increasingly influential (Marett 1941, 157) and clashed directly with Müller’s propositions, and thus authority on the question. Tylor’s developmentalism not only implied the rejection of cultural or religious degeneration (Tylor 1871, 1: 23–62) but its comparative method was fundamentally opposed to Müller’s. Whereas the latter’s was etymological and thus implied (supposed) historical links of transmission (i.e. Indo-European diffusionism), Tylor’s was typological and ahistorical (1: 5), grounded in the idea of the psychic unity of mankind and its corollary, convergent evolutions. Tylor’s comparative method allowed for the classification of human productions, in particular religion, to which he devoted over half of the two volumes of Primitive Culture, echoing recent developments in biology and geology. These he organized in a linear scale of progress with Australian Aborigines at the lowest point and his own Victorian society at the top. A second point of contention for Müller was the intellectualism which governed Tylor’s definition and theory of religion. Grounded as much in his acceptance of the psychic unity of mankind as in his atheism, Tylor’s intellectualism led him to consider that religion was the product of individual rational thought processes.4 Religion, whether “savage” or Christian (1: 385), or rather “animism” as he labelled religion, is invariably an attempt to explain and act upon the world. Animism is thus an imperfect, yet perfectly rational, “primitive philosophy” or “early science” (1: 387, 403). Tylor’s myth of origin of “animism” neatly illustrates his epistemological position: It seems as though thinking men, as yet at a low level of culture, were deeply impressed by two groups of biological problems. In the first place, what is it that makes the difference between a living body and a dead one; what causes waking, sleep, trance, disease, death? Looking at these 4 “As to the religious doctrines and practices examined, these are treated as belonging to theological systems devised by human reason, without supernatural aid or revelation” (Tylor 1871, 1: 386). For Tylor’s atheism, one needs only read the verses Tylor anonymously contributed to Andrew Lang’s Double Ballad of Primitive Man: “Theologians all to expose,—Tis the mission of Primitive man.” See also Strenski who labels him an “undertaker of religion” (2006, 92).

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Chapter 3 two groups of phenomena, the ancient savage philosophers practically made each help to account for the other, by combining both in a conception which we may call an apparitional-soul, a ghost-soul … Far from these world-wide opinions being arbitrary or conventional products, it is seldom even justifiable to consider their uniformity among distant races as proving communication of any sort. They are doctrines answering in the most forcible way to the plain evidence of men’s senses, as interpreted by a fairly consistent and rational primitive philosophy. Tylor 1871, 1: 387

From this myth, Tylor derived his famous minimum definition of religion: “the belief in spiritual beings” (1: 383), beings that range from individual souls to the Christian God. Tylor’s myth of origins conflicted with Müller’s on two main points. For Müller, religion arose from the exercise of the faculty for faith rather than reason. Consequently, religion should not be conceptualized as an imperfect counterpart of science and thus discarded as a survival of a lower stage of culture. Moreover, Müller rejected Tylor’s minimum definition of religion, and thus animism as the first stage of religion, since for Müller the Infinite was not initially personal.5 Personality, according to Müller, appeared later as a result of the “disease of language,” as the original metaphors used to qualify perceptions of the Infinite were mistaken for proper nouns (Müller, 1909, 92–94). It is precisely these points of conflict with Tylor that Müller sought to address with mana. Codrington provided Müller with what appeared to be solid ethnographic evidence that Tylor’s minimal definition was inadequate since mana, prime focus of the religion of the Melanesians and which Müller claimed as the “Melanesian name for the Infinite” (Müller 1878, 55), was not personal. Mana fell under the purview of religion but was not a spiritual being.6 At the same time, Müller’s presentation of mana insisted on its irrationality. Müller, but not Codrington,7 writes that mana is a “vague and hazy form … 5 For the role of personality in Tylor’s animism, see, for example: “If as the poet says, ‘Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas’ [happy he who could know the causes of things], then rude tribes of ancient men had within them this source of happiness, that they could explain to their own content the causes of things. For to them, spiritual beings, elves and gnomes, ghosts and manes, demons and deities, were the living personal causes of universal life” (Tylor 1871, 2: 168; my emphasis). 6 Müller noted in 1888 that “Mana is the name, not of any individual superhuman being” (1907, 132). 7 The only element in Codrington’s text that may possibly support Müller’s reading is Codrington’s admission that mana is difficult to translate: “I think I know what our people mean by [mana]” (Müller 1878, 56).

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of the idea of the infinite,” and “This Mana is one of the early, helpless expressions of what the apprehension of the infinite would be in its incipient stages” (55–56; my emphasis). Finally, Codrington’s mana was not only “supernatural” but also belonged to “the region of the unseen” (55), and was therefore insulated from the senses. Mana consequently evaded both reason and sense, and Müller’s conclusion was inevitable: its apprehension could only be brought about by the faculty for faith he had argued for in his first Lecture. Melanesian mana, provided it was indeed conceptualized as religious, thus demonstrated both the inadequacy of Tylor’s definition of religion and the suitability of Müller’s in a way no Indo-European material ever could. The publication of Müller’s Origin and Growth of Religion represents an important point of rupture in the history of mana. For the first time, mana appeared in a debate that exceeded strictly Oceanic matters, whether ethnographical, religious, or political. Although still little more than a “glossed item of exotic native terminology” (Smith 2004, 125), Codrington’s mana was extracted from its Melanesian context and mobilized in the service of a theoretical reflection on the general category of religion. Müller did not, however, enlist mana as a major theoretical category, possibly because he was aware that its use against Tylor came dangerously close to applying the developmentalists’ comparative method and its conflation of “primitives” and “savages” that he so strenuously resisted. Müller eventually came to concede in a later set of lectures delivered in 1888, that mana was not “the most primitive concept of the Polynesian race”; a pity, for otherwise mana represented a highly efficient weapon against animism: “it cannot possibly be forced into an argument to prove that religion began anywhere with a belief in supernatural beings or living agencies, and not with a naming of the great phenomena of nature” (Müller 1907, 132, 133).8

Robert Henry Codrington and His Many Mana There may, however, be a second reason why Müller did not embrace mana as a central category. In the years between the two sets of lectures, Codrington continued thinking about Melanesian religion. He began moreover to publish in his own name about Melanesia and its religions, and his public texts did not fully tally with his private letter. Codrington’s writings about mana, in partic-

8 It should be noted that at the end of these lectures, Müller indicated that his own use of mana in 1878 was “bold” but forgivable “under proper safeguards” (Müller 1907, 516).

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ular, evince variations, which may again be traced to contextual influences on the conceptualization of mana, influences both theoretical and religious. Codrington and the Melanesian Mission Robert Henry Codrington was born in 1830 into a family of Anglican clergymen.9 Like the first two leaders of the Melanesian Mission, Bishops George Selwyn and John Coleridge Patteson, Codrington enjoyed an excellent education, first at Charterhouse, then at Wadham College, Oxford, where he earned a B.A. (1852) and an M.A. (1856), and was elected to a clerical fellowship in 1855, which he retained until 1893 (Davidson 2003, 171). His studies prepared him for the priesthood in the Church of England (1857) but they also introduced him to the comparative study of languages. Serving first in England, he soon emigrated to New Zealand (1860) where he joined the New Zealand Anglican Church. In 1863, Codrington sailed to Melanesia with the first bishop of Melanesia, John Patteson, who happened to be a very gifted linguist (Whiteman 1983, 116), and in 1867, joined the mission as headmaster of the school of the Melanesian Mission on Norfolk Island, then newly removed from Auckland (Hilliard 1978, 35). Except for the period between 1871 and 1877 during which he was acting head of the Melanesian Mission, Codrington remained headmaster until 1887 when he returned to England, spending the rest of his life publishing Melanesian material and teaching at Chichester Theological College (Davidson 2003, 175), until his death in 1922. The Melanesian Mission has been qualified as “unique” (Davidson 2003, 171) and certainly its idiosyncrasies (organizational, doctrinal, and human) must have informed Codrington’s work. The Mission’s birth was the result of a clerical error in the geographical definition of the newly created Anglican see of New Zealand when its northern boundary was mistakenly fixed at 34°30’ north rather than south (Hilliard 1978, 1). To the New Zealand archipelago was thus joined the immense zone of Island Melanesia, a mostly non-Christian area. Quickly realizing the geographical, linguistic, and human challenges the immensity of his diocese entailed, Bishop George Selwyn (1809–1878) decided to adopt an unprecedented method: rather than send European missionaries to the islands, as had been the practice in Polynesia, he would bring boys from various Melanesian islands to New Zealand to be schooled by highly educated Englishmen to become native teachers of Christianity.10 Beginning in 9 10

Codrington’s biography has yet to be written. Information about him can be found in Hilliard (1978), Whiteman (1983), Stocking (1996, 34–44), Davidson (2003), Kolshus (2013). Commentators on the Melanesian Mission have added that this practical choice was also dictated by Selwyn’s and Patteson’s theological views, for whom “A Melanesian clergy

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1849, Melanesian boys were brought to New Zealand for a decidedly Englishlooking education in English (see Hilliard 1978, 33). Selwyn’s successor, John Patteson (1827–1871), however, realized that English represented a hindrance. He therefore began writing grammars of various Melanesian languages, translating scripture and catechetical literature, and teaching in the vernacular (Hilliard 1978, 31). By the time the school on Norfolk Island had opened in 1867 with Codrington as headmaster, not only was Mota, a Melanesian language, the school’s lingua franca,11 but both Patteson and Codrington were developing comparative knowledge of the then little known Melanesian languages as a result of their daily interactions with speakers from the various archipelagoes falling under the purview of the Mission (Codrington 1885, v-vi).12 This knowledge Codrington systematized in his comparative study The Melanesian Languages (1885). Codrington’s linguistic interests were hardly isolated from wider ethnological concerns. Subscribing to Patteson’s view that missionaries should thoroughly understand the target culture,13 Codrington began as early as 1863 to document Melanesian social organization and religion, information he relayed to what David Chidester has called “imperial theorists” (2014). Through Patteson, Codrington became an informant of Max Müller, who was especially interested in what Melanesia might have to say about language change

11

12 13

was the only possible way of ensuring the proper communication of Christian truth” (Sohmer 1994, 197). To them, while Christianity was universal, it needed to be applied in accordance with the target culture (Hilliard 1978, 56–57; Whiteman 1983, 117; Sohmer 1994). To such authors, who are largely favorable to the Melanesian Mission, this is taken as a sign of its desire to move away from Christianity-with-Civilization (Sohmer 1994); perusal of the schedule of the Mission’s school on Mota, however, suggests a somewhat different picture (Whiteman 1983, 126–27). As Thorgeir Kolshus has shown, this shift to the vernacular had an important consequence for mana in that Selwyn, Patteson, and Codrington acquired Melanesian languages through Māori. Thus, when they found cognate terms in Polynesian and Melanesian languages such as mana, they tended to conceptualize them in Polynesian terms. In the case of mana, it was most likely conceptualized in the way defined by William Williams, Selwyn’s associate, in his Dictionary of the New Zealand Language (1844), i.e. “power, influence” (Kolshus 2013, 320). These included the New Hebrides (today Vanuatu), the Banks and Torres islands, Santa Cruz, and the Solomon Islands (Hilliard 1978, 47). Patteson sought to recruit “A very few men, well-educated, who will really try to understand what heathenism is and will seek … to work honestly without prejudice” (Patteson, cited in Sohmer 1994, 178). See also Codrington’s own methodological comments (1881, 262; 1891, 116–18).

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(Davidson 2003, 174). Codrington had met Müller in 1865, at which date the latter entrusted him with a copy of Edward Tylor’s diffusionist Researches into the Early History of Mankind (Tylor 1865) for Patteson. In the early 1880s, Codrington returned for a spell in England at which time not only did he receive an honorary doctorate from Oxford (1885) but he also followed a course of lectures given by Oxford’s first reader in anthropology Edward Tylor (1883), for whom he was likewise an informant.14 While somewhat critical of armchair theorists (Davidson 2003, 174), Codrington nonetheless engaged with the later nineteenth-century writings of the two main figures in British thinking about religion, in an attempt to contribute to the theoretical conversation on religion. Mana from 1863 to 1881 As a result of his awareness of theoretical issues on religion, mana came to play a critical role in Codrington’s work. On the one hand, he recognized the importance of accurate descriptions of indigenous concepts for a more objective and self-aware study of human culture and diversity, while on the other hand he perceived the role mana could play in the political question of the definition of religion and its attribution (or not) to Melanesians. Codrington began thinking about Melanesian culture and religion as early as 1863, when he boarded the Melanesian Mission’s ship the Southern Cross on its tour of the islands. Upon returning, he delivered a lecture in Nelson, New Zealand, in which he presented an incipient ethnography of the “people.” There, Codrington provided what is most likely a first insight into what he later came to label “mana”: men get credit for a certain supernatural power, which will enable them to make a thing or place ‘tapu,’ to lay a charm in a path and stop all passengers, to bewitch an enemy with sickness or death, or to give fatal direction to spear or arrow. This superstition plays a great part in the daily affairs of life. Codrington 1863, 7; my emphasis What is most striking in this text, apart from its brevity and vagueness when compared to the letter Codrington sent to Müller in 1877 (see Chapter 2), is the fact that this “supernatural power” is not unambiguously ascribed to the

14

Codrington further corresponded with scholars such as James George Frazer and Georg Gerland.

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sphere of religion.15 Unlike the belief in gods and the afterlife, which Codrington classes as religious, this supernatural power, alongside sorcery and tapu, is prefaced by the comment that “it is hard to say exactly what customs among men belong to their religion” (1863, 5), a difficulty which may be explained by the absence of a link between this power and supernatural beings, a link Codrington later discovered (Müller 1878, 56; Codrington 1881, 279; 1891, 119; see below). This lecture, however, was penned by a man who had spent at best a few weeks in Melanesia, and who, by his own admission, could know very little, if anything (Codrington 1891, vii). By July 1877, things had changed. Codrington had spent more than ten years in Melanesia and had come to be fluent in Mota. Moreover, both the Mission’s relatively egalitarian organization and Codrington’s “genial” personality had led him to interact closely with his Melanesian pupils.16 This close contact with informants had allowed him to gather a great deal of ethnographic information which, according to his own criteria, was reliable in that not only did he gather such information in the vernacular language but he also believed he had been somewhat successful in freeing himself from “preconceived opinions” typical of European missionaries and scholars (Codrington 1881, 262).17 He thus began to synthesize what he had learned. Between 1877 and 1881, Codrington produced three such syntheses, two intended for publication (Codrington 1880, 1881) and one addressed privately to, but quoted by, Max Müller (Müller 1878, 55–56).18 While products of the same period, these texts differ greatly not only in the descriptions of mana they give but in the relative importance assigned to it within the Melanesian religious system. As indicated in 15

16

17

18

In 1877, the passage quoted by Müller opens with the following words: “The religion of the Melanesians consists … in the persuasion that there is a supernatural power about … This is Mana” (Müller 1878, 55–56). For Codrington’s personality, see Bishop Patteson as quoted by Hilliard (1978, 36). Melanesian pupils at the Mission School were grouped according to their geographical origin; Codrington was in charge of the Banks Islanders, which explains the prominence given to that archipelago in his work, both ethnographic and linguistic (Hilliard 1978, 38; see Codrington 1881, 261–62). Codrington discussed openly his method for gaining information (see esp. Codrington 1891, v-vii) where he indicates that while he did observe, he mostly relied on native informants, who happened to be mostly young people trained in the Christian religion. He singles out the Rev. George Sarawia, “a native who was a grown youth before his people had been at all affected by intercourse with Europeans or had heard any Christian teaching” (vi). Sarawia was from the Banks Islands and was the first Melanesian priest (see Hilliard 1978, 61–62). The status of the two published texts is somewhat different. Whereas Codrington is solely responsible for the more comprehensive 1881 text, the earlier article was in fact published

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the previous chapter, the 1877 letter grants mana the central role in Melanesian religion, where it is given an articulate and theoretical definition (as an impersonal, supernatural and substantial power). Further highlighting the centrality of mana in Melanesian religion, the letter Müller quoted denied any major role to personal beings, made no mention of beliefs in the afterlife and concluded that “Melanesian religion, in fact, consists in getting this Mana for one’s self, or getting it used for one’s benefit” (Müller 1878, 56). On the other hand, Codrington’s published material leaves mana very much in the background. So much so that it is completely absent from his 1880 text on the customs of Mota, an island where, according to his subsequent texts, mana was in fact present. In his 1881 article “Religious Beliefs and Practices in Melanesia,” Codrington makes supernatural beings, not mana, the focus of his discussion of Melanesian religion. Mana does appear in the text but does so almost incidentally. His very brief discussion of mana (19 lines out of 55 pages; Codrington 1881, 278–79) is subsumed under the description of supernatural beings (277, 278–79). His description of mana is moreover somewhat diffident. While he stresses the role of spirits (vui) and ghosts (tamate) as the origin of “supernatural [or spiritual] power,”19 he also states: “It would be very difficult to ascertain whether the mana … is thought to originate in a connection with these spiritual beings” (278). In contradistinction to the 1877 letter to Müller, this text points to the social dimension of mana, an adjective he opposes to religious (see, for example, Codrington 1891, 103). And while mana is most often glossed as supernatural or spiritual power, it occasionally receives

19

at the advice of his fellow missionary and anthropologist Lorimer Fison (1832–1907), who added his own comparative remarks and prefaced Codrington’s text with the following comments: “The facts communicated to me by Mr. Codrington are so valuable, and his comments upon them so interesting, that I ventured to urge him strongly to publish them. In reply, he was kind enough to give me permission to make any use of them I pleased, ‘bearing always in mind that they are only notes.’ It seems to me, that I cannot make a better use of them than by laying them before the Royal Society of Victoria in his own words, together with such additional remarks as may be suggested by my knowledge of the customs of other tribes” (Codrington 1880, 119). “It is by the operation of these Vuis also that men are able to make rain or sunshine, and to produce abundant crops of yams and bread-fruit. Stones are the principal media for the exercise of such power, but it is the Vui, which the man approaches by the stone, whose power is at work … But the possessor of such a stone, because of his connection with the Vui, can impart the mana, the power which is in the one, to a number of similar stones at once, and so produce a general crop for his village” (Codrington 1881, 278). Mana as “spiritual power” occurs, for example, at p. 303. For sacrifice to ghosts as a means of obtaining mana, see p. 309.

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a more social interpretation, such as “the personal influence upon which so very much of a man’s power depends” (Codrington 1881, 278), which he locates in the sphere of unequal social relations.20 This opposition between the 1877 letter and the 1881 article—not to mention the mana-less “Notes”—suggests the existence of an agenda whose stakes exceed ethnographic description. In “Religious Beliefs and Practices in Melanesia,” Codrington focuses mainly on two elements: “supernatural” or “spiritual beings” (1881, 275) and indigenous representations of death and the after-life, essentially under the guise of the survival of the soul (the category “ghost,” i.e. “dead man,” plays an important role in Codrington’s discussion, and subsumes both sorcery and secret societies; 280–86). These two elements feature prominently in Codrington’s conclusion: “A general view of the Religious Beliefs and Practices in the Islands of Melanesia … will certainly show a general agreement throughout … It is seen that almost everywhere … the existence of spiritual beings … is believed in” (311), a conclusion that leads to the following question: “Can such beliefs and practices … be called a religion and treated as a religion by those who are to carry them the gospel?” (312). But Codrington’s conclusion has already answered this question. Melanesian religion, as he presents it, conforms almost exactly to Edward Tylor’s minimum definition of religion, “the belief in spiritual beings” (Tylor 1871, 1: 383), a definition which had attained a hegemonic status among contemporary specialists of religion. Foregrounding spirits and ghosts, whose importance Codrington elsewhere comes close to denying (Müller 1878, 55–56), allows him to credit Melanesians with the possession of this, in his view, valued category. Granting religion to the Melanesians may have had two (non-mutually exclusive) aims. The first was scholarly. In this way, Codrington was able to intervene directly in the theoretical conversation about the category and arbitrate between, if not correct, the theories of major authorities. For instance, he comments on the question of cultural similarities, which were then explained as either the result of contact (Müller’s diffusionism) or convergent but independent evolutions (Tylor’s developmentalism): It may not unreasonably be conjectured that a change has been going on by which the worship of the dead, and all practices connected with the belief in their active powers among living men, have come more into

20

“The position [of the men highest in the Suqe, a secret society] is merely social, but … the fact of their having been able to reach such a position, argues in the native mind the possession of mana” (Codrington 1881, 287; see also 279).

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Chapter 3 vogue than in olden times. Whether this has proceeded from the natural development of religious ideas, or whether it has been brought about by influence of communications from east or west, may be a question which cannot yet receive an answer. Codrington 1881, 311; see also 263–64, 266

At times, Codrington engages critically with the writings of specific authors such as John Lubbock (Codrington 1880, 133), James Frazer (see Stocking 1996, 44), and E. B. Tylor, whose theory of the origin of animism in dreams he attacks: “It does not appear that the belief in the existence of the soul of man proceeds in Melanesians from their dreams or visions in which deceased or absent persons are presented to them” (Codrington 1881, 313). The second aim was religious. By manipulating his material in order to demonstrate that Melanesians had religion, Codrington was preparing what appears as the crucial point of his article, the justification of his missionary work: “A savage people … who have no appetite for intercourse with the invisible, would fail to supply to a missionary a fulcrum by which, when it exists, they may be raised to a higher level” (313). Such a justification was needed all the more in that the Melanesian Mission was plagued at the time both by financial difficulties (Hilliard 1978, 44) and by discouraging results, in particular when compared to those of evangelical missions in Polynesia (Hilliard 1978, 60, 96), including Fiji where his Wesleyan colleague Lorimer Fison was active. While the Melanesian Mission had seen a good deal of apostasy on Mota following a series of natural disasters in 1873, part of the problem was the Anglican missionaries’ understanding of conversion. Rather than focus on the emotional and experiential dimension, as did the various evangelical missions, the Anglican High Church mission understood conversion primarily as a rational process (Hilliard 1978, 2; Whiteman 1983, 132; Sohmer 1994, 175), grounded upon an idea quite close to the developmentalist notion of the psychic unity of mankind, for which Codrington commended Tylor.21 Therefore, it was crucial for Codrington to demonstrate the commensurability between Melanesian religion and Christianity, and so show the sheer possibility of conversion, which required skewing his presentation away from a focus on a rather exotic impersonal power toward more familiar spiritual beings. The unhappy

21

“Referring to a book by Edward Tylor, Codrington noted that ‘he gives credit most deservedly as most people don’t, to savages for having plenty of brains. He quite confirms what I always have said that savages are wonderfully like other people”’ (Davidson 2003, 174; see also Gardner 2012, 153).

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consequence, however, was an uncomfortable position astride two mutually exclusive paradigms with its attendant two very different takes on mana. Mana in The Melanesians (1891) This theoretical dilemma was resolved ten years later with Codrington’s celebrated monograph The Melanesians: Studies in Their Anthropology and FolkLore (Codrington 1891). Once more in England, with his scholarly reputation secured by an Oxford doctorate, and presumably feeling less accountable for the Melanesian Mission’s results since his departure in 1887, Codrington published his most developed discussion of mana, which may be accepted as his definitive, mature view on the question.22 There he provided the definition of mana that has achieved canonical status up to this day, and in so doing, he again tinkered with its categorical status. In The Melanesians, Codrington returns to the perspective of his 1877 letter to Müller, whose text he gives in a note (Codrington 1891, 118 n1), and categorizes mana unambiguously under religion. Moreover, he defined (Melanesian) religion as “the expression of their conception of the supernatural” (116), a definition which leans toward Müller rather than Tylor, in that it allows impersonal representations (cf. Codrington 1916, 530). The most detailed analysis of mana accordingly occurs in the chapter on religion (Codrington 1891, 118–20; the chapter actually addresses the cognitive aspect of religion) where mana occupies the first position in his discussion, before the various supernatural beings believed in and the means of communicating with them.23 While this foregrounding of mana represents a reversal of the position defended in the 1880 and 1881 articles, Codrington did not minimize the role of spirits and ghosts as fully as he did in his 1877 letter. They are given a long description (120–27; 150–72), and they recur throughout the book as the objects of various religious and magical practices. Codrington, however, regularly suggests that their importance is a function of their association with mana.24 Vui, spirits that were never men, are defined as more intelligent than men and “supernaturally powerful with mana” (123), whereas only those ghosts that can be 22

23 24

His final publication, the article “Melanesians,” written for the eighth volume of the Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics published in 1916 does not depart from his position in The Melanesians. Moreover, the literature he gives on Melanesian ethnography is no later than 1891, the date of publication of his own monograph. Codrington’s definition of Melanesian religion might thus be glossed as mana plus spiritual beings. Unlike men who “have mana,” these supernatural beings “are mana” (Codrington 1891, 119 n1). In the note, Codrington discusses the various grammatical statuses of the word mana. But all point to mana’s substantial character (cf. Mauss 1950).

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shown to have mana are worshipped.25 In the context of a religion described (polemically) by Codrington as thoroughly geared toward material ends, it follows that communication with supernatural beings is not an end but rather a means to the acquisition of mana (see, for example, 128, 134). Indeed, Codrington confirms the essential role of this supernatural and impersonal power in both religious and magical affairs: It is the belief in this supernatural power, and in the efficacy of the various means by which spirits and ghosts can be induced to exercise it for the benefit of men, that is the foundation of the rites and practices which can be called religious; and it is from the same belief that everything which may be called Magic and Witchcraft draws its origin. Codrington 1891, 192 Mana is what “effect[s] everything which is beyond the ordinary power of men,” it is what makes trees bear abundant fruit, canoes go fast, and some men kill other men (118–19). But whereas Codrington had already described what mana could be expected to effect (1881, 279; Müller 1878, 55–56), in The Melanesians he attempted to account for its workings. He thus describes how Melanesians identify the presence of mana in various objects and in individuals. Although he did not share Tylor’s intellectualist view that religion is only an earlier, weaker form of science, the process he depicts, in the case of a stone, is inductive and the conclusion is based on “proof.”26 When Codrington turns to individuals, however, the process is somewhat different. Although he does mobilize the language of proof (“all conspicuous success is a proof that 25

26

“The ghost who is to be worshipped is the spirit of a man who in his lifetime had mana in him … The supernatural power abiding in the powerful living man abides in his ghost after death … if his power should shew itself, his position is assured as one worthy to be invoked, and to receive offerings … if no proof of his activity appears, he sinks into oblivion at once” (Codrington 1891, 125). “A man comes by chance upon a stone which takes his fancy; its shape is singular, it is like something, it is certainly not a common stone, there must be mana in it. So he argues with himself, and he puts it to the proof; he lays it at the root of a tree to the fruit of which it has a certain resemblance … an abundant crop on the tree … shews that he is right, the stone is mana, has that power in it” (Codrington 1891, 119); but see Firth’s misgivings as to the accuracy of Codrington’s description (Firth 1940, 488). I disagree with the suggestion (for example, Marett 1909, 12; Stocking 1996) that, to Codrington, (Melanesian) religion “was based on an irrational feeling of awe in the face of supernatural power” (Stocking 1996, 44). See the comments above on Anglicanism and its views of religion as based in rational thought.

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a man has mana”; Codrington 1891, 120), men are not submitted to a test, they only need to be successful to prove that they possess mana. In addition to this purely ex post facto character, a man’s mana differs from a stone’s in that the former translates neatly into sociopolitical power, a translation Codrington ascribes to the Melanesian “conception of the character of all power and influence as supernatural” (120), thus pointing to the quantifiable character of mana. Accordingly, mana is also encountered in Codrington’s discussion of chiefs and hierarchical secret societies. Mana constitutes, according to the missionary, the basis of a chief’s power, it is “the real ground on which the power of a chief rests” insofar as his wealth and success are attributed to his mana (57–58). Arguing for a substantialist rather than stative reading of mana (see Lehmann 1915, 56–60; Keesing 1984), Codrington, following his Melanesian informers, then ascribes the possession of mana to privileged contact with spirits and ghosts through ritual (for example, Codrington 1891, 46, 55), the possession of which is evidenced by conspicuous success, whether agricultural, nautical, or martial. This explanation, however, represents nothing less than, to borrow Bruce Lincoln’s phrase, a “mystification of success” (Lincoln 2014, 81) and the misrepresentation of its non-supernatural causes.27 Indeed, Codrington’s text itself supplies hints that other factors are at play in the construction of chiefly power (see also Lehmann 1915, 28). Although Codrington downplays the role of heredity (1891, 51), most of the chiefs he mentions in fact belong to powerful families and clans.28 In addition, it seems chiefly mana could be, perhaps needed to be, supplemented with such mundane adjuncts as physical force.29 Mana thus seems to be attributed not just to those men who are successful, but more specifically to those who are primed for success by virtue 27

28

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For other analyses of mana as mystification, see, for example, Shore (1989, 138–39), Sahlins (1981), Styers (2012), and, especially, Grijp (2014) who analyses mana as ideology in the context of Polynesian chiefdoms. Codrington begins by nuancing heredity: “The hereditary element is not absent in the succession of chiefs … though it is by no means so operative as it appears to be” (1891, 51), but his examples suggest a different interpretation. Speaking of one Takua, he notes that “his greatness rested in its origin on a victory … his reputation for mana, spiritual power, was then established; and from that as a member of a powerful family” (51; for mana glossed as “spiritual power,” see Lehmann 1915, 27). See also comments such as: “the chief was always of the great clan or kin”; “the son does not inherit chieftainship, but he inherits … what gives him chieftainship, his father’s mana, his charms... as well as his property” (Codrington 1891, 55, 56). “A chief had around him a band of retainers … who hung about him, living in his canoehouse, where they were always ready to do his bidding” (Codrington 1891, 52).

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of their exalted ascendance, family wealth, and ritual knowledge. As a consequence of this collusion, Melanesian mana was undoubtedly naturalized as a self-fulfilling prophecy insofar as the reputation for success that mana expressed surely discouraged ulterior opposition (Lincoln 2014, 81). The mystificatory character of mana is further illustrated in Codrington’s chapter on the suqe, an institution, present with variations in all the archipelagos Codrington describes, whose function is to classify hierarchically all the male members of society.30 Ascension through the ranks is highly desirable as the upper echelons are accompanied by considerable social power, not least of which is the power to admit candidates to these lofty ranks (Codrington 1891, 103, 113)—but it is a difficult process: To rise from step to step money is wanted, and food and pigs; no one can get these unless he has mana for it; therefore as mana gets a man on in the Suqe, so every one [sic] high in the Suqe is certainly a man with mana, and a man of authority, a great man, one who may be called a chief. Codrington 1891, 103 Mana here mystifies the nature of social differentiation as it conceals both the actual nature of the production of surplus wealth, and the identity (social, religious, and political) of those individuals that reach the highest ranks of the suqe. As in his discussion of chiefs, Codrington, however, does not fully conceal the social dimension of the power of mana by hinting at the important role of the wider group in a man’s progression. First, there is the role of co-optation; no advancement can take place without the consent of those at the higher ranks (103). Second, while mana is presented as the agent, the text regularly points to the role of family and friends in the raising of the necessary money and pigs.31 Thus, it appears that a man’s standing in society may in fact be the primary cause of his high standing in the suqe and so of his possession of mana. While Codrington was critical of what he at times described as

30

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Codrington’s discussion of the suqe (1891, 101–15) was quickly picked up by other early anthropologists and linguists including his colleague Lorimer Fison (1881) and Sidney H. Ray (Tylor 1892, 299–300). On the suqe see also Whiteman (1983, 134–36), Allen (1981), Vienne (1984), and Guerard (1994). “The candidate must have in the first place his introducer” (Codrington 1891, 105–06); “in the higher grades the candidate for advance still has his patron, but the expenses fall upon himself, aided by his friends” (106; my emphasis); “by their suqe [the women] become rich in money, with which to help their husbands in their steps in rank” (110). For the role of the father, see p. 112, and of the kin group in general, p. 114.

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“superstition” and credulity (1881, 261; 1891, 99, 187, 193), his primary objective was description, he did not attempt to refute mana nor reduce it to social or political manipulation. On the contrary, he was careful to preserve its religious categorization and thus protect it from critical analysis,32 a choice that may be explained by the recuperation of the term mana in a Christian context (a context of use Codrington does not discuss at all). The term was indeed used by the Melanesian Mission in their translation of key Christian concepts (Kolshus 2013, 323–24), a use that further translated into prestige and power for priests who came to be the archetypical “men of mana” with the conversion of Melanesia in the twentieth century (Whiteman 1983, 338). Indeed, mana has survived the conversion throughout Oceania, whether Christianized (see McClancy 1986, 149–50; Tomlinson 2007; see also Davidson 2003, 175), or not (Firth 1940; Shore 1989). After a good deal of hesitation, due both to internal and external pressure as we have seen,33 Codrington settled on mana rather than spiritual beings as the fundamental concept of Melanesian religion, a decision that would prove momentous for the study of religion. But while Codrington’s definition of Melanesian mana was in itself neither innovative nor unambiguous,34 its conceptualization as “religious” coupled with the pervasiveness he accorded mana in Melanesian culture opened the door to a paradigmatic revolution in the study of religion, which hitherto had been mainly defined, at least in the context of Oceania, with reference to suspiciously European-looking gods and hells (see Chapter 2). Qualified as impersonal, the Melanesians’ mana clashed with Edward Tylor’s minimum definition of religion, with his theory of the origin of religion, and more generally with his intellectualist framework (religion as explanation of the physical world). Mana’s second aspect, power, likewise

32

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34

“[Suqe] is a social, not at all a religious, institution; yet, inasmuch [sic] as religious practices enter into the common life of the people, and all success and advance in life is believed to be due to mana, supernatural influence, the aid of unseen powers is sought for by fasting, sacrifices, and prayers, in order to mount to the successive degrees of the society” (Codrington 1891, 103). Cf. Codrington (1881, 287). Lehmann goes so far as to charge Max Müller with being instrumental in Codrington’s substantialist reading of mana: “Auch hierdurch gewinnt die Vermutung noch grössere Wahrscheinlichkeit, dass Codrington sich von Max Müller zu seiner Einheitsbedeutung angeregt gefühlt hat” (Lehmann 1915, 57). Others in the field had or were in the process of translating mana as “supernatural or spiritual power,” for example, Penny (1887, 55), Bastian (1888, 1: 445, 511), and Tregear (1891). Concerning Codrington’s ambiguity, see, for example, Smith (2004, 126) and Styers (2012, 231).

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clashed with Tylorian intellectualism insofar as religion defined through mana became less a matter of explaining and more about doing. The Melanesians thus paved the way for a reconfiguration of the object itself of the study of religion and so led to the dynamist paradigm in the study of religion (Gladigow 1992). At the same time Codrington’s mana provided the blueprint for a discourse of power which situated agency outside individuals, in the ahistorical domain of the non-human. Mana moreover provided a discourse of power whereby religion was directly effective in worldly affairs and where politics could be effectively reduced to religion. Mana could thus prove desirable for scholars who were opposed to Tylor and his view that religion did not belong in the modern Western world.

Bringing Mana into Theories In the decade following the publication of Codrington’s magnum opus in 1891, mana began appearing in texts that were not strictly concerned with Oceanic matters. Melanesian religion and its mana could for instance be mentioned in textbooks and general histories of religions. In such texts, mana remained a circumscribed, local notion (if occasionally extended to the whole Pacific), depending wholly on Codrington’s description, with little theoretical or explanatory work. At most, mana was showcased in an evolutionary perspective as an illustration of “savage” religion and thought (for example, Brinton 1897, 62– 63). Some of these textbooks enjoyed considerable repute, such as Chantepie de la Saussaye’s Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte (1897, 1: 38–39), which went through four editions and was translated into English and French. It is not, however, with such localized (emic) uses of mana that I am concerned here but rather with those texts where mana was to some extent removed from its ethnographic context and given a more general (etic) meaning, thus paving the way for its eventual adoption as a “class-name of world-wide application” (Marett 1916, 377). John H. King and Supernatural Power A year after the publication of The Melanesians, Dr. John H. King (1843–after 1905), a surgeon from a Georgia slave-owning family,35 published The Supernatural (1892), a two volume study of the supernatural or “supernal,” a category 35

King has been largely forgotten apart from short discussions concerning his study of the supernatural by Schmidt (1910, 248–57), Webster (1952), and Evans-Pritchard (1965, 30– 31). In addition to his scholarly writings, mainly of a psychological bent, some autobio-

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he understood as the fundamental concept of religion, whose origin and development he set out to reconstruct. In his text, King resorted to Codrington’s mana, but unlike Max Müller he did not just use Melanesian mana as empirical, and so highly circumscribed, evidence against rival theories. Rather, mana came to be raised (somewhat tentatively) to the status of a secondorder category, instrumental in the description, classification, and analysis of religious data drawn from the world over. Mana had once again begun to shift, moving away from emic, religious concept to become a scholarly, religionswissenschaftliches category. King, although himself a staunch evolutionist, disagreed with Tylor’s influential conception of religion as presented in Primitive Culture (1871) in two important ways. Firstly, he rejected Tylor’s intellectualism. Religion (namely, the supernatural concepts that lie at its heart) does not, according to King, proceed from rational thought but from the normal and universal “sentiments of Wonder, Fear, Hope, and [/or] Love” (King 1892, 1: 15) as stimulated by anything perceived, mistakenly, as extraordinary,36 sentiments that lead to the conceptualization of “supernal powers or influences” responsible for the extraordinary, or uncanny, phenomenon in question. This focus on emotions leads King to steer away from religion as an explanation of the world or as reverence before the spectacle of nature to religion as dealing primarily with power. The history of religion is thus the story of mankind’s misguided quest for “means of protection outside its own physical powers,” a quest for “supernal protecting powers” which has occupied man until the present day. In sharp contrast with Tylor, King dismisses religion as invariably “false” and as based on “the failure of the perceptive and reflective powers” (1: 5, 66), irrespective of the level of mental development of the group under study.37 For King, religion shares nothing with science—it never was a proto-science.

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graphical information may be found in his disturbingly racist book of reminiscences as a Confederate soldier (King 1904). “Under the general aspects of things there is a quiet accord between the mind of man and the phenomena of the universe, but should the condition of things lose its accepted normal character then influences of dread fill the mind, and, as in the presence of the eclipse or the meteor, if the dread is more than spasmodic, man doubts the stability of the universe. So it is even with less variation from the normal. It may be a feather, a leaf, a stone, or an animal which presents unknown characteristics and excites first wonder, then dread, and on his failure to recognize their status they become to him uncanny—they are not natural—and excite sentiments of erratic influence, of supernal action” (King 1892, 1: 15, see also 89; my emphasis). Although an atheist, Tylor conceded that religion was quite acceptable at early stages of development: “Far from its [savage religion] beliefs and practices being a rubbish-heap

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Secondly, King rejected Tylor’s animism as a minimum definition of religion. Animism, which, in Tylor’s work, encompasses all historical religions including Christianity, represents but a later stage in King’s linear scale of development (1: 6, 30–34; 165 ff.). There are simpler, less evolved impersonal conceptualizations before it, the simplest of which we even share with animals (1: 77–88). The earliest is “luck.” At this stage, individuals recognize extraordinary, and thus supernatural, phenomena, deduce the presence of “occult virtues” at work, and adapt their behavior either to avoid harm or derive advantages therefrom; for example, by avoiding stepping under a ladder (1: 100). The next stage in religion consists in the active manipulation of the impersonal supernatural powers of luck by means of spells and charms.38 It is only after this point that supernatural power can be conceptualized as personal (i.e. Animism). If King tacitly agrees with Tylor concerning the dream origin of personal supernatural powers, and deduces from that origin the colonization of the whole of nature by ghosts, spirits or souls (1: 171, 182), he diverges from Tylor in his minimum definition of religion, which may be glossed as “the belief in supernatural power.” With the introduction of personality, King then goes on to detail what he sees as increasingly developed forms of supernatural persons, which he correlates with social and political institutions: first, ghosts and nature spirits (which he links to totemism; 1: 185), then tutelary deities, the gods of textual polytheisms and monotheisms, and, finally, an abstract deity. Codrington’s mana, explicitly defined as an impersonal “supernatural power” (Codrington 1881, 277), was superbly positioned to play a role in King’s dynamist theory of religion and he certainly did not fail to seize upon the opportunity. King introduced mana, alongside Australian boylya and Dakotan wakan,39 as an example of the supernatural power wielded by wizards, shamans, and other priests at a pre-personal stage of religion (King

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of miscellaneous folly, they are consistent and logical in so high a degree as to begin, as soon as they are roughly classified, to display the principles of their formation and development; and these principles prove to be essentially rational, though working in a mental condition of intense and inveterate ignorance” (Tylor 1871, 1: 20–21). “When through the development of his mental powers he is able to read a purpose in such presentations [lucky or unlucky things], and realizes the will to control and classify them, and thereby from forms of thought convert them into principles of action” (King 1892, 1: 103). King relies for the description of boylya on Alfred William Howitt (1887), for wakan on Henry Schoolcraft (1851), and quotes Codrington (1881) for mana (and thus not the same source as Müller).

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1892, 1: 132–33).While mana is at first strictly restricted to its ethnographic context, with a page-long discussion of its use and acquisition by Codrington’s Melanesians, it is raised without transition to universal status as the active ingredient everywhere manipulated by religious specialists, among whom the seventeenth-century magus Sir Kenelm Digby who “so loved to discourse upon … the old sympathetic mana” (King 1892, 1: 135). Insofar as King considers these specialists, whom he generically labels “medicine-men,” to be markers of a specific phase in the evolution of supernal conceptions, it follows that they represent a universal phenomenon, as does the power they rely on. Accordingly, King identifies the various ethnographic notions as actualizations of a single universal category: “The North American Indians recognize this mysterious power, this boylya or mana, in the word wakan” (1: 136), and then extends it globally: “A power more or less akin to the boylya or wakan, though often nameless, is recognized by all races of men” (1: 137). Although the category does assume various forms and functions, King insists that its core meaning, naturalized as a product of “organic [and thus universal] feelings” (1: 4; see above), is everywhere the same: it is an impersonal, supernatural, and substantial power. According to King, it is present across the globe (1: 137; 2: 82) but also throughout the phylogeny of religion. Retrospectively, the conception of mana as supernatural power is present just as much at the stage of “luck” as that of the great personal gods, if only as a Tylorian “survival.”40 And throughout his two volumes, King resorts, although not systematically, to the term mana detached from its Oceanic origin in order to denote his generic concept of supernatural power.41 In constructing such a second-order concept, King was aware that he was breaking with the dominant anthropological paradigm and so prefaced his discussion of the power claimed by select individuals with the following: Before describing the modes by which [medicine-men’s] power [i.e. mana] is manifest, we have to consider its nature and origin and enunciate the forms it assumes among various races of men. We are not aware

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“The earliest form of mana presents it as an attribute in things or appearances, denoting an omen or a curative or protective virtue. It may only signify luck”; “The mana power of the ghost has been step by step amplified to a Supreme Deity” (King 1892, 1: 140, 216). For Apollo as having mana, see p. 264. Mana attributed to, for example, a Chichester witch (King 1892, 1: 156), totem animals (1: 185), Anglo-Saxon medical charms (1: 204), mantras (2: 29), destiny (2: 82–83), and contemporary Cornwall clergymen (2: 253).

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Chapter 3 that the subject in its fullness of character has ever been considered; local and isolated magical and spiritual claims have been described and explained, but the common nature of the supernal influence or accepted influence has never been presented. King 1892, 1: 133

Although King’s use of mana resembles Max Müller’s in its anti-intellectualist and anti-animist dimension, King nevertheless took mana much further than the German philologist. King’s mana is more than a convenient counter argument for a scholar on the defensive. King extracted mana from its local setting, both cultural and political, compared it with notions throughout the world, which he found to be identical, and finally re-conceptualized mana as a universally valid, second-order category central to his own theory of religion. In transforming mana into a ‘scientific’ category, King anticipated much of the writing on mana in the subsequent decades. Andrew Lang’s X Phenomenon The writings of the Scottish littérateur and sometimes anthropologist Andrew Lang (1844–1912) evince a comparable, albeit less fully developed, attempt to bring mana into a general theory of religion. The Oxford-educated Lang, author of over three hundred books, is known not least for his breadth of interests.42 Among his publications figure fairytales, folklore, mythology, but also what Stocking has called “paranormal phenomena” (1996, 56–57) and contemporary psychological theories (notably those of William James and Jean-Martin Charcot). After meeting and reading Edward Tylor in 1872, Lang began applying the anthropological method he had discovered in Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871), with its focus on typological comparison and “survivals,” to his own fields of interest: custom, folklore and mythology (Lang 1873; 1884), and took to thrashing his opponent Max Müller and his mythological theories.43 With the comparative method, Lang also imbibed the anthropologist’s view of religious evolution. However, Lang’s preoc-

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On Lang, see, for example, Green (1946), Stocking (1996, 50–63), Wheeler-Barclay (2010, 104–39), and Chidester (2014, 125–58). Lang responded to Müller’s second Hibbert Lecture (see above) in two different publications: in his Custom and Myth (Lang 1884, 212–42) and in an appendix to his Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Lang 1887, 2: 326, 330–45), defending anthropology’s comparative method. Although Lang had read at that time Codrington’s “Religious Beliefs and Practices” (1881), and mentioned Melanesian use of “mana” in the same book (Lang 1887, 1: 116), he did not discuss Müller’s theoretically-oriented use of mana.

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cupation for childhood and the role of imagination,44 as well as his romantic distrust of materialism and progress (Wheeler-Barclay 2010, 105–06; for Lang on the folk, see especially 123) progressively moved him to reject Tylor’s developmentalist paradigm. In The Making of Religion, published in 1898, Lang propounded an alternate theory of religion (Lang 1898), in which he offered a rival view of both the origin of the belief in souls, spirits, ancestors, etc. (i.e. animism), and of the development of religion. The Making of Religion attacked Tylor’s theory of religion on two fronts. The most obvious, but in the present case less important one, is Lang’s reconstruction of the development of religion. For the Scotsman, belief in the individual separable soul did not represent the most basic stage in religion; it is therefore not the case that animism moves linearly from belief in the individual soul to nature spirits, thence to departmental gods and ultimately to a monotheistic high god in line with the progress of culture and civilization (Lang 1898, 176). Basing himself on recent (mostly Australian) ethnographic reports, Lang notes the existence of moral, eternal, and creative High Gods among the most “primitive” human groups, i.e. Australian Aborigines. Because they have never died these High Gods cannot, by Lang’s definition, be “spirits” and so do not fall under the purview of animism and its myth of origin in dreams (Lang 1898, 201–04). Consequently, Lang proposes a two-pronged development of religion, with theism on the one hand and animism on the other, which, although initially independent, eventually merged. Insofar as Lang suggests (with some diffidence) the anteriority of theism (whose origin he does not explicitly discuss), he also accepts that the (necessary) introduction of animism and its venal, blood-thirsty ghosts and spirits brought with it some degree of (moral) degeneration (278–93).45 Lang precedes his theory of High Gods, which incidentally represents a challenge to Tylor’s minimum definition of religion, with a discussion of

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Lang’s concern for childhood was both ontological (see his books for children) and phylogenic. In the latter case, he used the notion of the folk, an equation shared by his anthropological colleagues. In an earlier text (engaging Müller’s theory of the origin of religion), Lang suggests that early religion was characterized not by “the vision of the Infinite” but “by the idea of Power. Early religions are selfish, not disinterested” (Lang 1884, 213; see also 233). Stocking has written that this earlier text has “a certain resonance of Codrington’s idea of mana” (Stocking 1996, 55), and it is suggestive that in this context Lang mentioned “boilyas,” though in a personal idiom (Lang 1884, 234), and noted that “In New Zealand, every Rangatira [chief] has a supernatural power” (237). Mana itself, however, is not mentioned and, retrospectively, those powers proved to be personal, whether ghosts or spirits.

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the origin of animism. Whereas Tylor explained “primitive” belief in souls and spirits as the result of ignorant yet rational cogitation by a primitive philosopher, as applied to the biological problems of dreams and death (Tylor 1871, 1: 387), Lang suggests that it arose as the result of a specific class of experiences, which could still be observed in his own society—frauds notwithstanding. These experiences, which he gathers under the label “X phenomena” and links to an “X region of our nature” (Lang 1898, 3), consist of what he terms unusual, “supernormal,”46 but nevertheless “actual, phenomena,” whereby information is acquired without recourse to the normal “channels of sensation” (68; see also Wheeler-Barclay 2010, 113). Lang posits that averred cases of “clairvoyance,” “possession,” or “telepathy,” although neglected by his positivist colleagues in anthropology, belong to the order of nature (Lang 1898, 50, 72, 116), though he entertains the possibility that these might be reducible to psychical phenomena such as hypnosis and suggestion, the unconscious and the subconscious (13). “Savages,” he argues, accept their reality but explain them wrongly as the result of spiritual agency. This second side to Lang’s theory thus attacks animism on two counts: the just-so story of its dream origin (for dreaming is, according to Lang, a thoroughly normal and common experience) and its intellectualism. Lang was indeed opposed to the ideological and polemical thrust of accounting for religion as a rational but ignorant proto-science, a “survival” in need of disposal. Where in all of this does mana fit? Mana makes a timid appearance in Lang’s discussion of Melanesian ghosts and spirits (Lang 1898, 214–18; with references to Codrington 1881 and 1891). On the face of it, Lang mentions these to document his distinction between spirits (i.e. ghosts of once living men), who belong to animism, and “beings” that have never died, and so evince one of the defining traits of his “High God” category. But in that context, Lang adds that besides these spirits and beings, Melanesians also believe in mana, which Lang carefully notes is equally linked to all classes of phenomena: There is in the universe a kind of magical ether, called mana, possessed, in different proportions, by different men, Vui [“spirits that were never men” (Codrington 1891, 121)], tamate [ghosts], and material objects, and

46

“By ‘supernormal’ experiences I here mean such as the acquisition by a human mind of knowledge which could not be obtained by it through the recognized channels of sensation” (Lang 1898, 68).

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… the atai or ataro of a man dead, his ghost, retains its old, and acquires new mana … Dr. Codrington cannot determine the connection of this belief with that in spirits. Lang 1898, 217–18, 216 Lang glosses this mana as “magical rapport” (216), a term he twice uses to denote the type of “supernormal” connections that fall under his “X phenomena” (7, 261), and indeed, Lang adds that “Mana is the uncanny, the X, the unknown” (216). Despite the brevity of the account and Lang’s diffidence about Melanesian “metaphysics,” mana plays an important if somewhat implicit role in Lang’s argument. If mana can be predicated of all classes of persons and things, it follows that it is a more fundamental religious category than, for example, spirits. And if mana represents the X phenomenon generically in Melanesia, it may be used to bolster the argument that supernormal experiences lie at the heart of religion. Focusing on mana as supernatural (i.e. “supernormal,” “X”) rather than power, Lang was able to suggest that his theory of the origin of religion, based almost exclusively on contemporary evidence, much to his chagrin,47 in fact possessed a counterpart in a “low race” (218). Consequently, his theory could be applied generally. In this sense, Lang uses mana in rather the same way as Max Müller who sought a “primitive” instance of an impersonal Infinite (see above; Müller 1878, 55–57). Lang, however, went further than Müller. Turning to Fijian religion for further ethnographic evidence of the distinction between ghosts Kalou yalo and eternal gods Kalou vu, Lang deduced from the terms used a higher-order category (Kalou) denoting whatever is “supernal … mystic or magical” (Lang 1898, 218; citing inaccurately Williams and Calvert 1860, 170). That Kalou is to be understood as another instance of Lang’s second-order “X” category is instantiated by his juxtaposition of different terms, among which mana: “[Kalou] seems to answer to mana in New Zealand and Melanesia, to wakan in North America, and to fée in old French” (Lang 1898, 218). His subsequent discussion of the Hebrew Bible’s narrative of the witch of Endor (1 Samuel 28:3–25) likewise strengthens the identification of these various exotic terms. In the story, King Saul asks a witch to raise the dead prophet Samuel, she complies but upon seeing Samuel’s shade, cries: “I see Elohim!” This story interested Lang on two counts. First, it offers a biblical

47

While Lang admits that there is much documentation on “savage” belief about X phenomena, he deplores the fact that whatever evidence there is comes from “educated civilized men” (Lang 1898, 3).

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instance of “veridical … hallucination” (305), precisely the sort of experiences he construed as the building block of religion. Second, it provides, according to him, yet another emic actualization of his generic category and so, through comparison, argues in favor of the universality of the category for which mana is but one name.48 Although Lang did not raise mana to the status of a second-order, universal category, it was no simple Melanesian word. Lang was independently following King’s example in reducing the meaning of mana to a bare abstract core and positing the universality of this impoverished mana. But unlike King, he did not choose to substitute the word “mana” for his theoretical category, “X” or “the supernatural.” The contrast, however, does not end here. While they both evince a similar attempt to universalize mana and attack Tylor’s animism and intellectualism, they also make it plain that Codrington’s mana could well be used to advance rival agendas. King was a strict developmentalist focusing on emotions whereas Lang accepted degeneration and looked to experience; for the former religion begins with impersonality while the latter placed high gods at its origin. Most striking in this regard is the flexibility of mana itself. It appears that Codrington’s definition as supernatural, impersonal, and substantial power lent itself to widely differing (mis)interpretations depending on the adjective one wished to stress—impersonal in King’s case, supernatural in Lang’s. Neither King nor Lang nor their mana, however, made much of an impact on their contemporaries. The former was not read (Schmidt speculated that his title repelled potential scholarly readers; 1910, 249) while the latter was ignored by anthropologists and provoked outrage among his fellow (evolutionist) folklorists (for example, Clodd 1898; Hartland 1898). Marcel Mauss neatly summed up the general feeling concerning Lang’s X region: “The first positive thesis … offers neither sociological nor scientific interest” (Mauss, 1900a, 200; see Wheeler-Barclay 2010, 134–37). In fact, in his subsequent publications, when mana did appear, it was not as a theoretical, second-order category (Lang 1901, 99). The introduction of mana to the scholarly scene would depend upon less marginal figures, and indeed that honor has been conferred to an Oxonian and two Parisians, Robert Ranulph Marett, and the jumeaux de travail Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss.

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“The point, however, is that Elohim is a term equivalent to Red Indian Wakan, Fijian Kalou, Maori or Melanesian Mana, meaning the ‘supernatural,’ the vaguely powerful—in fact X” (Lang 1898, 305).

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Mana Universalized In his autobiography, Marett (1866–1943) indicated that he and the two Frenchmen had arrived independently at the same conclusion, namely that behind magic and religion lay mana (Marett 1941, 161).49 Acknowledging the pre-eminence of his counterparts’ theorization of mana (Hubert and Mauss 1904), Marett claimed temporal priority. Marett’s claim is somewhat shaky for, while it is true that Marett discussed mana at the 1899 meeting of the British Association, it was only in 1904 that he raised it explicitly to the status of universal category for the theorization of religion and magic. Trained as a philosopher with a focus on ethics, Marett, who came from a comfortably Anglican landowning family,50 was moved to explore anthropology as a means of studying the development of ethics, after having read Lang’s Custom and Myth (Lang 1884) while a student at Oxford. Admitted as fellow of Exeter College at the same institution in 1891, he began working with ethnographic material and produced a prize-winning essay on “The ethics of savage races” in 1893, befriending Edward Tylor who had been an examiner (Marett 1941, 115–17). Entrenched in the evolutionist paradigm but weary of anthropological authorities, Marett continued collecting ethnographic material so that when in 1899 he was invited by the Anthropological Section of the British Association to “come over and enliven what threatened to be a dull program with something ‘really startling”’ (156), he did not disappoint; his lecture proved to be the proverbial last straw that broke animism’s back (159). His lecture “Pre-Animistic Religion” (Marett 1900, 162–84), based on a serendipitous assemblage of sources gathered by his wife (he was on holiday far from a library when the call came), took the form of yet another attack on Tylor’s theory of religion. Like Müller, King, and Lang before him, Marett did not just attack animism for its definition of religion but also its epistemological basis. Shifting the focus from ideas to emotions, suggested Marett, revealed “facts” that, although excluded by animism, belong to a wider class to which he wanted to reserve the name religion. Marett concluded that Tylor’s theory, as well as Lang’s High Gods (Marett 1900, 166), covered but a part of what should count as religion and that an appropriate theory thereof should take as its point of departure a specific sort of emotion. Marett goes on to spell out what

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On Marett, see Bengtson (1979), Stocking (1996, 163–72), Styers (2012). On his use of the category “supernatural,” see Hultkrantz (1983). In Marett’s view, religion “was partly a matter of heart as contrasted with head” (Marett 1941, 76).

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this higher-order theory he labels “supernaturalism” entails. Some indeterminate stimuli may give rise to a complex feeling of “awe,” where fear, wonder, admiration, etc. cohabit (168; note the similarity to King’s theory which he most likely did not know). Critically, this feeling prevents rational treatment of the stimulus in “natural” terms; on the contrary, “there arises … a powerful impulse to objectify and even personify the mysterious or ‘supernatural’ something felt” (168). From there, it is but a short way to dealing with it ritually, for awe implies something awful, a something Marett conceptualizes as “a Power.”51 At this point Marett turned to a series of examples, among which mana. But in 1899, Marett did not foreground mana in any way. He neither provided a reference, though he presumably drew his information from Codrington’s 1881 text which he quotes later, nor did he give ethnographic details. Mana is meaningful only by virtue of its inclusion in a list of terms that are, according to Marett, “typical and might be multiplied indefinitely,” such as andriamanitra (Madagascar), ngai (Masai), wakan (Sioux), and kalou (Fiji) (169).52 But taken together these terms, glossed as “supernatural power” and echoing a “universal feeling,” dealt a heavy blow to animism. It appears Marett was the right person in the right place, speaking to the right audience. He became famous overnight (Marett 1941, 157; Kippenberg 1999, 238–41) and his theory was soon adopted by authorities such as the folklorist Sidney Hartland (1901, 27), the German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (1906, 171–77) and the ethnologist Konrad T. Preuss (1904–1905; Marett 1941, 159–60). But in addition, he must have been saying the right thing. On the one hand he attacks what the preceding pages suggest were by then common enemies, animism and intellectualism, with a weapon itself not entirely novel. On the other, he provides a harmless theory of supernatural power. Unlike Lang, who accepted the reality of supernormal power, or King, who admitted that it was consubstantial to flawed human nature whether “primitive” or civilized, Marett’s object of study was not power itself but its discursive traces among “primitives.” Insofar as he carefully restricts his discussion to non-civilized cases, that power dissolves into the far less potent realm of the extraordinary, not to say the superstitious. Accordingly, when Marett introduces mana, it is as a counterpart to words such as Malagasy andriamanitra, which he glosses 51 52

“It is the Awful, and … everything wherein or whereby it manifests itself is, so to speak, a Power of Awfulness, or, more shortly, a Power” (Marett 1900, 170). In the fourth edition of his Threshold of Religion (Marett 1929), Marett qualified this statement, noting that: “they are meant simply to illustrate the vague application of some class-concept to a variety of objects calling forth religious awe. It is not contended that these epithets bear one and all the same sense” (Marett 1929, 12 n3).

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as denoting “Whatever is great, whatever exceeds the capacity of their understanding … Whatever is new and useful and extraordinary,” a word applied to things such as silk, rice, or a lamp (Marett 1900, 169). Reinforcing the impotence of the supernatural power he hypothesized, Marett avoids all mention of sociopolitical contexts when exemplifying the terms he compares, contexts undoubtedly present in Codrington (1881) as well as in William Ellis’s History of Madagascar, the source of Marett’s andriamanitra.53 In other words, Marett severs mana from its Melanesian sociopolitical context. He thus maintains the boundary between religion and politics that the new disciplines studying religion were busy enforcing (see Styers 2004 and 2012; McCutcheon and Arnal 2013; Chidester 2014, 52). It was to be five more years before Marett, recasting his supernaturalist theory in the form of an attack of James G. Frazer’s intellectualist definitions (and division) of magic and religion (Marett 1904), explicitly constructed mana as a second-order category of universal application designed to account for magic and religion. Mana thus moved from example to label, with the generic meaning of supernatural power accompanied by the magico-religious emotion of awe, a category that could be applied in any geographical and cultural locale: I suggest that the peculiar contribution of magic … to religion was the idea of mana. No doubt, the actual mana of the Melanesians will on analysis be found to yield a very mixed and self-contradictory set of meanings, and to stand for any kind of power that rests in whatever way upon the divine. I suppose it, however, to have the central and nuclear sense of magical power; and, apart from the question of historical fact, let me, for expository purposes at any rate, be allowed to give the term this connotation. Marett 1904, 154 Marett, however, was not alone in crafting a new universal category for the disciplines studying religion.54 The period between 1899 and 1904 saw other publications which bolstered the idea of mana’s universality. One of these, which Marett addresses in his 1904 essay, was James Frazer’s second edition 53

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The sentence immediately before that which Marett quotes (“Whatever is great…”) reads: “The king they also call andriamanitra, and sometimes with the addition of hita maso— “seen by the eye,” i.e. the visible god” (Ellis 1838, 1: 391). William Ellis is the same missionary who wrote about Oceanic matters discussed in the preceding chapter. Marett later provided a theoretical assessment of his promotion of mana to the status of second-order category (Marett 1908).

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of The Golden Bough. In that widely-read and authoritative book, Frazer had excerpted Codrington’s theoretical discussion of mana as the active force in magic and religion, and placed it within a juxtaposition of ethnographic data which were de facto pronounced comparable (Frazer 1900, 1: 65–66, quoting Codrington 1891, 191, 192).55 Although Codrington’s mana appears in The Golden Bough as a strictly emic notion, Frazer confers upon it the status of locus classicus in the anthropological canon.56 Another text, published in 1902 (but which Marett did not know in 1904) and far more theoretically subtle than Frazer’s,57 offered an independent corroboration that impersonal, substantial, and supernatural (or, more simply, magical) power might indeed be a universal phenomenon. In 1902, John N. B. Hewitt (1859–1937), an American linguist and ethnologist of Tuscaroran (Iroquois-speaking) descent, published a discussion, framed in evolutionistic terms, of what he took to be a central category of “savage man”: “mystic potence” (Hewitt 1902, 33). According to Hewitt, savage philosophy peopled the world with unfriendly bodies, which, like man, wielded a supernatural power, “the efficient cause of all phenomena, all the activities of [man’s] environment” (36), a philosophy he explicitly understood as universal among “savages” (36, 38, 42). To designate this “magic power,” Hewitt consciously chose to adopt a “neologism”: “the Iroquoian name for the potence in question, orenda” (37), under which he subsumed parallel terms from other North American tribes.58

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Although Frazer quotes Codrington in the first edition of The Golden Bough (Frazer 1890), he does not mention mana there. Marett later wrote of Frazer’s influence: “if our imperial race is beginning to know something about those people of rudimentary culture whose fate is in its hands, [it] is in no small part due to the wide circulation achieved by The Golden Bough” (Marett, 1920, 173– 74; 1941, 161). Marett notes in his autobiography that when he wrote these two essays, he was reading “travellers and other first-hand observers” but no “theorists” (Marett 1941, 162), suggesting his ignorance of Hewitt as he wrote his “From Spell to Prayer” (Marett 1904). Marett first cites Hewitt in 1908 (Marett 1909, 131). “In proposing the term, it may be said in favor of its adoption that its signification … is better defined than that of the other terms mentioned [i.e. North American Indian terms wakan, pokunt, manitou]. In further justification of the introduction of this neologism into the language, it may be said that it denotes a discrete idea, clearly defined and prolific in the tongue whence it is taken. Moreover, it precipitates, so to speak, what before has been held in solution. Orenda is of easy utterance and of simple orthography, and so is readily enunciated. So, until a better name for the mystic potence under discussion is found, let orenda be used for it” (Hewitt 1902, 37–38). Compare this with Hocart’s discussion of the success of the word mana over its rivals such as orenda, where he noted that

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Although Hewitt went on to offer a detailed lexical and ethnological study of orenda, his ultimate aim was theoretical not descriptive—to provide a general definition of religion: Religion … may be defined as any system of words, acts, or devices, or combinations of these, employed to obtain welfare or to avert ill-fare through the use, exercise, or favor of the orenda of another body or bodies … any word, any act, or any device, or any combination of these, designed to induce some other body or bodies to use or exercise orenda for the purposes indicated above, must justly and essentially be termed religious. Hewitt 1902, 42 As both Marett and Jonathan Z. Smith have noted, Hewitt not only offers documentation of an exotic term that others could take as parallel to mana, as did Ellis and Thomson, who provided Marett with local descriptions of andriamanitra and ngai (Marett 1899, 169), or William Jones, likewise of Native American descent (Fox), who analyzed the Algonkin word manitou (Jones 1905). In addition, Hewitt actively constructs “magic power” as the key second-order category for the analysis of religion (Marett 1941, 164; Smith 2004, 126). From a theoretical perspective, Marett’s 1904 “mana” and Hewitt’s “orenda” were synonymous, and it must have taken but little effort to deduce their universality. Shortly thereafter, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss published their “Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie” in L’Année sociologique (1904; but written in 1902–1903), which according to Marett had independently “hit the same bird” (Marett 1941, 161). Indeed, Hubert and Mauss not only raised Codrington’s mana to second-order status but were also fighting the same enemy: the intellectualism of British anthropology. But the similarities end there. Marcel Mauss (1872–1950) initially occupied a somewhat marginal place as a socialist and as a member of the nascent sociological school headed by his uncle Emile Durkheim,59 at a time when the institutional study of religion in France was dominated by intellectualism (see Rosa 1996). Like Marett, Mauss

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mana “has the advantage in sound over any of its rivals: it is simple and easy” (Hocart 1922, 139). I focus on Mauss because it appears that it was he, and not Henri Hubert (1872–1927), who is responsible for the use of mana in L’Esquisse. This is shown by a recent edition of the article that indicates which of the two men was responsible for which parts of the text (Bert and Meylan 2014). Moreover, the few entries dealing with mana in Hubert’s files, held by the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris (box 14a), suggest his

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had trained in philosophy before turning to the study of “primitives,” which he studied with Léon Marillier who lectured on the religions of non-civilized peoples at the fifth section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, until his untimely death in 1901.60 In L’Esquisse, the authors sought to achieve two related aims, to show the social nature of magic and to account for its efficiency, two aims diametrically opposed to the intellectualist (and especially Frazerian) doxa which saw magic as individualistic and ineffective, i.e. a pseudo-science. To do so, Hubert and Mauss broke down magic into three components: agent, act, and representation (i.e. emic accounts of magic). While they quickly established the role of society behind magician and ritual, the representations of magic occasioned a two-pronged discussion. First, they dealt with emic representations, both explicit (for example, Codrington’s mana, Hewitt’s orenda, Assyrian mâmit, and Indian brahman; Hubert and Mauss 1904, 60) and implicit, which they classified under three headings: abstract impersonal (magic as built on laws), concrete impersonal (magic as transfer of properties), and personal (demons, i.e. animism). These they showed to be collective, whether because they borrowed from other domains of social life or were handed down by tradition (88). The authors, however, had defined magic negatively as private, individualistic religion (19, 82); although built on collective elements, the practice of magic seemed to be an exclusively individual matter. To solve this paradox, Hubert and Mauss needed to show that behind the lonely magician in fact stood society. This led them to analyze belief in magic, in order to prove that its foundation was not individualistic. To do so, Hubert and Mauss did the same thing as Müller, King, etc., they mobilized Codrington’s mana.61 Marcel Mauss may have encountered mana as early as 1895 when he began attending Marillier’s courses at the Ecole Pratique. One year after its publication in 1891, Marillier had written an enthusiastic review of Codrington’s Melanesians and mentioned incidentally Melanesian mana in a review of Frazer’s The Golden Bough (Marillier 1892a; 1892b). Mauss himself had read The Melanesians at the latest by 1896, and that same year used Codrington’s mana as an illustration of the notion of magical power (Mauss 1896a, 280; 1896b, 40). Mauss had also encountered mana in general texts on religion, having

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relative lack of interest in mana. For biographical information on Mauss, see, for example, Fournier (1994), Tarot (1999), and Bert (2012). Concerning Marillier, see Le Maléfan (2005). Mauss succeeded Marillier at the EPHE. The authors’ archives evince one other source for mana, Edward Tregear’s MaoriPolynesian Comparative Dictionary (1891, 203), which provides a strictly lexicographical analysis of mana.

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reviewed Lang’s Making of Religion as well as Marillier’s “Religion” entry for La Grande Encyclopédie (Mauss 1900a; 1902), where Marillier made occasional, if unsystematic, use of the term mana, roughly understood as supernatural power.62 Finally, whereas Marett claims he did not know Hubert and Mauss before 1904, it is possible that Mauss had read Marett’s 1899 conference: both he and Hubert certainly read Folk-Lore, the journal where it was published in 1900.63 To demonstrate that belief in magic was thoroughly social, Hubert and Mauss returned to the representations of magic. Their second examination revealed that behind the laws of sympathy, properties, and demons there lay a more fundamental representation motivating belief in magic’s efficacy. This representation they described in terms of impersonal power acting within a “mysterious milieu” (Hubert and Mauss 1904, 105, 107). At the same time, they insisted, against intellectualism, that this general representation was “singulièrement confuse et tout à fait étrangère à nos entendements d’adultes européens” (107). Having hypothesized this representation, they sought to document it empirically.64 Codrington’s 1891 discussion of mana, which they did not merely quote but reconfigured to suit their tastes, fulfilled all their requirements. In their reading, mana is not logical, but “obscure and vague” and “confuses agent, rite, and representation” (109, 108); it encodes value and discriminates among individuals (109); being impersonal, mana is not to be confused with demons or animism (110–11); “mana is power par excellence” (111); finally, mana is supernatural despite the fact that “it shews itself in physical force” (112; Codrington 1891, 119). But since Hubert and Mauss’s aim was to provide a general theory of magic, they needed mana to be universal. Like their predecessors, they adduced parallel notions drawn from ethnographic literature but went further by drawing on philological sources,65 from whose juxtaposition

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Marillier uses the term mana six times in the thirteen-page article. He discusses the term upon its first occurrence: “The word mana designates in Melanesia those natural and supernatural gifts that endow a man, all the powers over men and things he enjoys” (Marillier 1900, 349). For instance, Mauss penned a review of Sidney Hartland’s 1898 review of Lang’s Making of Religion (1898), which was published in Folk-Lore (Mauss 1900b). For the Durkheimians’ positivism, see Durkheim’s methodological manifesto (Durkheim 1895). Ethnographic literature: Malayo-Polynesian notions (kramât, deng, hasina), North American (Hewitt’s orenda, manitou, wakan, pokunt), Mexican (naual), and Australian ones (boolya, koochie, arungquiltha; Hubert and Mauss 1904, 112–16). Philological literature: Vedic bráhman, Greek phúsis and dúnamis (116–18). Hubert and Mauss’s universalizing

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they deduced the universality of their mana:66 From the foregoing, we feel justified in concluding that a concept, encompassing the idea of magical power, was once found everywhere. It involves the notion of efficacy. At the same time as being a material substance which can be localized, it is also spiritual. It works at a distance and also through a direct connection, if not by contact. It is mobile and fluid without having to stir itself. It is impersonal and at the same time clothed in personal forms. It is divisible yet whole. Mauss 1972, 144; Hubert and Mauss 1904, 118 Thus universalized, mana could deploy its theoretical, explanatory effects. First, it refuted intellectualism and animism (being illogical and impersonal). For Hubert and Mauss, mana only makes sense when seen from the point of view of collective psychology.67 And if mana cannot be the product of rational cogitation or experience, it must then be a matter of emotions (“sentiments”; 122), a statement that leads the authors to provide a myth of origins for mana and magic. They arise in situations of danger or of great need (hunting, war, etc.) that affect not only the direct participants but the entire group. Anticipating Durkheim’s discussion of collective effervescence (Durkheim 1912), Hubert and Mauss argue that, brought together by a shared emotion, the group unites in common ritual action. In this state of overexcitement, desire, cause, and effect are simultaneous (135): To see all these figures masked with the image of the same desire, to hear all mouths uttering proof of their certainty—everyone is carried away,

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agenda is made explicit when they state: “What we like in Mr. Hewitt’s phrase “magic potentiality” as applied to mana and orenda …” (114); Hewitt applies the phrase to orenda but in no way to mana, which does not appear in his text (Hewitt 1902). This deduction was denounced by Jevons (1908, 105–07) but granted by numerous contemporary scholars, for example, Arnold van Gennep (1904, 17). More generally, Hubert and Mauss’s mana has seen a good deal of discussion, see Lévi-Strauss (1950, xli-l); Crapanzano (1995); Martelli (1996); Karsenti (1997, esp. 243). “These values [magical and social] do not depend, in fact, on the intrinsic qualities of a thing or a person, but on the status or rank attributed to them by all-powerful public opinion … It goes without saying that ideas like this have no raison d’être outside society, that they are absurd as far as pure reason is concerned and that they derive purely and simply from the functioning of collective life” (Mauss 1972, 148–49; Hubert and Mauss 1904, 121, 122). For a Melanesian account of a direct link between possession of mana and social status, see Codrington (1891, 46–58, 69–100).

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there is no possibility of resistance, by the conviction of the whole group. … In such circumstances … a feeling of universal consensus may create a reality. Mauss 1972, 164; Hubert and Mauss 1904, 134 Hubert and Mauss thus disagreed with King and Marett; it is not so much the nature of the emotion that is of importance but the context in which it occurs: the belief in the ritual’s efficacy (i.e. mana) arises only in a collective setting. But they also disagreed on the objectivity of mana. Far from illusory, magical power is quite real in that it is society—which according to the Durkheimians is greater than the sum of its parts and holds hegemonic power over its members (see Durkheim 1895)—that vouches for it.68 The patient heals not because he is an ignorant or gullible fool but because the group believes in magical cures (Hubert and Mauss 1904, 141). By this argument, Hubert and Mauss were reducing Müller’s, Codrington’s, or Marett’s “supernatural” to society. L’Esquisse, and its discussion of mana, was widely read, as Hubert and Mauss themselves noted in a later publication, where they mention approval from both philologists and generalists, including major anthropologists and historians of religions such as James Frazer, Francis Jevons, and Sidney Hartland (Hubert and Mauss 1909, xx-xxiii). But their work had a mixed reception. While their social analysis had a lasting influence through colleagues such as Arnold van Gennep (1909), Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1910), and Emile Durkheim (1912), most readers rejected or ignored their sociological treatment of magic. What proved highly influential, however, was their construction of mana as a second-order, universal category. Indeed, not much time would pass before Marett’s and Hubert and Mauss’s mana condensed into a new paradigm in the study of religion, dynamism,69 and entered the lexis of scholars as varied as Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, Jane Harrison, and Theodor Adorno. In less than thirty years mana had moved from local to general theoretical category. Tellingly, when the editor of the prestigious Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics chose a contributing author for the article “mana,” it was Robert Marett he chose and not Codrington (who wrote the “Melanesians” entry; 68

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“The world of magic is full of the expectations of successive generations, their tenacious illusions, their hopes in the form of magical formulas. Basically it is nothing more than this, but it is this which gives it an objectivity far superior to that which it would have if it were nothing more than a tissue of false individual ideas” (Mauss 1972, 171; Hubert and Mauss 1904, 141). The earliest reference to “dynamism” I have found is by van Gennep: “Dynamism designates the impersonal theory of mana” (Gennep 1909, 17).

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Marett 1916; Codrington 1916). How is one to account for the success of the term? Serendipity may be evoked; Hewitt had suggested that ease of utterance should be considered (Hewitt 1902, 38), while Hocart remarked upon its happy homonymy with biblical manna (Hocart 1922; Smith 2004). But the foregoing discussion suggests that mana filled a need felt by many scholars. Yet it is important to keep in mind that this was not any mana, it was Codrington’s. It was a mana conceptualized purely in religious terms, virtually freed from all disturbing political aspects. It was also a mana to some extent already theoretical. Codrington was more than a local informer; he engaged various theorists and at times presented his mana in a rather abstract form (especially Codrington 1891, 118–20, 191–92). As his final text most clearly suggests, he was theoretically on the side of Max Müller against Tylor, and his most influential publication provided the means to beat the latter.70 And while the various theorists discussed in the present chapter all defended different, if not conflicting, agendas, they all shared dissatisfaction with Tylor’s intellectualism and animism. Mana proved highly useful because Codrington had defined it in theoretical and thus general, not to say vague, terms, as an impersonal, supernatural, and substantial power, a gloss one may doubt would have been congenial to the Melanesians studying on Norfolk Island. But it was precisely this indeterminacy that forged the success of the category. It was highly flexible and easily comparable insofar as its semantic content was rather low. But, as will be seen in the next chapter, in being used to attack the intellectualist analysis of religion, mana opened the way to a more sympathetic view of religion, wherein religion was not bad science, but had to do with meaningful emotions and experiences which were common to humanity.

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“This ‘sense of the Infinite,’ as Max Müller calls it, was the foundation of the religious beliefs of the Melanesians” (Codrington 1916, 530).

Chapter 4

The Domestication of Mana While spirit is rapidly giving way before the disillusioned gaze of the sophisticated mind, mana will live as long as the conceptual power of man reacts to the religious thrill. Goldenweiser 1915, 636

∵ By 1905, mana had acceded to the status of a general theoretical category and for much of a quarter of a century it was to provide a major instrument for the study of the nature and origin of religion, so much so that a paradigm, dynamism, was built around it. But mana—which proved highly fashionable— soon outgrew the scholarly aims of those who had universalized it. In less than a decade, mana was to appear in works of sociology, psychology, history, and even theology. In so doing, mana underwent another major conceptual shift. Initially constructed to deal with “primitive” or prehistoric religion, it was increasingly used to discuss “civilized” religions. This shift had important consequences for the outlook on religion as mana had been constructed to challenge a theory that happened to be thoroughly atheistic. As we shall see in this chapter, mana came to provide scholars a means to not only analyze religion as something other than a misguided error but also as a socially effective and deeply meaningful part of Western culture. But this came with a price— namely an ever greater disparity between second-order mana and what an increasing number of professional ethnographers were finding in the Oceanic field. A price that eventually proved to be unbearable. By the 1940s, voices began to call for the end of mana understood as a universal category. It is to this tenure of more than thirty years that this chapter is devoted.

Marett’s Paradigm While Hubert, Mauss, and Lang moved on to other topics, Marett—presumably heartened by the spectacular success of his pre-animistic theory— published further theoretical texts clarifying the meaning of his new scholarly

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 | DOI 10.1163/9789004349247_005

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category and the issues it was meant to address. In his 1908 essay “The Conception of Mana” (Marett 1909, 115–41), Marett provided a first formalization of mana as a second-order category. Situating the category within a recognizably Tylorian epistemological framework—he mobilized both the “comparative method” and the psychic unity of mankind to justify its world-wide applicability (115)—Marett then defined it as supernatural or more generally extraordinary power, rejecting as ethnocentric any instances where mana was used in a “secular sense,” i.e. where it was not mystified (see Chapter 2). Marett’s aim being to define religion through the opposition between natural and supernatural, one would look in vain for a definition of power itself; at most he resorted to the physicists’ idioms of “energy” and “voltage,” existing outside of man but susceptible of being harnessed by him (128, 138). Marett further declared mana free from any moral dimension in an explicit bid to attack the “antithesis between magic and religion” (131), with the consequence of further moving away from the political considerations inherent in all accusations of magic. But perhaps the most pregnant idea in “The Conception of Mana” lay in its concluding sentence: “all religions, low and high, rudimentary and advanced, can join in saying with the Psalmist that ‘power belongeth unto God”’ (141). Explicitly meant to show the adequacy of mana as the minimum definition of religion, the essay implicitly introduced the idea that mana could be useful in accounting for contemporary religious experience (see Kippenberg 1999, 245). While Marett never followed through on this idea, others, as will be readily apparent, would seize upon it. With his theoretical texts, Marett had done much to set the agenda for the scholarly use of mana, which was congealing as the “dynamist” paradigm.1 The name dynamism, however, is somewhat misleading, for if mana was power it was but barely so. Grounded as it was in individual experiences of the extraordinary, Marett’s mana, unlike Codrington’s, was properly supernatural, i.e. religious, which by his definition excluded natural power, that is social and political power (Styers 2012). As such, it is hardly surprising that much of the discussion on mana in the years after 1905 remained centered on the adjectives rather than the noun. 1 On dynamism, often used interchangeably with pre-animism, see, for example, Pinard de la Boullaye (1922, 367–70), Alles (1987), Kippenberg (1999, 237–57). Marett wrote a general synthesis on mana for the Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics (Marett 1916). In addition to reviewing the usual ethnographic documents, Marett spelt out the theoretical issues his second-order category was designed to solve. First, to show the fundamental unity of magic and religion; second, to provide their common definition; third, to account for the transmissibility of magico-religious quality (effectively accounting for sympathetic influence); finally mana offered a unifying theory of ritual efficacy (Marett 1916, 379).

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Impersonal? Mana long bore the memory of the debate for which it had been constructed.2 In the years and decades that followed Marett’s first forays against Tylor and Frazer, scholar after scholar returned to mana to interrogate its relationship with personal powers. In 1912, the Danish historian of religions Vilhelm Grønbech (1873–1948) addressed the Fourth International Congress on the History of Religion on the theme of “Soul or Mana,” drawing on medieval Germanic sources to show that at the primitive stage the two concepts were indistinguishable (Grønbech 1913). Ivy Campbell (d. 1948) came to a similar conclusion in her doctoral dissertation on “manaism” (i.e. dynamism), noting that the ethnographic evidence did not support the impersonality of mana (Campbell 1918, 46, 17). Most theorists of religion, however, did not follow Grønbech so far, but the question of the co-presence of soul/spirit and mana long remained an issue. For instance, in his textbook History of Religions, Edward Hopkins (1857– 1932) devoted a chapter to Marett’s dynamism, remarking that mana could at times be “spiritual” (Hopkins 1918, 67). The exact nature of the impersonality of mana at times came under scrutiny, as in the work of the folklorist E. Sidney Hartland (1848–1927). Although he subscribed to Marett’s emotionalist pre-animism (see Hartland 1906), Hartland questioned the strict impersonality of mana on the basis of the various ethnological reports discussed in the previous chapter (notably Codrington’s who had noted the link between spirits and mana; Codrington 1891, 119). This examination led Hartland to conclude that mana could take two mutually non-exclusive forms: a “potentiality” inherent in objects and persons, and “the impersonal, mysterious, undefined reservoir of power in the universe” (Hartland 1914, 45). Both conceptions being of the domain of the “unknown” and “transcendent,” they represented, for Hartland as for Marett, “the common root of magic and religion” (66). A conclusion Hartland aimed at Frazer’s distinction between magic and religion, which Frazer construed as an opposition between manipulation of impersonal powers (magic) and entreaty of personal beings (religion). Hartland made further use of mana against Frazer by noting that its uneven distribution among wizards (some being more powerful than others) proved that his theory of magic as the misapplication of the law of sympathy was untenable (73). These issues were not only the province of armchair theorists of religion. Franz Boas’s student Alexander Goldenweiser (1880–1940), for instance, had

2 Gregory Alles has commented on how little progress was made after the first dynamistic formulations of Marett, Preuss, and Hubert and Mauss (Alles 1987, 529).

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actual field experience but asked the same theoretical questions as Marett and came to much the same conclusions, whether on the psychological nature of mana, its fundamental role for both religion and magic, or its opposition and anteriority to belief in spiritual beings.3 Examples might be multiplied, but it should be enough to note that at the Fifth International Congress for the History of Religions held in Lund, Sweden, in 1929, no less than 16 out of 88 contributions bore in their title either the term ‘soul,’ ‘mana,’ or both (n.a. 1930); that in 1931, it was still possible to publish some one hundred pages on the relationship between mana and soul in a leading journal in the field of religion (Arbman 1931); and that the very impersonality of mana could still be the focus of study in the early seventies (Philsooph 1971). To these theoretical discussions may be added reports from field anthropologists who sought to weigh in the discussion, providing new analyses of mana that challenged the impersonality attributed to second-order mana by theorists of religion. As early as 1914, Arthur Hocart drew on his linguistic inquiries in the Solomon and Fiji Islands to show that “far from being praeanimistic, [mana] is out and out spiritualistic” (Hocart 1914, 100).4 Other such pronouncements followed. Ian Hogbin, who evinced Malinowskian functionalism, explicitly criticized theorists for misrepresenting Codrington’s mana as impersonal (Hogbin 1936, 268 n18). Paul Radin, who worked among the North American Winnebago, likewise sought to show that the various indigenous notions conceptualized as impersonal power in America, among which Hewitt’s orenda (Hewitt 1902; see Chapter 3), were in fact thoroughly personal. Pointing to inconsistencies in Hewitt’s report on orenda,5 as well as to his own ethno3 “Mana then is the direct objectivation of the religious emotion, it is that which causes the (religious) thrill … Mana represents a direct conceptualization of the religious thrill, spirit, as such, is not a carrier of religion, but becomes associated with the religious thrill on account of certain peculiarities in the behavior of spirits” (Goldenweiser 1915, 636, 640). Importantly, Boas, building on reports of wakanda, orenda, manito, etc., had indicated that the fundamental concept of North American (Native American) religion was a dynamistic “magic power” (Boas 1910). 4 Interestingly, Hocart’s description of Oceanic peoples’ uses of mana resembles closely what I have called political conceptualizations of mana in Chapter 2, which may be accounted for by Hocart’s interest in kingship. Hocart’s data point to what Roger Keesing (1984) has labelled the stative usage of mana. Rudolf Lehmann (1915) arrived at a quite similar conclusion (mana meaning “efficacious” rather than “supernatural power”) through philological and comparative analyses. Other Oceanists such as Capell (1938) and Firth (1940) also pointed to the stative nature of mana (see below, pp. 101–03). 5 Radin quotes the following sentence from Hewitt’s discussion: “the possession of orenda is the distinctive characteristic of all the gods,” as pointing to a personal power (Radin 1914, 347).

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graphic work,6 he concluded that “Animism, then, in the old Tylorian sense of the term, is the belief of the Indians” (Radin 1914, 351). Impersonal Mana in Greece and Rome While the impersonality of mana was originally a theoretical problem for the general study of religion, it was rapidly taken up by non-anthropologists interested in textual religions, whether Native American, Germanic (see Chapter 5), or Mediterranean.7 Most spectacularly, mana was introduced into discussions of Greek and Roman civilizations despite fierce resistance by the majority of classicists (and more generally members of the privileged classes) who idealized them as centers of high culture and rationality, when not as the fount of contemporary bourgeois culture, and thus tended to protect Athens and Rome from anything smacking of savagery. One such iconoclastic classicist was Jane Harrison (1850–1928).8 Harrison, who held a research fellowship at Cambridge from 1898 onwards, regularly broke with accepted views, not least scholarly ones.9 She was drawn to the anthropology of religion and was interested in its “savages,” but although she read Tylor and Frazer (who like her was a trained classicist) she rejected their intellectualism in favor of a Durkheimian, sociological view of religion. Accordingly she granted ritual a primary role over against myth, for which she is remembered as a member of the Cambridge Ritualists. Moreover, Harrison, herself something of an anti-conformist (WheelerBarclay 2010, 220), was drawn to marginalized elements in ancient Greek culture such as the ecstatic cult of Dionysus and rejected those her own Victorian society constructed as prestigious—the Olympian gods, their myths, classical rationality and art. These interests eventually coalesced into a narrative of 6 “I was fortunate enough to work among the Winnebago and Ojibwa, where the belief in wakanda and manito is strongly and characteristically developed. In both tribes the term always referred to definite spirits, not necessarily definite in shape” (Radin 1914, 349). 7 Anthropologists, most of whom belonged to the privileged, classically educated class, were quick to note correspondences between mana and various Greco-Roman concepts (see Hubert and Mauss 1904, 116–18; Clodd 1907, 184; King 1910, 154). 8 Others classicists who took up mana in their discussion of Greek religion include Rose (1925, 6), Cornford (1912, 222), and Nilsson (1941). 9 Wheeler-Barclay provides an edifying example of the type of response her theories elicited from philologists (here Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf): “I can’t get along with historians of religion; not with those who really dispose of everything with magic and superstition and in the end have a more intimate relation with old women of both sexes than to Plato, Spinoza and Goethe” (quoted in Wheeler-Barclay 2010, 215). For Harrison’s biography, see, for example, Peacock (1988), Beard (2000), Wheeler-Barclay (2010, 215–42), and Konaris (2016, 237–65).

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change from a matriarchal religion grounded in collective and emotional ritual celebrating life to a patriarchal and rational religion where reigned Zeus, the “archpatriarchal bourgeois,” and bloodless theology (i.e. classical mythology; Harrison 1903, 285). Harrison’s Themis (Harrison 1912) represents her attempt to systematize her theory of the origin and development of Greek religion. To do so, she enlisted the theoretical help of scholars such as Emile Durkheim (who in 1898 had defined religion in purely collective terms) and Robert Marett. If her narrative presupposed a shift in the history of Greek religion from the emotional to the rational (i.e. theology), it also required a parallel shift in object. For Harrison, theology imposes static personalities endowed with genealogies and res gestae as recipients of rational do ut des worship, but such personalities (Zeus, Apollo, etc.) represented only the end products of religious development: We now know, from a study of the customs of and representations of primitive people, that … a thing is regarded as sacred, and out of that sanctity, given certain conditions, emerges a daimon and ultimately a god. Harrison 1912, 63 Earlier forms of (Greek) religion could not be, by virtue of her anti-intellectualist stance, personal. But like Max Müller in 1878, Harrison was confronted with the absence of straightforward sources for a pre-animistic stage in Greek religion. She thus reconstructed an archaic ritual whose object was a thing (a thunderbolt), not a person (its wielder, Zeus), but then had to show that it indeed belonged to the sphere of religion. To do so, she turned to orenda, wakonda, and mana (to which she granted etic status),10 which provided comparative proof that religion really only requires the emotion of awe as caused by an uncanny, but explicitly impersonal, power (Harrison 1912, 66–69, 64– 65). Harrison herself noted the critical role played by Codrington’s mana: “An examination of the words orenda, mana and Wa-kon’-da [i.e. wakan] has helped us to realize what is meant by the word ‘sacred’ [i.e. religious, see p. 62] and also in what sense it is possible to ‘worship’ or rather to ‘attend to’ the thunder without any presupposition of a personal thunder-god” (72; see also Clodd 1907, 184). She thus concluded that archaic—or did she mean “primitive”?—Greek religion and magic consisted in the manipulation of mana 10

In a note, Harrison stated: “I have adopted mana rather than Wa-kon’-da as a general term for impersonal force because it is already current and also because its content is perhaps somewhat less specialized and mystical” (Harrison 1912, 74 n1).

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and not commerce with divinities: “Magic, sacrament and sacrifice are fundamentally all one; they are all the handling of the sacred, the manipulation of mana” (Harrison 1912, 138). Harrison accordingly sought Greek equivalents to the term mana. These she found among the first generations of immortals in Hesiod’s Theogony, whose “verse is full of reminiscences, resurgences of early pre-anthropomorphic faith; he is haunted by the spirits of ghostly mana, orenda …” (73). Above all she singled out the shadowy but adequately named figures of Kratos and Bia, ‘Power’ and ‘Force.’ Tellingly, she did not mention in this context the (overly philosophical, rational) terms (dúnamis, phúsis) Hubert and Mauss had identified as the Greek counterparts of mana (Hubert and Mauss 1904, 116–18), despite mentioning their work approvingly elsewhere (for example, Harrrison 1912, 85 n1). Importantly in the present context, Harrison’s discussion of Greek religion was not completely cut off from her personal interests (see Kippenberg 1999, 205). As she herself stated, “the human mind is not made of watertight compartments. What we think about Greek religion affects what we think about everything else” (Harrison 1912, xviii). Just as she rejected the Olympians and their theology, she rejected theism and Christian dogmatizing (Wheeler-Barclay 2010, 224, 234). And conversely, as Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay has shown, true religion was for Harrison to be found in “mysticism, ecstasy, and celebration of the ritual world,” in emotion and collective rituals; it lay in “the real mystery of the universe, the force behind things, before which we all bow” (Wheeler-Barclay 2010, 233, 235). True religion needed to be a-theistic if not pre-animistic. To put it another way, Harrison’s true religion had to do with emotionally intense experiences of impersonal power, with mana. At any rate, with Jane Harrison, we have a first sign that the second-order category mana could prove personally appealing and relevant to educated Westerners and not only to “primitive” peoples. Mana had established a beachhead in archaic Greece, and it would soon move closer to home. Roman religion posed a problem for moderns used to a Christian— Protestant—view of religion. In John Scheid’s happy expression, it was above all an “orthopraxy,” being devoid of “revelation, scripture, dogmas, and orthodoxy” (Scheid 1998, 20). Roman religion did not have a “theology” in Harrison’s use of the term. Compared to their Greek counterparts, the gods of Rome had little personality and less res gestae; moreover most of them—and there were many—existed only through their one specialized function (Rose 1926, 43). To account for this peculiarity, some Latinists,11 such as Herbert J. Rose (1883– 11

For other Latinists who embraced dynamistic ideas, see, for example, Fowler (1911), Pfister (1937), Grenier (1947), and Wagenvoort (1947).

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1961) who had been a fellow at Marett’s Exeter College in Oxford, postulated that such frail personalities were in fact: not so much gods as particular manifestations of mana. Spiniensis provided the mana necessary to get thorn-bushes (spinae) out of people’s fields; Cinxia, that needed for the proper girding (cingere) of the bride; and so with innumerable others. What stories could anyone tell about such phantasmal, uninteresting beings as these? Rose 1926, 44 By analyzing Roman gods as precipitations of impersonal power, Rose was going further than Harrison. Unlike her, he was not reconstructing a far-off impersonal stage in Greek religion; he claimed that stage was still alive in the writings of such classical authors as Ovid, Varro, or Virgil (42). Providing, in his view, further evidence of the presence of pre-animistic elements in their religion, Latin has a word “which approaches fairly near to mana in meaning”: numen (7; see also Rose 1949 and 1951; for critical appraisals, see Dumézil 1974, 36–48; Scheid 1998, 128). Conceding that numen meant “the product or expression of power” (44) rather than power itself, Rose nevertheless reduced a god (for example, Spiniensis, but also the better known Jupiter and Mars (46)) to its action, so that what Codrington had said of Melanesian religion might be said of Roman religion as well: “religion consists in getting this Mana for one’s self, or getting it used for one’s benefit” (Codrington 1891, 119). The conclusion was inescapable: “in its form and in many of its conceptions, the theology … of Italy, before the influence of Greece made itself felt, still shows clearly enough the savage past which lay no very great distance behind it” (Rose 1926, 61). Needless to say, Rose’s thesis and its potentially subversive subtext have long been rejected (for example, Scheid 1998, 14). With Harrison and Rose, we see that the question of mana’s impersonality was not strictly a theoretical problem. They, and others with them, as we shall soon see, invested mana with values and used it to speak to contemporaries of pressing issues, whether it was the nature of Western identity and its uneasy relationship with savagery in the aftermath of the butchery of the First World War, or religion in an era of disillusionment with institutional Christianity. Supernatural? Just as the impersonality of mana provoked a sustained, if hardly innovative, discussion, challenges were also issued to its supernatural character.12 These 12

For a useful overview of the concept “supernatural” in the study of religion, see Hultkrantz (1983).

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might arise from scholars’ doubts as to whether “savages” distinguished between natural and supernatural at all (for example, Clodd 1907, 182; 1921, 3, 10; Durkheim 1912, 33–40). In other cases, there were attempts to reconfigure the discussion in terms of “primitive” notions of causality rather than religion. Certainly, Codrington’s source text did nothing to clarify the issue, as the following sentence suggests: “It is a power or influence, not physical, and in a way supernatural” (Codrington 1891, 119). As early as 1906, the historian of ideas Arthur Lovejoy (1873–1962) attacked Marett’s conceptualization of mana as a “name for the supernormal” or supernatural and thus as a religious category; for Lovejoy, mana denoted “the efficacious, the powerful, the productive” (Lovejoy 1906, 380). He carefully equated mana with other, now familiar, “primitive” notions (orenda, manitou, ngai, etc.), but not with those drawn from more prestigious textual cultures (contra Hubert and Mauss 1904, 116–18). This category, according to Lovejoy, represented the central concept of a universal “primitive philosophy,” which he baptized “primitive energetics” or “manitouism” (Lovejoy 1906, 381, 382). Understood as “impersonal, quasi mechanical … and communicable” energy or force (359, 362), mana, wakonda, etc. functioned, according to Lovejoy, as a coherent conception among “primitives.” It worked in “savage thought” “according to quite regular and intelligible laws” (379, 381), explaining any form of efficacy, and thus received practical “applications in custom and rite” (359) in order to bring about desired ends. Far from expressing an emotional response to the extraordinary and supernatural, mana encoded nothing less than a primitive theory and praxis of causation,13 which lay behind the spheres of what would eventually become religion and science (378). Lovejoy’s disagreement with Marett thus appears paradigmatic rather than adjectival. Lovejoy remained in the Tylorian, intellectualist, paradigm, which spoke of religion in terms of explanations, causes, and rationality, and insisted on the rupture between “primitives” and the civilized West. But while Lovejoy’s focus on causality opened a discussion that has yet to close (see Chapter 6), the Tylorian echoes progressively vanished—and manitou did not replace mana as the name of the second-order category as Lovejoy wished. Other scholars followed Lovejoy in conceptualizing mana as a philosophical concept of causality which could be distinguished from religion and magic.

13

Thus, Lovejoy inverts Marett’s schema: “This energy is, to be sure, terrible (under certain circumstances) and it is mysterious and incomprehensible; but it is so because it is vastly powerful, not because the things that manifest it are unusual or ‘supernatural’ or such as ‘defeat reasonable expectation.’ In other words, Mr. Marett appears to me to put the emphasis on the wrong side” (Lovejoy 1906, 380; quoting Marett 1900).

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The psychologist Irving King, who directly referred to Lovejoy in a book dealing with the development of religion, concluded from his examination of various “savage” notions of impersonal force that it was not “in itself a religious concept” (King 1910, 163). Although he accepted the Marettian idea that this power was first evoked by the emotion of awe at the terrible spectacle of nature (157–58), he added that this idea of awful power “gradually assume[d] the function of a general explanatory concept” (162). Accordingly, notions such as mana, manitou, orenda, etc. represented for King “rather a point of view or theory of the world which may or may not be used by religion” (163). It was a theory, however, that should not be identified with modern science. Drawing on the Tylorian notion of “survival,” King identified its modern counterpart in the negatively-marked idea of luck (163–64). The philosopher and psychologist Carveth Read (1848–1931) took a somewhat different tack. In his analysis of magic, Read noted that the central notion it mobilized was that of impersonal force, generalized as mana (Read 1920, 121). Read emphasized moreover that while it originated in the observation of the self and of nature, it was applied to a specific category of events, those that are “unusual, wonderful, mysterious” (122; the authorities Read mentions are Marett and Hartland). If Read’s mana was about causality, it was nevertheless tightly linked to the supernatural, and so distinct from other, presumably natural, representations of impersonal force.14 Moreover, mana appears as a secondary development, “superimposed upon the older and wider presumption of causality” (122). Mana thus did not represent the primary experience of causation but an unfortunate accident in the development of the principle of causation (124). If in these works mana was carefully distinguished from modern scientific concepts of force, others on the contrary sought to link them directly. The publisher and folklorist Emile Nourry (1870–1935), writing under the pseudonym Pierre Saintyves, published a monograph in 1914 aimed at demonstrating the continuity between the mana of “primitive” magic, the magnetic fluid of modern occultists, and the energy of contemporary physics (Saintyves 1914). In addition to exhaustively documenting the various forms impersonal power takes throughout human history, Saintyves attempted to account for its origin and development. All these dynamistic representations, according to Saintyves, proceed from the same human desire to explain one’s fellow man and environment. Humanity thus ever looks for causes. But being constrained by his “imagination,” man can only represent reality under the two forms of time

14

While Read does not spell out what these are, he uses the term “common sense” and opposes magic to science (Read 1920, 122, 124).

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and space, becoming and essence.15 To the former belong dynamistic notions: force, energy, mana, etc., to the latter, souls and atoms (Saintyves 1914, 65– 66). Accordingly, Saintyves asserted that the laws of gravitation, of thermodynamics etc., constructed by contemporary (pre-relativity) physics—its claims of inductivism notwithstanding—were in fact obtained deductively from the universal hypothesis of a general impersonal force (110). The conclusion was inescapable: Physicists tend to admit that gravitation, heat, light, electricity, magnetism … are all different forms of a single fundamental energy. This hypothesis … is—consciously or not—based on the bold generalizations of the sixteenth century physicists, of Paracelse and Robert Fludd, and we can say that through them, it is dependent on the theory of mana. Saintyves 1914, 110 That Saintyves held singular views on science—he accepted against Louis Pasteur the theory of spontaneous generation (116)—should not obscure the fact that mana could be compared to modern notions of force and even, in Saintyves’s view, set the agenda for biological and psychological research (133). Life should be studied as the force (irreducible to chemistry or physics) responsible for the passage from inorganic to organic states—or for spontaneous generation (114–16). Saintyves likewise called for a dynamistic outlook on psychical phenomena in order to account for telepathy, crystal gazing, and hypnotism (122–24; cf. Lang 1898). Crucially, Saintyves shows us mana fashioning the dreams of early twentieth-century Westerners when he writes that “physics … has allowed us numberless material applications. It fulfils already many promises made by magic, tomorrow it will fulfil the rest” (Saintyves 1914, 127).

A Power for Westerners But mana was also power. While few scholars bothered to think through the problems the concept of power raises—much less note the sociopolitical un15

“L’imagination ne sait rien se représenter en dehors du temps et de l’espace, et l’on ne connaît aucune représentation imaginaire du réel qui n’appartienne, soit au type temporel, soit au type spatial. Ces deux types peuvent s’appeler les formes a priori de l’imagination” (Imagination cannot represent to itself anything outside of time and space, and there is no imaginary representation of reality that does not belong either to the temporal or spatial type. These two types can be labelled the a priori forms of imagination) (Saintyves 1914, 65).

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derpinnings of mana in Codrington’s accounts16—this substantive nevertheless had nolens volens important implications for the study of religion. The change in object from spiritual beings (gods, ancestors, etc.) to power, in keeping with its anti-intellectualist origin, was consonant with a shift in the attitude toward religion. The new paradigm left behind a focus on individual belief to be evaluated in rational terms (and thus be faulted), and recast religion as a matter of subjective experience whose psychological effectiveness could actually be observed positively, not least in the context of ritual.17 As such, it abandoned the pejorative idiom of survivals (see Durkheim 1912, 287; Marett 1920) and its concomitant militant atheism. Having at its core an emotional experience of indeterminate power, religion no longer appeared as a foolish remnant from our primitive past; religion was reconfigured as a fundamental and universal element in the psychological life of mankind (see Kippenberg 1999, 240). While there is little doubt that Marett himself never “danced out religion” and wrote disparagingly of “savages,” he nevertheless echoed his anti-intellectualist theory in his personal life writing that for him “religion was partly a matter of the heart as contrasted with the head” (Marett 1929, xxxi; 1941, 76; see also 76–78). Much like Jane Harrison and Pierre Saintyves, Marett’s example suggests that the field of application of mana as a second-order category need not be restricted to the “primitives.” As we shall see now, mana soon came to provide scholars with the means to grant relevance to religion, however differently they might understand mana and religion, in their own society. Emile Durkheim: Society as Impersonal Power One of these scholars was the French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858– 1917). Proponent of a positivist methodology (for example, Durkheim 1895), Durkheim had long been interested in religion and the question of the nature of social solidarity in his own society (Durkheim 1893) when he set out to analyze what he believed to be the most simple and “primitive” religion, Australian totemism, in the explicit aim of “explaining the present reality … i.e. the man of today” (Durkheim 1912, 2). And as Jonathan Z. Smith has recognized (2004), mana was to play a central role in this project. 16

17

Durkheim, who mentions the correlation of mana and power, represents an exception, but this does not lead him to a discussion of political power (Durkheim 1912, 305; 1915, 213). To borrow the expression of the philosopher John Austin (1965), such experiences cannot be evaluated in terms of truth or falsity, but only as felicitous or infelicitous (see also Tambiah 1985, 77).

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In the Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, Durkheim seeks to demonstrate that the true object of religion, and hence all historical religions, Christianity included, is nothing other than society, to which he grants a sui generis reality (Durkheim 1912, 22; 1915, 16). To do so, he begins by providing a heuristic definition of religion based on the opposition between the adjectives sacred and profane, rather than on an object of worship, whether nature (Max Müller) or spiritual beings—E. B. Tylor, who looks a good deal like the proverbial dead horse, is roundly flogged (Durkheim 1912, 67–91; 1915, 48–65).18 He then assigns the role of simplest religion, and accordingly that of test subject, to totemism.19 While Durkheim defends his position on the grounds that totemism evinces the simplest social organization, totemism crucially provides him with a religion whose explicit objects of worship had no definite personality. Moreover, Durkheim is careful to show that, appearances notwithstanding, totemism has in reality nothing to do with the worship of specific plants or animals (1912, 197; 1915, 139; contra, for example, Tylor 1899). Altering his definition of the adjective “sacred,” construed in 1912 in terms of “separation,” not “tradition,” as in his 1898 definition of religious phenomena (Durkheim 1899, 19), allows Durkheim to show that it is not only the members of the totemic specie (witchetty grubs, kangaroos, etc.) that are sacred, the adult male members of the clan themselves and the graphic representations of the totem are sacred as well, since they are all to some extent objects of restrictions. They all give rise to “similar feelings” and, therefore, have something in common, a “principle,” which makes them sacred and which is the true object of worship (Durkheim 1912, 268–69; 1915, 188–89). This principle is a force: “Totemism is the religion, not of such and such animals or men or images, but 18

19

Durkheim’s famous definition reads: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them” (Durkheim 1912, 65; 1915, 47). This choice has led to a lively discussion; see, for example, Lévi-Strauss (1962) and Rosa (2003, 159–74). The “inventor” of totemism—a purely artificial category—was John McLennan (1827–1881), who gave the following description: “there are tribes of men (called primitive) now existing on the earth in the Totem stage, each named after some animal or plant, which is its symbol or ensign, and which by the tribesmen is religiously regarded … In several cases we have seen, the tribesmen believe themselves to be descended from the Totem, and in every case to be, nominally at least, of its breed or species. We have seen a relation existing between the tribesmen and their Totem, as in the case of the bear, that might well grow into that of worshipper and god, leading to the establishment of religious ceremonials to allay the Totem’s just anger, or secure his continued protection” (McLennan 1869, 427).

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of an anonymous and impersonal force” (1912, 269; 1915, 188). While invisible, like electricity, this force is in no way illusory for its physical and moral effects on the natives may be observed.20 The problem for Durkheim was not just that this force is invisible; it is not even present in Australian aborigine (emic) discourse and consciousness.21 This was all the more a problem since Durkheim stressed that the sociology he was founding was positive and dealt with empirical data (Durkheim 1895). His solution was comparison with ethnographic contexts where such a force was part of emic discourse (Durkheim 1912, 272–73; 1915, 191–92). This implied generalizing this notion of force and raising it to second-order status, as John King, Marett, and Hubert and Mauss had done. Predictably, Durkheim detailed its occurrences in various locales, particularly in the North American totemisms (wakan, orenda, manitou; 1912, 274–79; 1915, 192–96). However, the ethnographic case that best fit his aim was Codrington’s discussion of mana— actually, the text already quoted by Max Müller in 1878 (see Chapter 2). For Durkheim, Melanesian mana, its non-totemic cultural context notwithstanding, represented the perfect emic expression of the totemic principle or force which he believed to be at work in Australian totemism, to the extent that he titled the relevant chapter “The notion of the totemic principle, or mana, and the idea of force.” Having given a French translation of Codrington’s letter to Müller where he erased the passages suggesting mana’s link with persons (Codrington 1891, 118 n1),22 Durkheim exclaimed: Is this not the same notion of an anonymous and diffused force, the germs of which we recently found in the totemism of Australia? Here 20

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“In one sense, they are even material forces which mechanically engender physical effects. Does an individual come in contact with them without having taken proper precautions? He receives a shock which might be compared to the effect of an electric discharge (Durkheim 1912, 271; 1915, 190). On the imagery of force in Durkheim’s work, see Takla and Pope (1985). John King had found an Australian counterpart to mana, boylya, (King 1892, 1: 133); Durkheim, however, does not follow him, since for him: “Boyl-ya is strictly used for evil ends and thus belongs to magic and not religion” (Durkheim 1912, 282–83; 1915, 197–98). J. Z. Smith has discussed Durkheim’s misleading translation, noting that: “Durkheim’s interest in establishing the facticity of the ‘totemic principle’ in Australia was high. The notion of an ‘impersonal force’ accomplished a set of important objectives. Impersonality insured a collective, social understanding of sacrality. It blocked, as well, any deistic definition of religion. Above all, social force, conceived as parallel to force as conceptualized in the physical sciences, guaranteed facticity by providing an ‘objective correlative’— a goal persistently reiterated throughout Durkheim’s career-long project of establishing the social sciences” (Smith 2004, 131).

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is the same impersonality … Here is the same ubiquity … Therefore there is no undue temerity in attributing the Australians an idea such as the one we have discovered in our analysis of totemic beliefs, for we find it again, but abstracted and generalized to a higher degree, at the basis of other religions whose roots go back into a system like the Australian one and which visibly bear the mark of this. Durkheim 1912, 278; 1915, 194–95 Thus demonstrating that mana is the object not just of Melanesian religion as Codrington or Müller argued but really of the simplest religion of mankind, Durkheim went on to conclude, by virtue of the evolutionist assumption of the continuity between all religions, that at the core of every religion stands this mana which represents “the original matter out of which have been constructed those beings of every sort which the religions of all times have consecrated and adored” (Durkheim 1912, 284; 1915, 199). And among these beings, in yet another attack against animism, Durkheim placed the individual soul (1912, 343ff.; 1915, 240ff.). But Durkheim’s use of mana did not stop there; his notion of impersonal force was to play a major role in the vindication of religious phenomena. Through the totem, simultaneously recipient of cult and symbol of the clan, Durkheim posited his famous equation between mana and society.23 At the same time, this equation provided Durkheim with the opportunity of demonstrating the objective reality of mana, a god-like force, both coercive and beneficial, and so of religion (1912, 299, 322; 1915, 209, 225). To do so, Durkheim needed to show that the clan is more than simply the sum of its members. It must both exist within and transcend individual consciousnesses (1912, 317; 1915, 221–22). To document this transcendence, Durkheim turned to Australian corrobborees. In their descriptions of these clan gatherings, ethnographers of the turn of the century had reported that the native “easily loses control of himself” (1912, 308; 1915, 215). Durkheim accounted for this in terms of social psychology, according to which “the very fact of concentration acts as an exceptionally powerful stimulant,” giving rise to a sort of “electricity” which exalts the clansmen, makes them stronger, and leads them to extraordinary acts (1912, 308–09; 1915, 215–16). The clan, by means of this sui generis experience, “awakens in individuals the idea of an exterior force which dominates and exalts them” (1912, 314; 1915, 219). This impersonal and powerful force is society/mana, coercing its members (for example, it forbids clansmen to eat their 23

“The god of the clan, the totemic principle [i.e. mana], can therefore be nothing else than the clan itself, personified and represented to the imagination under the visible form of the animal or vegetable which serves as totem” (Durkheim 1912, 295; 1915, 206).

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totem) and ensuring their well-being (Durkheim gives the example of individuals healed by contact with a representation of the totem carved on a stone). Returning to a key idea of his Règles de la méthode sociologique, Durkheim asserted the reality and positivity of social things, and hence of mana (cf. Martelli 1996, 54). The adherents of historical religions—twentieth-century Christians included—are undoubtedly mistaken in representing the powerful effects of society under the guise of an animal, a plant, or a transcendent god, but the error has to do with the form, not the contents. The symbolized power is very real; religion is not the illusion intellectualists believed it to be: “this power exists, it is society” (Durkheim 1912, 322; 1915, 225). Durkheim moreover assigned a specific role to religion: to integrate the individual, to renew collective sentiments and ideas, and thus maintain society itself—a function no less fundamental among Australian Totemists than his ever more secular contemporaries (1912, 610; 1915, 427). With the Elementary Forms, Durkheim thus went further than either Marett or Hubert and Mauss.24 Whereas Marett’s supernaturalism focused on the psychological reaction (awe), rather than on the indeterminate power that triggered it, Durkheim took that power as his main object, determined its nature (mana is the power of society), and so reified it. Similarly, Durkheim altered his nephew Mauss’s mana. First, he re-categorized it from magic to the more positively marked religion. Second, he strengthened its ontological status: whereas Hubert and Mauss had claimed that mana arises from collective suggestion, which induced the idea of efficacy, Durkheim grants social gatherings a real, sui generis efficacy. Although Durkheim has been labelled, correctly, a reductionist who had little sympathy for the institutionalized religions of his day and their supernatural objects, his analysis nonetheless had positive implications for religion as a social phenomenon. Not only does he show that religion has a basis in reality, but he also carves out a sphere for religion within his own society, a sphere distinct from science (contra Tylor, Frazer, etc.), made up of feelings and actions (1912, 615; 1915, 430–31). And although Durkheim observed the recession of traditional religions in his own day, he could foresee no end to the crucial integrative role of religion. Twentieth-century Frenchmen and their lay Republic needed religion just as much as Australian Aborigines. And what might be the object of the religion of a people enlightened by the science of society if not the impersonal power of society, or in other words, mana?

24

For Marcel Mauss’s views on Durkheim’s mana c. 1930, see Mauss (1996, 234).

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The Theological Recuperation of Mana In the Elementary Forms, Durkheim had established a close relationship between the totemic principle, i.e. mana, and sacred things. Although the term “sacred” essentially functioned in the book as an adjective (whose meaning was constructed through opposition with an adjectival profane (see Paden 1991)) and therefore did not single out a determined object or objects, the mobilization of Codrington’s substantialized mana as the common feature of the sui generis taxon “sacred things” carried with it the risk of analogically granting substance to sacredness. And if for Durkheim mana remained what “gives things their sacred character” (Paden 1991, 20), others saw the opportunity afforded by the equation of mana and sacredness, thereby essentializing the latter as the object of religion. However, those who took this step did not reduce sacredness to society; rather they looked to Marett and his discussion of mana in terms of an emotional experience of mysterious power (Marett 1900). Building on a twin construction of continuity from “primitive” to civilized religion: historical (for example, Jane Harrison (1912) and Vilhelm Grønbech (1913)) and theoretical (for example, Durkheim), mana came to be incorporated in the second decade of the twentieth century, into a new type of discourse: Christian theology. Nathan Söderblom: Historian of Religion and Archbishop If there is one man who embodies this theological turn, it must be the Swede Nathan Söderblom (1866–1931).25 As a historian of religion, Söderblom had studied ancient Iranian religions with James Darmestetter, revised Cornelis Tiele’s Kompendium der Religionsgeschichte (Tiele 1912), and taught Religionsgeschichte in Uppsala and Leipzig. But he was also a man of the cloth. Born to a pietistic family, he studied both the arts and theology, was ordained a Lutheran minister in 1893 and archbishop of Uppsala in 1914.26 His interest for comparative religion answered to his ecumenical vocation and his firm belief that

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Söderblom has been the object of a number of studies, usually from a theological perspective, for example, Andrae (1932), Aulén (1932), and Hoffmann (1948). Sharpe’s biography (Sharpe 1990) represents an exception, although Sharpe’s bias in favor of the phenomenology of religion leads to a somewhat hagiographical treatment of Söderblom. It may be noted that at the University of Uppsala he was Professor of Theological Propaedeutics and Theological Encyclopaedia. The title may be an echo of Max Müller, who in 1873 had called the new science of religion “Comparative Theology” (Müller 1873, 21).

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the discipline had a constructive role to play for his personal faith,27 two elements already present in his 1901 dissertation and which he was to pursue until his death.28 Through comparison, Söderblom sought not so much to highlight resemblances than to stress the sui generis element common in religion, whose linear and teleological history was nothing less than the gradual revelation of God to mankind with its culmination in Christ (Sharpe 1975, 158–59). Accordingly, despite facing stiff opposition from his conservative theological colleagues in Uppsala, Söderblom regularly reaffirmed the complementarity of theology and the history of religion. Indeed, he made this complementarity the heart of his 1901 inaugural lecture, later published under the title Om studiet av religionen (On the Study of Religion; Söderblom 1951; Sharpe 1990, 95– 100), in which he insists on the usefulness of the history of religion for students of theology in that it documents the universality of a specific religious feeling he calls not awe but the “longing for God.” This feeling of longing, he argues, is present just as much in the animistic “superstitious rituals of savages” as in Christian doctrine (quoted in Sharpe 1990, 216).29 His reflections on a universal and unified religion developing in history through progressive revelations required the identification of a common object for the various historical religions. This he did in his Gudstrons uppkomst (‘Origin of the Belief in God’) published in 1914 and translated into German in 1916 (Söderblom 1916), whose results he synthesized in the article “Holiness” he penned for the Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics (Söderblom 1914). In the former text, Söderblom reviews the contemporary theories of the origins of religion, which he labels Grundvorstellungen (‘basic conceptions’)—Tylor’s animism; dynamism’s power, a word used interchangeably with mana (with references to both Marett and Durkheim); and Andrew Lang’s and Wilhelm Schmidt’s High Gods—and comes to the conclusion that none independently could account for “primitive” religious experience: all three were there from the start. 27 28

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Söderblom is said to have exclaimed on his death-bed that “I know that God lives, I can prove it by the history of religion” (Sharpe 1990, 198). His dissertation dealing comparatively with representations of life after death has one occurrence of mana. It is introduced in a discussion of Melanesian material but references Léon Marillier’s somewhat generalized use of the term: “en un mot et pour employer l’expression typique dont se sert M. Marillier d’après les Mélanésiens, le mana de l’homme” (in a word and to employ the Melanesian expression used by Mr. Marillier, the mana of a man) (Söderblom 1901, 37; see Chapter 3 above). This usefulness was not merely theoretical, as shown by his paper “Does Primitive Heathenism Present Any Points of Contact for Missionary Work?” (Söderblom 1915), in which he demonstrates how the history of religion can help missionaries in the field.

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But to accept that these three conceptions have played a role in the development of religion necessitates the identification of their smallest common denominator. Therefore, Söderblom was forced to provide a definition of religion that would include both personal and impersonal conceptions in order to identify “das Wesen der Religion” (‘the essence of religion’; Söderblom 1916, 193). To avoid the animist controversy, Söderblom fell back on Durkheim’s, and Marett’s, structural pair sacred-profane; whatever is sacred (or rather “holy,” since the German term used is heilig) belongs to religion.30 Significantly, but somewhat incoherently, he opted to link this notion to one of the three theories he had analyzed: dynamism.31 According to Söderblom, the opposition between sacred and profane implied the notion of supernatural power: “Es gibt heilige, das heisst von übernatürlicher Kraft erfüllte, Menschen …” (‘there are holy people, i.e. people filled with supernatural power’; 197). In addition, Söderblom, in line with other dynamists, insisted that this power was irrational and thus irreducible to either society or science,32 conveniently allowing him to reject both Durkheim’s explanation of religion and Frazer’s intellectualism. Indeed, like Marett before him, he cut magic off from science and linked it to religion, magic consisting in asocial and evil uses of religious elements.33 The rest of Gudstrons uppkomst is devoted to punctual studies of this object in the religious development of China, India and ancient Iran.

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“Es gibt keine Frömmigkeit, die diesen Namen verdient, ohne die Vorstellung vom Heiligen” (There is no religion worthy of the name without the conception of holiness) (Söderblom 1916, 193). “Zunächst gilt es für uns zu sehen, wie weit die charakteristischen Kennzeichen der Religion im Zusammenhang mit der Machtidee vorkommen, ja noch mehr, inwieweit sie ihr ganzes Wesen ausmachen” (First of all, it behooves us to see the extent to which the typical characteristics of religion occur in connection with the idea of power, better yet, how much it constitutes its whole being) (Söderblom 1916, 193). The critique of Durkheim’s theory occurs at page 210: “Denn [die Heiligkeit] besteht nicht in dem Gesellschaftszusammenhalt oder kühner Hypostasierung des Geistes des Gemeingefühls; sondern sie besteht hartnäckig in einer Irrationalität. Nimmt man sie fort, dann ist die Religion machtlos” (Indeed, holiness does not consist in social cohesion or a bold hypostasis of the spirit of the common feeling; rather it consists persistently in an irrationality. Take that away and religion is powerless) (Söderblom 1916, 210). Söderblom provides three typical features of magic: “Der Umgang mit bösen Mächten, illojale [sic] Privatpraxis, die mit dem regelrechten Priesterstand konkurriert, und Anwendung des Göttlichen als blosses Mittel anstatt frommer Unterwerfung und Ehrfurcht” (Contact with evil powers, dishonest private practice competing with the true priestly class, and use of the divine as simple means instead of pious submission and respect) (Söderblom 1916, 218; see also 194, 214–23).

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Rather than focusing on God, gods, society, or particular beliefs and practices, Söderblom defined the fundamental object of religion as holiness (Das Heilige, die Heiligkeit). In doing so, the archbishop nominalized what had functioned adjectivally in both Durkheim and Marett.34 This shift was further elaborated in the influential article he penned for the prestigious Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics. There, the nominal use of the term holy was foregrounded from the start: “Holiness is the great word in religion; it is even more essential than the notion of God” (Söderblom 1914, 731). While “holy” does occur in the article as an adjective defined in opposition to “profane,” not only does Söderblom regularly add the suffix—ness to it, but he also offers a positive definition of holiness: “not the mere existence of the divinity, but its mana, its power, its holiness, is what religion involves” (731). While he did not explicitly justify this momentous theoretical shift, Söderblom had indicated in Gudstrons uppkomst that terms such as mana originally designated objects and only became adjectival at a later stage.35 Söderblom defines holiness through two terms, mana and power (see also 1914, 734, 736), which he had identified in a previous publication (Söderblom 1916, 69; for a critique of this equation, see Widengren 1945, 87). This juxtaposition with Codrington’s substantial power allows him to conceptualize holiness as more than a state—as his use of the expression “the holy” suggests, he is moreover careful to note that holiness has little to do with ethics (Söderblom 1914, 732, 740). However impalpable and impersonal it might be, holiness reveals itself through the presence of an irrational feeling of “awe” (732, 734; German Furcht, 1916, 195; cf. Marett 1900; 1909), a feeling that leads to the cordoning off of its stimulus—a nod to Durkheim’s Elementary Forms much nuanced by Söderblom’s analysis of this separation in terms not of social convention but of psychological reflex. Moreover, Söderblom explicitly rejected the Frenchman’s analysis of mana as the power of society (Söderblom 1914, 732), opting for Marett’s view of mana as denoting the mysterious: “Holiness is viewed [by whom?] as a mysterious power or entity connected with certain beings, things, events or actions” (731). There followed the usual examples 34

35

Marett used the opposition between natural and supernatural (Marett 1900), but compared it to the opposition between profane and sacred (Marett 1909, 126; see also James 1917, 224). “Bei dem gegenständlichen Denken der primitivsten Menschen, dürfte man annehmen, dass solche Worte ursprünglich zur Bezeichnung von Gegenständen gedient haben, ehe sie adjektivische Bedeutung gewannen und Eigenschaften bezeichneten” (Concerning the objective thought of the most primitive people, one should admit that such words originally have been used to designate objects, before they acquired an adjectival meaning and indicated qualities) (Söderblom 1916, 95).

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from Melanesia, North America, Australia, as well as from medieval Scandinavia (see Chapter 5). While Söderblom was highly dependent on Marett’s supernaturalist theory, he did make one critical change. Whereas for the Oxonian mana functioned as a heuristic, theoretical category devised as a means to account for a specific type of empirical, human experience rather than an objective reality, holiness—mana repackaged—became for the archbishop the sui generis object of study. Söderblom was neither interested in an emotion, however peculiar, nor in its human subject, but rather in the mysterious cause of such an emotion, which he was geared personally and professionally to see in transcendental terms. Accordingly, Söderblom assigned to it the primary causal role in religious phenomena. For instance, it is holiness/mana, not society or pragmatist psychology, which explains ritual practice: “the positive rites have as their object the acquiring, concentrating, and utilizing of holiness” (732), a sentence which has clear echoes of Codrington’s description of mana in Melanesian religion (see Codrington 1891, 118–19, 192). Söderblom accounted for negative practices (e.g. taboos) as grounded on the dangerous character of holiness as an exterior, objective power. More generally, Söderblom closed the door to any symbolical, not to mention reductionist, interpretation. He thus granted holiness a foundational role for humanity, noting that institutions founded on holiness develop beneficial social, psychological, and moral effects, and went as far as to claim that civilization could never exist without holiness.36 Finally, the last paragraphs of the article provide something of a phenomenology of holiness, describing its various manifestations in history. There, Söderblom discussed the various modalities in which religious power manifests itself, be it acquired, contagious, intermittent, etc. Qualities that not only cement the objectivity and reality of this power but also its universality (the examples are drawn from India, Australia, Ancient Israel, etc.). But most importantly, Söderblom included Christianity in the discussion. He was particularly careful to stress that in the New Testament holiness above all denotes supernatural and substantial power and not a state: “in the Church ‘holy’ never became a merely ethical word, but chiefly suggests divine, supernatural power” (Söderblom 1914, 740), in other words: mana. Whether among

36

“The value of primitive holiness or tabu lies (a) in the strength and coherence it gives to society, for ‘the holy’ supplies a perpetual centre of gravity … Civilization and progress are inconceivable without the profoundly unreasoning sanction afforded by holiness” (Söderblom 1914, 735; my emphasis). This irrationalist position is based on Kant’s categorical imperative (735).

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Melanesians or Christians, “the underlying thought is that holiness means revelation of divine power” (740).37 With this article, Söderblom had proposed a new object of study, the holy, which was at the same time an object of experience for contemporary Western Christians such as himself. And indeed, he was writing from personal experience. In 1893, as Söderblom himself later related, he had had a direct experience of the holiness of God: There came over him [Söderblom writes in the third person] what might be called a direct perception of the holiness of God. He understood what he had long felt indistinctly, that God was far stricter than he could imagine or that anyone can really comprehend. God is a consuming fire. This apprehension was so powerful, so shattering, that he was unable to stay on his feet. Quoted in Sharpe 1990, 44 Others followed his lead. Rudolf Otto, who likewise adopted das Heilige (later Anglophone authors translated the term as “the Sacred”) in 1917 as the fundamental, transcultural, irrational object of religion, famously made such personal experience of transcendental power the prerequisite for the study of religion (Otto 1968, 22). And although Otto spoke of the “numinous” (built on the Latin numen, see above), its phenomenological description, as he himself admitted, was largely dependent on both Marett and Söderblom’s mana (31, n1). Indeed, Otto’s description of the numinous as a terrifying yet fascinating mystery (mysterium tremendum; 29–30) appears to be little more than a pretentious gloss on Marett’s awe. Of course, Söderblom and Otto cloaked their object in names that would be acceptable to their contemporaries—for what early twentieth-century Westerner would admit to worshipping an object designated by a category born of “primitives”? But behind holiness, the holy, and the sacred there lurks mana, Codrington’s impersonal, substantial, and supernatural power. A power 37

Marett’s student, the theologian E. O. James (1888–1972), came to a similar position (seemingly independently) in the conclusion of his study of primitive religion, writing that: “A study of primitive ritual and belief therefore reveals, among other things, a permanent element of truth—a progressive revelation. It shows how God, in His infinite wisdom, has led the human race onwards, not only in civilization, but also in knowledge of Himself, from very lowly ideas of deity, often indistinguishable from mana, to a doctrine which the Incarnate Son could claim as His own … from very crude and imperfect notions of holiness, to a type of character which is not essentially changed but only invested with supreme lustre and power in the sinless holiness of Jesus Christ” (James 1917, 239).

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made so objectively real by these scholars that it became possible to sketch its essence and thus produce, quite literally, a theology thereof. That such a theology was, and is, congenial to Western contemporaries is attested by the extraordinary success of Otto’s description of the transcendent reality knowable through religious experience in The Idea of the Holy (Otto 1968), a book translated into some twenty languages and still in print today. Gerardus van der Leeuw, Power, and the Phenomenology of Religion With Nathan Söderblom and Rudolf Otto, we are moving away from dynamism towards the phenomenology of religion. Although this paradigm is often presented as too protean to allow for a single definition (for example, Allen 1987, 273), one book undoubtedly sought to provide, and was read for a time as providing, a yardstick (see Sharpe 1975, 229). Aptly titled Phänomenologie der Religion, Gerardus van der Leeuw’s 1933 magnum opus (Leeuw 1986) did not just provide a systematic description of religious phenomena, it also defined the object, method, and disciplinary position of the phenomenology of religion. In that context, he granted mana a critical role. Gerardus van der Leeuw (1890–1950), an ordained minister in the Dutch Reformed Church, had studied theology and the history of religion, writing his doctoral dissertation on ancient Egyptian representations of God (including impersonal ones). In 1918, Van der Leeuw was appointed to the chair of the History of Religion and the History of the Doctrine of God in the Groningen Faculty of Theology. Like Nathan Söderblom, whom he admired,38 Van der Leeuw evoked in his inaugural lecture the relationship between the history of religion and theology, subordinating the former to the latter. In his view, the study of the world’s varied religious manifestations was a means to specify the essence of religion, or from a teleological perspective, Protestant Christianity (Sharpe 1975, 230–31; Waardenburg 1978, 190).39 Like Söderblom and Otto before him, Van der Leeuw understood this essence in sui generis, transcendental terms, and the possibility of revelation is indeed presupposed in much of his published work.40 Obviously, the admission of the reality of revelation

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Van der Leeuw may have encountered Söderblom’s work during his studies under William Brede Kristensen who mentioned Söderblom with approbation in his posthumously published lectures (Kristensen 1960, 186). He stated in his Inleidning tot de Theologie (‘Introduction to Theology’) that: “All science leads to God and all science proceeds from God” (quoted in Carman 1965, 20). “We can try to understand religion from a flat plain, from ourselves as the centre; and we can also understand how the essence of religion is to be grasped only from above, beginning with God. In other words: we can … observe religion as intelligible experience; or we can concede to it the status of incomprehensible revelation. For in its ‘reconstruction,’ ex-

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required a particular method, distinct from those current in history and the human sciences (Leeuw 1986, 686–87; see, for example, McCutcheon 1997)— the phenomenological method.41 In his book, translated into English as Religion in Essence and Manifestation in 1938, Van der Leeuw provided a blueprint for the phenomenological method (Leeuw 1986, 671–95), which he conveniently summarized as follows: The phenomenology of religion must in the first place assign names: — sacrifice, prayer, savior, myth, etc. In this way it appeals to appearances. Secondly, it must interpolate these appearances within its own life and experience them systematically. And in the third place, it must withdraw to one side, and endeavor to observe what appears while adopting the attitude of intellectual suspense [epoche]. Fourthly, it attempts to clarify what it has seen, and again … try to comprehend what has appeared. Finally, it must confront chaotic “reality,” and its still uninterpreted signs, and ultimately testify to what it has understood. Leeuw 1986, 688 Of special interest in the present context is the role of personal, subjective experience in his method. In his view, interpretation and understanding (as opposed to explanation, which he rejected) require intentional and methodical experience of religious phenomena as lived by others (674).42 But how can a scholar experience what another person, whether an ancient Egyptian or one’s earlier self, has experienced? Explicitly, Van der Leeuw dismissed the relativist, historicist problem by appealing to a common human nature (677). Implicitly he solved this problem, as Söderblom and Max Müller before him,

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perience is a phenomenon. Revelation is not; but man’s reply to revelation, his assertion about what has been revealed, is also a phenomenon from which, indirectly, conclusions concerning the revelation itself can be derived” (Leeuw, 1986, 679; my emphasis). For the phenomenology of religion, see, for example, Bleeker (1963, 1–15), Sharpe (1975, 220–50), Erricker (1999), Molendijk (2005, 30–48). For a detailed discussion of Van der Leeuw’s work, see Waardenburg (1978, 187–248). It should be noted that the phenomenology of religion is not indebted to Husserl’s phenomenology. To which he adds an element that may strike as somewhat out of place but certainly points to his disciplinary position: “Understanding … presupposes intellectual restraint [epoche]. But this is never the attitude of the cold-blooded spectator: it is, on the contrary, the loving gaze of the lover on the beloved object. For all understanding rests upon selfsurrendering love … this is the Platonic, as well as the Christian, experience” (Leeuw 1986, 684).

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by positing that all religions are at their core essentially identical. And why are they identical? Because all of them are about power: “religion implies that man does not simply accept the life that is given to him. In life he seeks power … in and about his own life, man seeks something that is superior, whether he wishes merely to make use of this or to worship it” (679). All historical religions, whether “primitive” or civilized, have a common object, or rather a common essence, power, a power not of this world, a power which is, as Van der Leeuw says, with Rudolf Otto, “wholly other” (Leeuw 1986, 681; Otto 1968, 45)—a power anyone can experience. It is this unifying object that governs Van der Leeuw’s lengthy typological exposition of the various gods, spirits and other objects of worship known to humanity (Leeuw 1986, 23–187), linking all religious manifestations in a long chain that goes from the simplest to the most complex experiences of transcendent impersonal power via personal manifestations thereof.43 Unsurprisingly, Van der Leeuw turned to Melanesian mana (drawn from Codrington, but mentioning Rudolf Lehmann’s critical discussion (1922)) to provide a “primitive” instance of this general object. In the early stages of his discussion, mana also functions as a comparative category, allowing Van der Leeuw to point to the universality of impersonal power, with examples ranging from North American notions (wakan, orenda) to occurrences from China and Vedic India (Tao, Ṛ ta).44 Surprise comes in, however, with the return of mana in the final chapter of his discussion of the objects of religion, dealing with representations of the absolutely powerful, the ineffable divine (Leeuw 1986, 182–87, especially 185). What unites the loftiest conceptions of the divine and “primitive” notions such as mana is that they both are devoid of “will” and “form,”45 that

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Van der Leeuw opens his discussion by rejecting “god” as the object of religion in favor of a “vague ‘something’ … Something Other … consequence of the Power it generates” (Leeuw 1986, 23). Accordingly, he selects the term “dynamism” to qualify his views, noting that the term has no chronological bearing, all religion(s) being fundamentally dynamistic— in fact “it lives and flourishes even in our day” (27–28). “Many ancient peoples were familiar with the idea of a World-course … a living Power operating within the Universe. Tao in China, Ṛ ta in India, Asha in Iran, Ma’at among the ancient Egyptians, Dike in Greece:—these are … living and impersonal powers [and] possess mana-like character” (Leeuw 1986, 30). “Our second Chapter dealt with Power theorized [he also uses mana, see Leeuw (1986, 30, 31)], rendered absolute, having attained dominance with no creation of form nor inclusion of will. Here, form and will having been abandoned as inadequate, we shall discuss Power unsustained by any person; Power that is not the outcome of will and that does not display itself, but absolutely is” (182). The examples Van der Leeuw gives include

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is the personality that so afflicts ancestors, ghosts, gods, as well as the grandfatherly, white-bearded Christian God (177–81). With these two extremes, we are dealing with experiences of pure power, almost unadulterated by social, psychological, and cultural contingency—what, according to Van der Leeuw, most closely approached the essence of religion, the “ultimate experience that evades our observation” (683; with clear echoes of Schleiermacher). Van der Leeuw had prepared the way for this description in his opening chapter dealing with Melanesian mana. There not only did he highlight the a posteriori character of Codrington’s mana (which can be read as confirming its empirical nature),46 but he completely did away with the structural approach present in the writings of Marett, Durkheim, and Söderblom: “there is no antithesis whatsoever between secular acts and sacred; every extraordinary action generates the experience of Power” (Leeuw 1986, 25). In this way, Van der Leeuw sought to avoid the pitfalls of reductionism and negative definitions, while pushing not just the substantialization but the essentialization of mana (and concurrently religion) to its extreme. With Van der Leeuw, mana had left the domain of anthropology, both in geographical and epistemological terms. But where, then, was it situated? In Phänomenologie der Religion, Van der Leeuw claimed that the phenomenology of religion was not theology, in that the former was not concerned with truth claims (687). Yet, in his “scholarly confession” delivered in 1946, Van der Leeuw had the following to say about their relationship: I have never felt the need to forget that I am a theologian, and naturally I have sought to use the phenomenological method to the benefit of theology. Not, of course, to turn theology into a science of religion but on the contrary to bring out more clearly the theological method, which I believe to be absolutely autonomous. Yet theology deals with history, since it is history which gives it its basis as well as its point of departure: revelation. Phenomenology must help theology to group the facts, to understand their meaning, and find their essence before it can evaluate them and employ them for its dogmatic ends. Leeuw 1954, 13; see also Waardenburg 1978, 228; Penner 1989, 56

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fate, the anonymous god of ancient Greek authors, Egyptian Atum, and Hindu Brahman and ātman (183–85). See, for example, Codrington (1891, 120). “Power is authenticated (or verified) empirically: in all cases whenever anything unusual or great, effective or successful is manifested, people speak of mana” (Leeuw 1986, 25).

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Van der Leeuw did not go so far as to evaluate explicitly the various objects of religion he described in his Phänomenologie der Religion. Yet for all that, his choice to begin and end his discussion with impersonal power pointed to the special status he granted mana and its lofty counterpart. If that ultimate, loftiest of all objects of religion represented its most adequate, absolute, pure, and undeceived representation (182), it follows that mana, by virtue of their equation, indirectly at least shared in this honor. And if this is true, then Van der Leeuw’s mana can be read as constituting an adequate object of faith and religious experience for contemporary Westerners!

Carl Gustav Jung on the Path to Individuation But perhaps the thinker who accorded mana the most relevance for his own society—and for himself—was the Swiss psychologist, mythologist, and New Age guru, Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961).47 After breaking with the Lutheran faith of his father, Jung turned to medicine but retained an interest in philosophy (especially Nietzsche) and in religion. Having completed his studies in 1900, Jung specialized in psychiatry, treating schizophrenic patients as well as conducting research. In 1902, he wrote a dissertation entitled On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena dealing with Spiritualism, which led him to posit the presence of unconscious contents in spiritualist mediums. At the same time, he noted in his patients’ dreams and hallucinations, likewise interpreted as unconscious material, the presence of themes known from mythologies from around the world. It was during this formative period as well that Jung embraced Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis and his hypothesis of an unconscious side to mental life. By 1909, Jung had gone into private practice, had a dream that led him to conceptualize the unconscious in phylogenetic terms, and, three years later, had broken with Freud.48 The period that followed was characterized by Jung as his “confrontation with the unconscious” (Jung 1965), by Carrie Dohe as a “psychological crisis” (Dohe 47

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There are a great deal of works on Jung, many of them hagiographic. I have profited from Homans (1987); Shamdasani (2003), and especially from the critical efforts of Noll (1994) and Dohe (2016). A version of this Lovecraftian-sounding dream is given in Noll (1994, 177–78). It consists in a downward movement through an old house. Beginning on the ground floor, Jung descends to a “vaulted Gothic room, and from there into a cellar,” he then sees steps which lead down to another, Roman, cellar. Under the Roman cellar, he sees a “tomb filled with prehistoric pottery, bones, and skulls … I thought I had made a great discovery” (Jung as quoted in Noll 1994, 177–78).

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2016, 53); its end in 1921 coincided with his “assuming his new identity as the founder of analytical psychology” (Dohe 2016, 53) and his proclamation of the collective unconscious as a part of human psyche, alongside (Freud’s) personal unconscious and consciousness. Jung was familiar with both the biological theory of evolution and the anthropological version (Tylor, Frazer, Marett; see Jung 1966, 68), as well as the comparative method of the anthropological approach, which equated prehistoric man, contemporary “savages,” and children as representatives of an earlier stage in the development of adult Western man. On the basis of the correspondences he perceived between his and his patients’ dreams and visions and ancient or “savage” mythic material, Jung transposed this model to the study of the human psyche. He thus posited the existence, in Homo sapiens, of a collective unconscious consisting in the instincts and accumulated experiences of the species during its long life prior to the evolution of consciousness (presumably rationality).49 Despite its age, the collective unconscious remained a fundamental part of civilized man’s psyche, helping it in its development. Should its workings be hindered, however, mental illness would follow.50 For Jung, the collective unconscious was a dynamic source of creativity. In an early text (1917), he pointed for instance to its (rather dubious) role in the discovery of the idea of the conservation of energy. According to him, its “creator” had not built on previous concepts but had “apprehended it intuitively” (Jung 1966, 67). From this “fact,” Jung deduced that “the idea of energy and its conservation must be a primordial image that was dormant in the collective unconscious” (68), and what better way to prove that this image was indeed primordial than by using the comparative method? The most primitive religions in the most widely separated parts of the earth are founded upon this image. These are the so-called dynamistic religions whose sole and determining thought is that there exists a uni49

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Commentators have noted the influence of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s notion of mystical or pre-logical mentality on Jung’s collective unconscious (Shamdasani 2003, 323–28; Dohe 2016, 93–94). Lévy-Bruhl (1910, passim) defined this mentality by means of its reliance on collective representations and the law of participation (Jung renamed this notion “projection,” Jung 1970, 65). Interestingly, one of the first examples of collective representation Lévy-Bruhl provided was mana (Lévy-Bruhl 1910, 2). Note that Van der Leeuw was also heavily influenced by the French philosopher. “But when an individual or a social group deviates too far from their instinctual foundations [i.e. the collective unconscious], they then experience the full impact of unconscious forces”—neurosis for individuals, wars for societies (Jung quoted in Storr 1983, 219).

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versal magical power about which everything revolves [Jung adds here the following footnote: “Generally called mana”] 68; cf. Jung 1969, 61–66 Both the law of the conservation of energy and “primitive” mana,51 and indeed his own concept of psychic energy (which he called “libido”; Jung 1969, 61, 65), were actualizations of a primordial image, or what Jung came to call an “archetype.” Jung’s archetypes—the term first appeared in 1919 (Noll 1994, 271)—are universal and ahistorical (or in other words transcendent) unconscious patterns that give rise to specific symbols or images in consciousness. As their name suggests, these images can be grouped under a limited number of motifs such as the child, the sun, the mother, etc., often interpreted religiously as gods. In Jung’s view, archetypes were indeed endowed with “numinous” energy (Jung borrowed the term from Rudolf Otto), and as such played a critical role in the psychic development of man as the key to one’s “individuation.” By individuation, Jung referred to the “process by which a person becomes differentiated from the collective” (Dohe 2016, 53), a process aiming at “wholeness” (Jung as quoted in Storr 1983, 211, 212), “self-redemption” (Dohe 2016, 64), if not outright self-deification (Noll 1994, 209–15). Individuation follows a basic pattern. First, one must abandon the mask (the persona) one has built in order to conform to society’s demands. Then one must become conscious of a series of archetypes, first the shadow, then the anima/animus (one’s representation of the other sex). Becoming conscious of the anima/animus frees the subject from its power or “mana,” leading her or him to believe she or he has acquired that mana (Jung 1966, 228). This belief leads the subject to delusions of grandeur, falling into the archetype of the “mana-personality,” a notion Jung introduced in 1928 in his Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious (on this notion see Sorge 2014): Thus the ego becomes a mana-personality. But the mana-personality is a dominant of the collective unconscious, the well-known archetype of the mighty man in the form of hero, chief, magician, medicine-man, saint, the ruler of men and spirits, the friend of God. Jung 1966, 228 51

In 1931, Jung explained the belief in mana as the result of “primitives”’ incapacity to distinguish between subject and object (with a reference to Lévy-Bruhl’s law of participation), and their tendency to project psychic contents onto others (Jung 1970, 63, 67–68). Note also the influence of dynamism on Jung’s thought.

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It is only when one becomes conscious that one has not truly gained that mana that the final stage can be reached—“the coming to birth of personality” (Jung 1966, 230), or the discovery of the God within, the Self. Although Jung documented mana carefully, quoting generously from digests of ethnographic reports52 and praising Codrington, his interest lay not in mana as an Oceanic notion. Being an archetype, the mana-personality finds incarnations everywhere as heroes, wise old men, etc., but also in “extraordinarily potent” (i.e. mana as analyzed by Lehmann (1922)) figures from history such as Lao-Tzu or Napoleon (Jung 1966, 232–33). But those for whom this archetype, and so mana, was of true relevance—because only they had the ability to bring it to consciousness—were the select few who submitted to Jungian psychological analysis, middle-aged, cultured Westerners, “often of outstanding ability” who had lost their faith and sense of purpose in a disenchanted world (Jung in Storr 1983, 211). These were women and men who moreover tended to project the archetype onto their analysts, ascribing mana to them as Jung once complained,53 though he did not object to being called the “Wise Old Man of Küsnacht” by Time magazine (Feb. 14, 1955; Dohe 2016, 3), a title which in fact referred to his mana-personality archetype. If we follow Richard Noll (1994) who sees Jung as the founder of a cult, then it appears mana proved useful in the construction of a religion specifically marketed to Westerners, a religion that moreover rejected personal gods (see Hanegraaff 1996, 497, 499). And so with Jung, the shift undergone by mana from local to universal category begun in the late nineteenth century was utterly complete; the colonized Oceanians had been deprived of yet another possession. Jung’s use of mana stands at a crossroads. While it coincided with the beginning of the end of the popularity of mana in the Academy, it also announced its new lease of life in gaming and popular fiction (Golub and Peterson 2016, 320) and in New Age religions, where Jung’s work still wields considerable influence (see Chapter 7). It is to the former that we must now turn.

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Jung followed Lovejoy (1906) and Lehmann (1922) who both interpreted mana as power rather than as what surprises (Jung 1969, 64). Jung also relied on Hubert and Mauss (1904), Julius Röhr (1919), and Söderblom (1916), who provided an extensive review of dynamist literature on religion. Jung’s most detailed discussion of ethnographic material occurs in his text on libido (Jung 1969, 61–66). Jung had also encountered mana in Freud’s 1913 Totem and Taboo (Freud 1918), where it is mentioned incidentally as a “primitive” explanation of taboos. “How very much the doctor is still mana is the whole plaint of the analyst!” (Jung 1966, 233).

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The End of Mana In 1949, the historian of religion Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) wrote what comes closest to the eulogy of mana as a second-order category.54 Although Eliade drew on such concepts as Söderblom’s the Holy and C. G. Jung’s archetypes, in his highly influential Traité d’histoire des religions (Eliade 1949; English trans. Patterns in Comparative Religion, Eliade 1958), Eliade explicitly rejected mana as a key category for the analysis of religion. In his indictment, Eliade specified the grounds for this rejection. First, mana does not represent a primary religious phenomenon; it is derived from another source (for example, a spirit), thus mana is more akin to a symptom than to a cause (Eliade 1958, 19).55 Second, mana is not found throughout the world—even putative analogues such as orenda or wakan do not in fact correspond to it. Consequently it cannot be conceptualized as the common denominator of religion and so account for its origin (20–21). Third but related to both, the definition of mana as impersonal power is in fact incorrect (see above, p. 74). This led him to the following observation: “it is wiser to set out the problem in ontological terms, saying that all that exists fully has mana” (24). While the phrase “all that exists fully” explicitly refers to the transcendent realm of “the Sacred” Eliade is famous for, it also evinces a view of mana that agreed with then current research in that it reflects a stative view of mana—mana denotes the state of being “efficacious, fecund, fertile” (23; see also Keesing 1984). The excesses of theologians and occultists notwithstanding, the responsibility for the (relative) end of the tenure of mana as a universal second-order category should be sought in a combination of detailed ethnographic and linguistic research on Oceanic mana and paradigm shifts in theory and method. As early as 1914, the field anthropologist Arthur Hocart had challenged Codrington’s definition of mana as substantive impersonal power, pointing to a rather different context of use. Hocart observed that Melanesians used the term to evaluate retrospectively the truth or success of an undertaking and not as the active means to bring about the desired aim, which led him to the following conclusion: the “fundamental meaning [of mana] appears to be ‘to 54

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See also Eliade’s positive review of the French translation of Van der Leeuw’s Phänomenologie der Religion in which Eliade nevertheless criticizes Van der Leeuw’s reliance on mana as operative category (Eliade 1950). “Tout ce qui est par excellence possède le mana” (All that truly is possesses mana) (Eliade 1949, 30). Moreover, mana cohabits with other hierophanies such as gods, nature, etc. (34). Other historians of religions had, however, written general denunciations of mana, but with rather less echo, for example, Baetke (1942, 10–16) and Widengren (1945).

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come true,’ and we might almost define mana a ‘response of spirits to prayers”’ (Hocart 1914, 100). In so doing, Hocart contradicted all the key elements of the pre-animists’ mana: grammatically it was not a substantive, it was not personal, and, adding insult to injury, it did “not evoke awe in a Fijian” (99). Rudolf Lehmann, in a comparative linguistic discussion of the ethnographic and lexical literature on mana in its native Pacific contexts, came to a similar position. He too criticized Codrington’s substantial definition of mana, which Lehmann felt had been imposed upon him by Max Müller (Lehmann 1915, 24, 57). Indeed, he concluded his study of the Oceanic word by noting that “mana is not a unique supernatural power … rather the word seems generally to describe not a subject but an epithet which can qualify the most different people and things,”56 an interpretation that fits well with the semantic core he posited for mana as “a concept of being effective” (Begriff des Wirksamseins, 43). With such a definition it becomes difficult to argue for mana as the central object of religion. The development of professional anthropology led to ever more accurate descriptions of indigenous uses of the word and ethnographers working in Melanesia became increasingly critical of the theories constructed by armchair scholars on the basis of inaccurate or misunderstood material. The nature of Ian Hogbin’s material, for instance, led him to attack Marett, and Hubert and Mauss, for seeking “the origin of magic in mana” (Hogbin 1936, 268), and more generally Hogbin noted that generalists were mistaken in regarding Oceanic mana as impersonal and universally distributed (268 n18),57 leading him to the conclusion that “its use … as a foundation on which to build up a general theory of primitive religion is not only misleading but also fallacious” (274). Raymond Firth berated armchair theorists of mana—and indeed Codrington—for their tendency to project their own expectations on the term rather than collect actual, empirical uses of the word in its native contexts (Firth 1940, 488). And as was the case with the preceding scholars, Firth found that on the island of Tikopia these uses did not suggest an actual, but abstract,

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“… das mana kein einzige übersinnliche Macht sei … vielmehr scheine das Wort überhaupt kein Subjekt, sondern ein Attribut zu bezeichnen, das den verschiedensten Menschen und Dingen zukommen könne” (Lehmann 1915, 60). Although he accepts Codrington’s definition of mana, which he quotes at length (Hogbin 1936, 266–67), Hogbin quotes approvingly an informant as saying that “to have nanama [i.e. mana] then means to be successful, through the favour of the spirits” (245), reflecting a stative meaning. This meaning is used without comment by Capell in his discussion of the linguistic history of mana (Capell 1938, 89).

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power to be wielded,58 but rather a posteriori judgements and evaluations regarding specific events, analogous to the English phrases “to have success” and “to be successful” (497), which in no way precluded the influence of spirits and gods in the happy turn of events (505). Firth further noted that there was still need of much empirical analysis of mana in other Oceanic societies before it might be possible to speak of “an identical system of ideas” in Oceania, let alone the entire world (507). But in addition to the empirical challenge, that second-order mana proved to be nothing like “real” mana, more profound epistemological shifts seem to have likewise made the theoretical category less useful. As we saw in the previous chapter, second-order mana was born in a context dominated by evolutionism and its interest for the origins of religion. With the effective overthrow of evolutionism and intellectualism, universalized mana became likewise less relevant to the study of religion. Thus, the Melanesianist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), who is generally associated with the introduction of functionalism, devoted a section of his 1925 essay Magic, Science, and Religion to refuting mana as an adequate tool for the analysis of religion and magic, which he found far too abstract and theoretical for these inherently practical categories (Malinowski 1984, 76–79; 1935, 69).59 But it was not only Malinowski’s lack of interest in origins that led him to such a position. Nor was it his doubts about the quality of the information on Melanesian mana, which had not been obtained through “participant observation,” the method for which he has become famous (see Malinowski 1922, 1–25). Indeed, his method which stressed participation in, and direct observation of, native life rather than decontextualized discussions with informants (7), led to a focus on discrete, if not unique, events, rather than general abstractions, and more generally favored cultural specificity over the search for cross-cultural universals (see Stocking 1996, 276). Accordingly, the very few occurrences of mana in Malinowski’s writings (mana did not belong to the lexis of the Trobriand Islands where he worked) exclusively refer to Melanesian, emic uses (Malinowski 1935,

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“‘Supernatural power’ for instance does represent one aspect of the concept but it leaves out of account the essentially material evidence of such power, and directs attention to the means rather than to the end-product” (Firth 1940, 506). The force active in magic “certainly is not a force such as the one described by Dr. Codrington … And again, the similar conception found among North American Indians cannot have anything to do with the specialized concrete virtue of magic” (Malinowski 1984, 77). It should be noted, however, that in his earlier Argonauts Malinowski accepted the raising of mana to second-order status, although he did not use mana in his discussion of Trobriand magic (Malinowski 1922, 514).

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215). If Malinowski did generalize, he looked for the underlying functions (of religion, of magic, etc.), which did not coincide with the stated aims and representations of the various acts as reported by the actors (Malinowski 1984, 89–90; see also 1966, esp. 67–68). He thus eschewed such emic explanations as mana. In other words, what these fieldworkers, and others like them (for example, Evans-Pritchard 1929, 622), were doing was precisely the opposite of what was described in Chapter 3: they were carefully deconstructing the universalization of mana by literally returning to its Oceanic home, while some of them went as far as to challenge its very conceptualization as a religious category. And indeed since the end of the 1930s, most of the anthropologists who discussed mana have been Oceanists dealing with Oceanic matters. But it is one thing to pronounce a scholarly category dead, and it is another for it to truly disappear. A text by Claude Lévi-Strauss, published in 1950, a year after Eliade’s declaration, offers a neat, if somewhat playful, illustration of the persistence of universalized mana. Tasked with the writing of an introduction to a selection of works by Marcel Mauss, Lévi-Strauss took the opportunity to evaluate Hubert and Mauss’s use of mana in the Esquisse (Hubert and Mauss 1904) to account for magic. According to Lévi-Strauss, their mana was inadequate to that task in that it was not a sufficiently second-order category; it was too much of an indigenous theory, and still needed to be reduced to be fruitful (Lévi-Strauss 1987, 48–49, 57). But, having rejected Hubert and Mauss’s mana, Lévi-Strauss immediately went on to re-theorize it within his structuralist theory of human thought. He began by noting how mana was a truly universal notion; even Frenchmen and Americans had words that, like mana, suggested surprise (or should we say awe?) at something unknown or strangely effective (for example, “truc” and “oomph” respectively; 54–55). This distribution led him to analyze their role within what he took to be universal symbolic thought, concluding that mana, etc., played the role of an empty symbol “which can mean anything60 simply because it means nothing” (Boyer 1986, 52): [Mana is] zero symbolic value, that is, a sign marking the necessity of a supplementary symbolic content over and above that which the signified already contains, which can be any value at all, provided it is still part of the available reserve. Lévi-Strauss 1987, 64 60

“Force and action, quality and state, substantive, adjective and verb all at once” (LéviStrauss 1987, 64).

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Although Lévi-Strauss did not take the matter further, his mana, as semiotic category, represented nothing other than a thoroughly theoretical conceptualization, in sharp opposition to the contemporary anthropological consensus. While Lévi-Strauss’s effort and others like it remained largely isolated within post-1950s anthropology,61 it nonetheless points to the enduring popularity of westernized mana. And indeed, this mana went on to thrive in the decades that followed Eliade’s eulogy, but just not where it was born, moving both geographically and discursively. On the one hand, it pursued its voyage to the West, severing whatever bonds might still hold it to Oceania; on the other, it left anthropology and the history of religion passing into historical and philological studies. But perhaps most remarkably, it embarked on a career outside of Academia. It is to such discursive spaces that the subsequent chapters of this book will turn, first to Medieval Scandinavian studies, then to popular culture. In these spaces, Codringtonian mana has provided an idiom of power which can be put to various uses, whether it is to misrepresent political power, to provide a rationalized systematization of magic for computer game designers, or to legitimate the ritual practices of twenty-first-century Neo-Pagans. 61

Ulterior occurrences of universalized mana in anthropological circles include the antistructuralist Laura Makarius in her study of African marginal but powerful figures (Makarius 1974); the cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer working on the Fang people of Cameroon has discussed the acquisition of “mana-terms” understood à la Lévi-Strauss (Boyer 1986). Finally, it may be noted that anthropologists associated with the so-called ontological turn have recently shown interest in mana because of its characterization by Codrington, Mauss, and Lévi-Strauss among others as simultaneously thing and concept, verb, adjective, and noun, that is as collapsing central Western dichotomies (especially Holbraad 2007, see also Viveiros de Castro 2009, 250–51, da Col 2012; for a critique of such uses of mana, see Kolshus 2016).

Chapter 5

Mana in the North1 Hjalti went up to the king [St Óláfr] and greeted him, “and we sorely need you, king, to lay your hamingja upon this expedition,” and said he hoped they would meet again safe and sound. The king asked where he was going. “With Björn,” he said. The king said, “Your going with him will improve the chances of this expedition, because your hamingja has often proven itself. Know for certain that I shall keep you in mind, if that does any good, and confer my hamingja on you and your companions.” Óláfs saga helga, ch. 692

∵ In a text published in 1945 in the Saga-Book of the Viking Society for Northern Research, a prestigious journal of medieval Scandinavian studies, Gabriel Turville-Petre, a specialist of Old Norse/Icelandic literature and culture, provided a detailed philological analysis of the Old Norse substantive hamingja. Having reviewed the various occurrences of the term in his Scandinavian sources, Turville-Petre came to make the following synthetic statement: “hamingja, as has been said, also means ‘attendant spirit,’ but more commonly it is used in the abstract sense of ‘fortune,’ ‘destiny.’ In some instances of its use hamingja seems almost to mean ‘strength,’ ‘mana”’ (Turville-Petre 1945, 123).3

1 This chapter is a revised version of a text originally published under the title “Mana in the North: Power and Religion in Medieval Scandinavian Historiography” in the journal History of Religions 56 (2016): 149–166. 2 Hjalti gekk at konungi ok kvaddi hann–“ok þurfum vér nú þess mjǫk, konungr, at þú leggir hamingju þína á þessa ferð”–ok bað þá heila hittask. Konungr spurði, hvert hann skyldi fara. “Með Birni,” segir hann. Konungr segir: “Bœta mun þat til um þessa ferð, at þú farir með þeim, því at þú hefir opt reyndr verit at hamingju. Vittu þat víst, at ek skal allan hug á leggja, ef þat vegr nǫkkut, ok til leggja með þér mína hamingju ok ǫllum yðr” (Aðalbjarnarson 2002, 88). 3 While Turville-Petre wrote on numerous topics in Old Norse history and literature, he is best known for his texts on skaldic poetry and pre-Christian Scandinavian religion (Turville-Petre 1976; 1964). Interestingly, one of his main influences in the field of the history of religions was

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 | DOI 10.1163/9789004349247_006

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As the preceding chapters have shown, the word mana, notwithstanding its current widespread use in most Western languages, a use now enshrined in multiple language dictionaries, does not originally belong to the linguistic history of Europe. Mana historically and linguistically belongs to the languages and cultures of the warm southern waters of the Pacific (Keesing 1984; Blust 2007), despite the best (but misguided) efforts of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century linguists and anthropologists to endow the word with an Indo-European pedigree, as did for instance the diffusionist Arthur Hocart, for whom “it is quite possible that the word mana is of Indian origin. Sanskrit manas means ‘mind’; Malay manah means the same” (Hocart 1922, 140; see also Fornander 1878, 128–29; Shortland 1882, 3). It may thus come as something of a surprise to encounter the word in a mid-twentieth century scholarly discussion of an ancient culture often defined by its relationship to the cold waters of the North Atlantic—medieval Scandinavia and its so-called “Viking” culture.4 Yet, rather than seeing in Turville-Petre’s use of this Oceanic word a clumsy misuse of categories or an instance of wrongheaded comparison, I would argue that the mobilization of mana by philologists and historians of Scandinavia deserves our attention, if only because the sheer incongruity of resorting to mana to discuss Viking matters points to a problem where the discipline’s usual conceptual tools have shown their limits. In the present chapter I will on the one hand trace the genealogy of Scandinavian mana and, on the other, dwell on the service(s) philologists and historians such as Turville-Petre asked of mana. In so doing, I will focus on a key element in mana’s universalized, Codringtonian definition—the word power—in order to throw some light on the ways mana has proved useful, or indeed harmful, in thinking about the interactions of power and religion.

Mana in Medieval Scandinavia For the sake of convenience, the occurrences of the term mana in the scholarly production of specialists of Old Norse culture and literature can be classified according to the broader contexts which mana is mobilized to illuminate. Georges Dumézil, who would later write a forceful indictment against mana (Dumézil 1974, 36–48). 4 There was, however, a possible precedent: Codrington, in a private letter, had likened his Melanesian Mission to the medieval Scottish abbey of Iona, referring to its role in the conversion of Scotland (Gardner 2012, 153). There is, however, no mention of mana in this context.

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These are of three sorts: discussions of kingship, of magic, and of the colonization of Iceland. Mana appears most frequently in the writings of Scandinavists dealing with the institution of pre-Christian (when not prehistoric) Germanic kingship. As early as 1914, the historian Fritz Kern noted that Germanic kingship rested in part on “old religious representations. … Indeed, a particular force (eine besondere Kraft), a mysterious ‘Mana,’ adheres to the sovereign of primitive peoples, a magic which draws him close to the god …” (Kern 1914, 20). Kern went on to deploy, for the pre-Christian (or “primitive”) period, the category “sacred [or sacral] kingship,” which James George Frazer had recently discussed at great length in the first volume of the third edition of the Golden Bough. According to Sir James, the early king was defined by his ability to exert, on behalf of a group, “supernatural power (mana)” over the annual cycle of vegetation (Frazer 1911, 339).5 For Kern, it was the possession of mana, in addition to membership in a determined kin group that grounded and demonstrated the legitimacy of the individual sitting on the throne, a statement that also functions as Kern’s explanation of the early form of the institution. The historian of religions and Germanist Jan de Vries likewise turned to mana, which he borrowed from Robert Codrington, in his Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte (1st edition, De Vries 1937) to characterize the ancient kings of Norway who, according to him, were expected to use their Königsmana (‘king’s mana’) to make their domain fertile (De Vries 1937, 2: 117–18).6 According to him, this “supernatural power” could lodge itself in kings’ bodies, especially their long hair, and could be transferred to other persons or objects, rings in particular.7 De Vries’s handbook was (and still is) highly influential and may account for the somewhat strange appearance of mana in a text by a scholar of Anglo-Saxon literature, Francis Magoun, on Germanic altar rings published in 1949. Discussing the possibility that such rings existed in Sweden, Magoun mentioned a ring having belonged, according to the medieval mythographer Snorri Sturluson,8 to a mythical king of Sweden and stated that “though not so

5 It should be noted, however, that the intellectualist Frazer was hardly interested in mana, preferring another etic category “sympathetic magic” (see Chapter 3). 6 De Vries later came to reject the use of mana in the context of Germanic sacred kingship, see De Vries (1956, 295). 7 “[The ritual ring] war also ein Ding von grosser Heiligkeit, noch primitiver gesagt von starkem mana” (De Vries 1937, 2: 117). 8 Snorri (1178–1241) is the author of the Prose Edda (c. 1220), a handbook of vernacular poetry in which he provides mythological narratives. Among these, Snorri tells the story of King Hrólfr Kraki sowing gold. King Aðils of Sweden had asked for military help from Hrólfr and

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declared, one might not unreasonably think that this ring was sacred, imbued with royal priestly mana” (Magoun 1949, 285–86). It appears as if it sufficed for Magoun, who sought to document the religious usage of rings in pre-Christian Germania, that these belonged to (sacred) kings to fall within the purview of religion by virtue of the close relation between kingship and mana postulated by De Vries. Magoun’s reading of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf confirms this interpretation: “acquired by [Hygelác, king of the Geats, the ring] would as a matter of course absorb potent royal or even dynastic mana …” (287).9 De Vries and Magoun were in turn quoted by the historian of religions Åke Ström in a contribution to the Eighth International Congress for the History of Religions (1955) on the theme of sacred kingship. In his text, Ström sought to show the continuity between Frazerian sacred kings and the chieftains of Free State Iceland (c. 870–1264). Among the elements common to both stands the ring and its mana, simultaneously cause and sign of the king’s authority and, implicitly, of his counterpart in king-less Iceland, the goði (‘chieftain’; Ström 1959, 704–05). Despite the discredit heaped by anthropologists and historians of religions on mana as a universal, theoretical category as early as the 1930s (see Chapter 4), the category has continued to be invoked in discussions of Scandinavian kingship. Besides Walter Baetke (1964, 39), Francis Oakley (1999, 103; see also 52), or Jens Peter Schjødt (2010, 164), one may also mention Rory McTurk who has made the possession of mana one of the criteria of his influential definition of Scandinavian sacred kingship (McTurk 1993, 353; 1994–1997, 20). While they may disagree on a number of matters, one point upon which these scholars agree is that mana denotes impersonal, substantial, and supernatural power (cf. Codrington 1891, 118–20).

promised a financial reward in exchange. But when it was time to settle, Aðils refused to pay. Hrólfr goes to Sweden to claim the payment but Aðils attempts to burn him and his men in his own hall. Having saved themselves, Aðils’s wife Yrsa gives Hrólfr (who is also her son) gold and the gold ring Svíagriss (‘Pig of the Swedes’; possibly an allusion to the god Freyr), an heirloom of the Swedish king. Hrólfr then makes off with the gold with Aðils in hot pursuit. To save himself, Hrólfr scatters (i.e. sows) the gold and the ring on the road, and the Swedes leave off the chase, groveling like pigs to pick it up. Snorri concludes, “this is why gold is called [in skaldic poetry] the seed of Kraki” (Sturluson 1998, 1: 58–59; English translation, Faulkes 2001, 110–12). I fail to see any hint of supernatural power in this story. 9 Magoun, who makes reference to Jan de Vries and Vilhelm Grønbech (see below), uses mana in the Anglo-Saxon context in order to designate magical or supernatural power which is present in magical formulae as well as in the grace conferred by the Christian god to his elects (Magoun 1947). Magoun was followed in this usage by Chaney (1960).

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Which brings us to the second context of use of mana, magic. Many, if not most, studies of Old Norse magic are set within a recognizably Frazerian framework (Meylan 2014, 14–17); magic is accordingly sharply distinguished from religion both chronologically and functionally. For Frazer, magic, which everywhere preceded religion, manipulates impersonal forces (in other words mana) whereas religion entreats personal beings (gods, spirits, etc.; Frazer 1911, 224–25). This evolutionary model was at work for instance in Hjalmar Falk’s discussion of the development of the Scandinavian gods: “there is a representation older than the personal gods, upon which rests magic and witchcraft. It is a belief in a force or power (‘mana’) which every living being possesses—if in a different degree.”10 Jan de Vries likewise built on Frazer’s distinction between magic and religion but got rid of his rationalistic (intellectualist) framework in favor of Robert Marett’s and Nathan Söderblom’s emotionalist theory: Every something, which distinguishes itself as something out of the ordinary, receives meaning not only because it calls forth in the human soul astonishment, fear or admiration, but also because it possesses an objectively higher worth. It has, as the Melanesians express it, mana, a concept which Codrington first mentioned and pertinently described as a power or influence which is not physical but, in a certain sense, supernatural.11 Mana is a force De Vries claims the Norsemen knew under the names of máttr (‘strength’) and megin (‘might,’ ‘power’; see also Falk 1927, 34).12 But the Germanic names notwithstanding, he provides a familiar-sounding description of mana: Scandinavian mana is supernatural,13 it is impersonal, and 10

11

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“Eldre enn de personlige guder er en forestilling som danner grunnlaget for magi og trolldom. Dette er troen på en kraft eller potens (‘mana’) som—om enn i forskjellig grad— tilhörer hvert levende vesen” (Falk 1927, 34). “Denn jedes Etwas, das sich als etwas Besonderes von dem Gewöhnlichen abhebt, bekommt nicht nur dadurch Bedeutung, dass es im menschlichen Geist Staunen, Angst oder Bewunderung erregt, sondern auch dadurch, dass es objektiv einen höheren Wert besitzt. Es hat, wie der Melanesier das ausdrückt, mana, einen Begriff, den Codrington zum ersten Male erwähnt hat und zutreffend umschrieb als eine Macht oder eine Einwirkung, die nicht physisch und in gewissem Sinne übernatürlich ist” (De Vries 1970, 1: 276). “Die Nordleute haben verschiedene Wörter für diese ‘Macht.’ Man nennt sie megin und meint damit dasselbe wie mana” (The Northmen have various words for this ‘power.’ It is called megin which means the same thing as mana) (De Vries 1970, 1: 276–77). “Auch damit kann man das mana eines Dinges bezeichnen und der schwedische Bauer tut es noch heute, wenn er das Wort makt in diesem Sinne gebraucht: makten i säden,

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substantially, almost materially, present in various physical objects: in bread, rings, the human body, the earth (De Vries 1970, 1: 277, 284, 281, 284). Magic then consists in activating this mana thus securing serious benefits for the happy few able to do so—De Vries mentions kings in this context. In his Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte, mana thus allowed De Vries to cordon off a specific, sui generis type of power he categorized as magico-religious, which required a specific type of explanation, one strictly couched in a religious idiom. Régis Boyer has also resorted to mana in his study of Old Norse magic. This time, however, the counterparts of the universal category are not vernacular concepts of power but the Old Norse substantive hugr, usually translated as ‘mind,’ ‘desire,’ ‘foreboding,’ ‘courage’ (Cleasby, Vigfússon and Craigie 1957, s.v.; Zoëga 1910, s.v.).14 The lexicological evidence notwithstanding, this hugr, according to Boyer (himself an epigone of Eliade, see, for example, Boyer 1992a), is a “numinous force” which animates matter but belongs properly to a world superposed on the empirical one.15 It is this force, conceptualized in the wake of Frazer as impersonal, which is manipulated by the magician through rituals based on the principle of sympathy: “the characteristic of rituals of transfer is imitation: the magical force passes through a signifying, symbolic, or representative object” (Boyer 1986, 150). Unlike the two preceding taxa where examples abound, for the third context of use of mana—tales of the colonization of Iceland—I know of only a single instance. In 1998, Margaret Clunies Ross published the second volume of her acclaimed Prolonged Echoes, which dealt with the reception and uses of Scandinavian myths in medieval Iceland. Mana makes an appearance in the chapter discussing myths of colonization where the author analyzes the role played by religion in the stories Icelanders of the thirteenth century told about

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makten i brödet, das ist die übernatürliche Potenz …” (It is also possible to describe with it the mana of a thing, and the Swedish farmer still does it today when he uses the word makt in this sense: makten i säden, makten i brödet, that is the supernatural power…) (De Vries 1970, 1: 277). Cleasby, Vigfússon and Craigie add that in the plural (hugar) the term can be “personified … a person’s ill-will or good-will being fancied as wandering abroad and pursuing their object” (1957, 290–91). “Au plus intime de cette vision se lit une coloration proprement idéaliste de la matière, littéralement animée par ce que les Polynésiens appellent mana, les Indiens d’Amérique orenda ou manitou et, nous le verrons, les Scandinaves hugr” (At the heart of this vision one observes a properly idealist view of matter, literally animated by what Polynesians call mana, Native Americans orenda or manitou, and, as we shall see, Scandinavians hugr) (Boyer 1986, 15–16).

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the settlement of the Atlantic island by their tenth-and eleventh-century ancestors. Landnámabók (‘Book of the Taking of the Land’), the main source of such stories, indeed shows that religious discourses were willingly mobilized to legitimate the taking of land by the new immigrants, thereby legitimating their descendants’ possessions (Clunies Ross 1998, 124, 129). According to Clunies Ross, these discourses could take two different forms: either a settler is guided to his future domain by a god (usually Þórr or the Christian god) or by an impersonal manifestation of the “supernatural” (143–44, 129). In the course of her discussion, Clunies Ross variously refers to the latter as “sacred” and “numinous power,” but also as “mana.”16 On the whole, the authors reviewed here agree on the definition of mana. Mana is a supernatural, impersonal, and substantial power, which belongs to the conceptual field of religion. But while they did borrow the canonical definition of mana (see Chapters 3 and 4), they did not use it to put forward a dynamistic reconceptualization of Old Norse religion; personal gods, the colorful heroes of the adventures told by the two Edda,17 remained the centerpieces of scholarship on the pre-Christian religion of Scandinavia.18 Rather, most of these scholars invoked mana at the level of human interactions, foregrounding not so much the adjectives as the noun in its definition—power— so that mana came to function as an explanation: a particular individual is a (sacred) king because he possesses mana; the efficacy of magic is accounted for through the action of this sui generis power; such-and-such kin group owns such-and-such piece of land by virtue of the pronouncement of this impersonal force. Mana thus functions as a concept conveying the notion of extraordinary power. I would submit, however, that if it were only a question of introducing such a theoretical concept, English, German, French, or modern Scandinavian languages would be perfectly capable of furnishing adequate expressions. The category mana thus appears to pull a little more weight than that. To identify more precisely what these scholars expected of mana, how-

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“Mana”: Clunies Ross (1998, 128, 141 n30, 142, 144, 146); “sacred power” (138); “numinous power” (143). For Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, see Faulkes (2001, 7–58); for the Poetic Edda (c. 1270), see Larrington (1999). There are a great deal of studies on the religion of pre-conversion Scandinavia, I will mention here only those written by the authors mentioned here, studies which are implicitly aligned with Tylor’s definition of religion as “belief in spiritual beings”: De Vries (1937), Turville-Petre (1964), Ström (1975), and Boyer (1992b). It may be noted that all these scholars are located within the Indo-European diffusionist paradigm, which is fundamentally personal when it comes to gods and mythology.

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ever, it may be useful to begin by considering the precise nature of the theoretical instrument they were borrowing.

Mana in Scandinavia Historians and philologists dealing with medieval Scandinavian matters began using the term in the early 1910s. Although a number of them were aware of its Melanesian origins and mention Codrington as their source, the mana they mobilized was the second-order category. These scholars were at best at one remove from the debates that had led to the introduction of Oceanic mana into the disciplines dealing with religion in general. Moreover, they seem to have had no direct interest in general questions such as the nature, development, and origins of religion, with the exception of Vilhelm Grønbech, who wrote both about ancient Germanic religion and general issues in the study of religion and intervened in the discussion on the personality of mana (see, for example Grønbech 1913; 1915). Most of the scholars discussed in the preceding section indeed pursued circumscribed, descriptive aims and, accordingly, did not bother much with theoretical issues. Grønbech notwithstanding, these Scandinavists had no interest in the issues of rationality, of the relationship between religion and science, or of the role of emotions that were so central in the construction of mana as a general category for the study of religion. Somewhat ironically, when these historians and philologists borrowed the word mana, they borrowed a concept largely free of its (intellectual) history. The mana Fritz Kern, Hjalmar Falk, and others borrowed was, however, not fully freed from all theoretical presuppositions. For instance, an evolutionary perspective underlies a number of these authors’ works, a perspective which may generally be traced to James Frazer and his theory of the development of sacred kings out of magicians (Frazer 1911; see preceding section). More relevant in the present context, their uses of the term point, beyond the occasional nod to Codrington, to the contribution of Robert Marett’s conceptualization of mana as supernatural or “magical power” (Marett 1904, 154; 1909, 115–41; 1916; Marett is explicitly mentioned by Magoun 1947, 34) as opposed to that of Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss (1904). Unsurprisingly in light of the lack of posterity for their Esquisse outside of the Année sociologique circle, one would indeed look in vain, in Scandinavian studies, for a sociological interpretation of mana. The choice of Marett over the Frenchmen obviously had important consequences for the subsequent use of the term. Medieval Scandinavian mana was thus cast in strictly religious terms. Insofar as it can be traced to Codrington, the reference is to his letter to Müller

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and, perhaps, to the chapters he published in 1891 on religion and magic and not to those chapters dealing with chiefs and secret societies, which hinted at a sociopolitical dimension of mana (Codrington 1891, 117–27, 191–217, 46–58, 101–15). Significantly, such elements as the association of Melanesian mana and specific individuals or its uneven repartition among the various members of a group, which were both present in Codrington’s ethnography, were thoroughly hidden in Marett’s mystificatory conceptualization (Styers 2012, 238; see Chapter 3). The power Marett had constructed was tautologically defined as whatever evokes a religious feeling. Revealingly, the Greek word Marett selected to translate this power was τέρας, ‘sign sent by the gods,’ ‘wonder,’ ‘monster,’ ‘something extraordinary’ (Marett 1909, 13; Bailly 1950, 1915), glosses that undoubtedly fit his supernaturalist theory very well, but the Melanesian material rather poorly. Gone were the discursive, social, and political contexts of use of mana. As a result, the sole actors of mana in Scandinavia came to be gods, wizards, and kings, the latter looking more like τέρατα than men. This theoretical option may have been further strengthened by the writings of Nathan Söderblom, whose generalist work on religion was explicitly mentioned by Kern and Jan de Vries, on whose study of ancient Germanic and Scandinavian religions most subsequent users of mana in the field were dependent (Kern 1914, 20; De Vries 1970, 1: 276). In the Swedish archbishop’s various texts (Söderblom 1914; 1916), not only would Scandinavists find a supernaturalized, when not transcendental, view of mana, they would also come across a harsh refutation of Emile Durkheim’s reductionist work on religion and his key opposition of sacred and profane, and, by implication, of Hubert and Mauss’s work on mana (see, for example, Söderblom 1914, 732). But what may have made Söderblom particularly attractive to scholars of medieval Scandinavia was his mention of the Old Norse word hamingja (732; Söderblom 1916, 8, 26, 51; first published in Swedish in 1913). Like his fellow dynamists, Söderblom was committed to the universalization of mana under the guise of “holiness” or “the Holy” as the primary object of religion and its study, a universality he sought to demonstrate through the accumulation of notions from across the world, which he believed were comparable. Where he broke with, for instance, Marett was in his decision to extend the range of application of mana to all religions including Christianity. This allowed Söderblom to discuss in the same breath the more usual “primitive” representations (Iroquois orenda, Sioux wakan, etc.), together with notions the early twentieth century associated with ulterior stages of evolution, whether the notions in question belonged to the vocabulary of the Vulgate New Testament (for example, sanctus; Söderblom 1914, 740–41), or to the vernacular lexis of (Christian) Scandinavia. For the latter, Söderblom gave two terms: “the makt, ‘might,’ ‘power’ of

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Swedish folk-lore,” and the “hamingja” the saintly King Óláfr famously possessed and conferred upon his men, a king famous for his Christianization of Norway (732).19 It was precisely with this Old Norse notion, hamingja, that Turville-Petre’s inquiry, with which this chapter began, was concerned. Söderblom did not dwell on hamingja beyond giving a list of glosses: “‘luck,’ ‘success,’ ‘protecting genius,’ ‘fate,’ of individuals and clans” (732). He did, however, give two references to works by the Danish historian of religions Vilhelm Grønbech (1873–1948). In 1909, Grønbech had given an extended discussion of this Old Norse notion in the first volume of his monumental study of the ancient Germanic “mode of thought” (Danish: tankegang; Grønbech 1909, 11; English trans. 1931, 15). Breaking with Tylor’s intellectualist and evolutionist canon, Grønbech’s book was based on the axiom that there are two irreconcilable systems of thought, our own and the “primitive,” within which he included ancient Germanic society. Grønbech defined the latter by its focus on the collective rather than the individual. There the fundamental unit was the family, “a gathering of individuals so joined up into one unit that they appear incapable of independent action … the individual cannot act without all acting with and through him; no single individual can suffer without affecting the whole circle [i.e. his kingroup].”20 Anticipating the concept of “participation” formulated by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl in a book published the following year (LévyBruhl 1910, 68–110), Grønbech accounted for this inter-relationship between kinsmen by recourse to the dynamistic notion of a “hidden force,” which he called “frith” (Danish fred; from Old Norse friðr, ‘peace’), a “power that makes them friends [cf. Old Norse frændi, ‘kinsman’] one toward another” (Grønbech 1931, 32; 1909, 30). To this “frith,” Grønbech added a second power he labelled lykke (‘luck’), to which ancient Scandinavians, according to him, attributed all success whether military, agricultural, or pastoral: “it determines all progress … It seems to be

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For the hamingja of St Óláfr Haraldsson, king of Norway between 1015 and 1028 who was said to have achieved the Christianization of the country, see the passage from his eponymous saga (Óláfs saga helga, ‘The story of St Óláfr’) given at the beginning of the chapter. While hamingja is generally presented as a pre-Christian concept, it should be noted that it appears exclusively in texts written after the conversion to Christianity. The saga mentioned here is part of a collection of royal biographies called Heimskringla, which was written in the 1220s and is often attributed to Snorri Sturluson. “Vi skal begynde med en ‘æt,’ en samling mennesker der er forbundne til enhed i den grad, at de tilsyneladende slet ikke kan handle selvstændigt … den enkelte kan ikke handle, uden at alle handler i og med ham, den enkelte kan ikke lide noget, uden at lidelsen går ud over hele kredsen” (Grønbech 1909, 28–29; 1931, 31).

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the strongest power, the vital principle indeed, of the world.”21 This power is linked to persons and because its intensity varies, as does the mana of Melanesians, it defines the relative standing of individuals and families. Some have it in greater degree than others, but royal families most of all. In kings, who occasion Grønbech’s most detailed discussion of luck, it translates into the power to heal, to carry the day on the battlefield despite overwhelming odds, to make seas yield great catches, and the fields to grow abundantly (1909, 150–52; 1931, 131–33). A king is so possessed of this power that he can confer it on others to guarantee the successful outcome of otherwise risky missions (1909, 153; 1931, 133–34). The echoes of Codringtonian mana are obvious; like Melanesian mana, lykke is “supernatural but shews itself in physical force,” moreover the indication that it can be conveyed from one person to another suggests its impersonality and substantiality (Codrington 1891, 120, 119). Grønbech having come to identify his second-order lykke with the Old Norse noun hamingja (Grønbech 1909, 189; 1931, 157), Söderblom’s decision to include hamingja in his discussion of holiness as mysterious power appears to be justified.22 Grønbech, however, did not agree. Hamingja as he saw it was not an equivalent of mana, rather it was a scholarly concept he had constructed to break free of the opposition between animism and pre-animism/dynamism (but see Widengren 1945, 81 n58). Thus, if in his text hamingja functioned at times as an impersonal power (i.e. mana), it is occasionally translated as soul, implying personality.23 This apparent contradiction is at the heart of the paper Grønbech gave to the Fourth International Congress for the History of Religions 21

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“Den råder for al fremgang … Den synes at være den stærkeste magt, ja selve livsprincippet i verden” (Grønbech 1909, 144; 1931, 127, see also 155). Compare this statement with the following remarks made by Codrington: “all conspicuous success is a proof that a man has mana,” or “if a man’s pigs multiply, and his gardens are productive, it is not because he is industrious and looks after his property, but because of the stones full of mana for pigs and yams that he possesses” (Codrington 1891, 120). The meaning of hamingja has been the object of a long debate, see, for example, Ellis (1943, 131–38), Cleasby, Vigfússon, and Craigie (1957, s.v.), Baetke (1964), Turville-Petre (1964, 227–30; see above), De Vries (1970, 1: 222–24), Hallberg (1973), Beck (1999, 470–80), Böldl (2005, 110–11), Sommer (2007), Lincoln (2014, 80–81). Among the medieval sources where the term appears, see in particular Víga-Glúms saga (ch. 9), Þorskfirðinga saga (ch. 16), Heimskringla’s Óláfs saga helga (ch. 69), and Völsunga saga (ch. 29). Hamingja “comes now as a man, now as something human, now as a personality, now as a force” (Grønbech 1931, 260). Subsequent studies tend to agree with this perspective. See for instance Heinrich Beck who defines it both as Glückskraft (‘power of luck’) and Schutzgeist (‘protective spirit’; Beck 1999, 478). The Swedish historian of Vedic religion Ernst Arbman, reflecting on Grønbech’s work, came to a different reading: “Hamingja, Mana ist dieser Auffassung [i.e. Grønbech’s] nach

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in 1912, which bore the title Soul or Mana (Grønbech 1913), and it may come as something of a surprise that Söderblom referred to it in his discussion of holiness (Söderblom 1914, 732). Indeed, Soul or Mana functions as a theoretical statement concerning “primitive” culture in which Grønbech operated the synthesis between the two antithetical denotations of hamingja, soul and mana, and their concomitant theories, animism and dynamism.24 To distinguish between the two is a modern reflex, he argued, and to apply that distinction to “primitive” societies amounts to what later anthropologists would call ethnocentrism (Grønbech 1913, 10–12; 1931, 20–22). Söderblom was technically wrong but his mistake points to a more general problem common to both scholars. Both Söderblom and Grønbech were raising the issue of power, which both were to conceptualize in religious and mystificatory terms. It is particularly patent for Söderblom, who located power, renamed “holiness” or “the holy” for the occasion, radically outside of the social, if not human, sphere, a power knowable exclusively through individual irrational experience. It is not surprising then that Söderblom would stand the Durkheimian analysis of the relationship between society and religion on its head: The value of primitive holiness … lies (a) in the strength and coherence it gives to society, for ‘the holy’ supplies a perpetual centre of gravity … Civilization and progress are inconceivable without the profoundly unreasoning sanction afforded by holiness. Söderblom 1914, 735, my emphasis; see also 741

24

nichts anderes als Seele, die eigene psychische und moralische Kraft des Menschen” (Arbman 1931, 296) (Hamingja, mana, according to this opinion, is nothing other than soul, man’s own psychic and moral power). While Arbman’s article seeks to reify the distinction between soul and mana, he concedes that hamingja, which he equates with mana, can at times take on a personal form: “Die Hamingja der Nordländer, die als ‘Glück’ des Mannes sein ganzes Schicksal bestimmte und ihm sogar übermenschliche Kräfte verlieh, wurde nicht nur als eine dem Menschen inhärierende unpersönliche Qualität, sondern mitunter auch als eine ‘Fylgjukona’ (‘Begleiterin’), als ein Art weibliches Schutz- oder Schicksalswesen aufgefasst, ohne dass ihre Rolle dadurch verändert wurde” (The hamingja of the Northmen, which as a man’s ‘luck’ determined his whole destiny and even gave him superhuman powers, was not only apprehended as one of man’s inherent impersonal qualities but sometimes also as a ‘fylgjukona’ (‘follower’), as a sort of feminine protecting and fateful being, without its role being thereby altered) (Arbman 1931, 309). The Germanic, primitive, soul is a “homogeneous soul that is always true to its character, never too personal to ooze into things, never so neutral as to be out of touch with personality” (Grønbech 1913, 9–10; see also Grønbech 1931, 267).

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The same process, if more implicitly, is at work in Grønbech’s writing. The Dane’s general object, the culture of the ancient Germans, implied dealing with the issue of social differentiation and so with that of sociopolitical power. But while the central categories he identifies or rather constructs, fred, lykke, etc., are defined in terms of force, power, or energy (Grønbech 1909, 27, 30, 90, 144, passim), these are in fact built on the religious discourse of mana that underlies his whole discussion. The presence of mystification is most obvious in the discussion of his concept of lykke/hamingja. Significantly, his analysis of the concept, which is given a foundational role for Germanic life,25 actually takes the form of an analysis of royal power: “in its foremost representative, the king, the peculiar character [of luck] is revealed” (Grønbech 1931, 130).26 Detailing Norse kings’ specific (magical) powers of luck, Grønbech makes two central claims. First, a king’s luck, which is inherent to his kin group, is the cause of all the great things he accomplishes (Grønbech 1909, 157; 1931, 131–32). Second, social status, i.e. hierarchical difference, is a dependent variable of the luck an individual possesses. A poor man’s difficult life is exclusively due to his hamingja and so lies outside of his control: “Poor folk ‘have but one luck, and that a slender one’; they may strive and struggle as much as they will, they gain no more than the minimum reward for their pains” (Grønbech 1931, 138).27 In other words, much like mana-filled Melanesian chiefs, one must possess substantial supernatural power to exercise political power, which amounts to positing an equation between these two types of power. Grønbech justifies, or rather protects, this equation by attributing it to a mode of thought (tankegang), called “prelogical” by Lévy-Bruhl (1910), which Grønbech asserts throughout the volume answers to criteria radically different from his own. While it is true that Old Norse sources disclose a causal relationship between supernatural and political power, this should not allow historians of 25 26 27

“Lykken betinger fred og ære” (Luck conditions frith and honor) (Grønbech 1909, 177). “I sin ypperste repræsentant, kongen, åbenbarer den ret sit ejendommelige væsen” (Grønbech 1909, 147). “Fattigfolk ‘har kun een lykke, og den er tynd’: de kan stræbe og stride så meget de vil, mere end stræbets minimumsløn følger ikke med” (Grønbech 1909, 159). The thirteenthcentury Snorri Sturluson, in his Prose Edda, offers a similar explanation of social differentiation but on the basis of a personal agency, the Norns (Old Norse nornir, shadowy feminine figures associated with fate): “Then spoke Gangleri: ‘If Norns determine the fates of men, they allot terribly unfairly, when some have a good and prosperous life, and some have little success or glory, some a long life, some short.’ High said: ‘Good Norns, ones of noble parentage, shape good lives, but as for those people that become the victims of misfortune, it is evil Norns that are responsible”’ (Faulkes 2001, 18).

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religions to simply repeat what they find in their sources as Fritz Kern, Jan de Vries, Francis Magoun, and others did (see above). Questions must be asked, such as who poses this equation? (the king and his intellectual cronies), for the benefit of what audience? (those that might want to take his place), and to what end? (to justify his royal power; see Lincoln 1996). It does not take much critical acumen and reductionist drive to reject this equation as at best analytically unhelpful and at worst a case of mystification pure and simple. The impersonal power that is hamingja is not the cause of kingship; on the contrary hamingja, like Melanesian and scholarly mana, represents an ex post facto vindication, all the more convincing in that it works as a “self-fulfilling prophecy” (Lincoln 2014, 81), designed to mystify the nature of royal power and hide under the guise of religion the ugly truth of its workings, namely the violence and corruption so regularly depicted in the Old Norse royal biographies, the so-called konungasögur.

Mana in Iceland It is now possible to return to the question asked earlier in this chapter. The history of the construction of mana as a universal second-order category suggests that the a priori incongruous invocation of mana by historians of medieval Scandinavia, a mana they initially borrowed from Söderblom and Grønbech,28 goes beyond merely compensating for a category absent from the Old Norse lexis (“magical or supernatural power”). The foregoing rather suggests that second-order mana allowed scholars to echo their tendentious sources by describing political power in supernatural terms, by cordoning off that power in the sui generis sphere of religion, and as a result, preventing the critical exploration of these sources and the ideological discourses they harbor. I would like to further illustrate this ideological function of mana by returning to a case mentioned earlier, the stories of the colonization of Iceland. In 28

Thus Kern (1914, 20 n34), De Vries (1937, 33; 1970, 1: 276 n2, 277 n3), Magoun (1947, 34 n8). See also Schjødt (2010, 172) who mentions a Söderblomian “holiness” but without giving a reference. Most of the other scholars discussed in the context of mana and sacred kingship refer to Jan de Vries’s discussion of kingship in his Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte (De Vries 1937, 1970), who can be considered the main mediator of mana into Scandinavian studies. This role was facilitated by his interest and profound knowledge of the history of religions in general and his inclusion in international networks, despite having been ousted from the Academy for his collaboration with the Nazis during World War II. On De Vries’s life and career, see Hofstee (2008); for his correspondence with Mircea Eliade, see Dana (2015).

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the second volume of her Prolonged Echoes, Margaret Clunies Ross resorted to mana in her analysis of such stories, including that of the emigration to Iceland of the Norwegian family of Egill Skalla-Grímsson, hero of an eponymous saga and a major figure of tenth century Iceland (Clunies Ross 1998, 145–46). Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, written in the early thirteenth century, tells the following story.29 In the wake of a murderous quarrel between the king of Norway and Kveld-Úlfr and his son Skalla-Grímr, father and son leave their Norwegian holdings and make for the North Atlantic island. Exhausted by battle, the elderly Kveld-Úlfr feels his end drawing near as the ship is approaching Iceland. He tells his crew that, in the case of his death, they are to make him a coffin and cast him into the sea, adding that: Things will go differently than I thought if I do not make it to Iceland and take land there … tell [my son Skalla-Grímr] … to fix his abode as close as possible to the spot where I will have made land.30 After his death, his crew follows his instructions. Sometime later, the ships come within sight of the island and seek shelter in the Borgarfjörður (west coast) where it does not take long before Kveld-Úlfr’s coffin is found on the shore. Skalla-Grímr, who in the meantime has ascertained the quality of the nearby lands, submits to his father’s will and settles there, laying hold of a large and rich tract of land. For Clunies Ross, Kveld-Úlfr’s body “functions as a family talisman, whereby the family luck … was transmitted safely to Icelandic soil,” a talisman she goes on to label a “mana-filled icon or symbol of the [father’s] power” (Clunies Ross 1998, 146).31 The introduction of mana into this narrative has a number of consequences. First, it recodes the story in religious terms despite the absence of any such elements in the Old Norse saga. This shift thus allows the scholar to insert Kveld-Úlfr’s body in a series that includes sacred “kings’ corpses or … saints’ relics” (Clunies Ross 1998, 146). In doing so, Clunies Ross introduces a supernatural power which strips Skalla-Grímr of the responsibility of his actions in 29 30

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The standard edition is still Nordal (1933); for an English translation, see Pálsson and Edwards (1976). A shorter version of this story is also extant in Landnámabók, chs. S29-S30. “Verðr þetta annan veg en ek hugða, at vera myndi, ef ek skal eigi koma til Íslands ok nema þar land … segið honum … þá taki sér þar bústað sem næst því, er ek hefi at landi komit” (Nordal 1933, 71). Note the occurrence of the term “luck” which probably refers to hamingja. Clunies Ross does not give references for her use of the term “mana.” She has confirmed to me in a personal communication, however, that she had borrowed the term from anthropological literature and not from Grønbech (personal communication, 2012).

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Iceland, namely the original appropriation of high-value (and possibly contested) land.32 Indeed, this mana, which Clunies Ross links to the god Óðinn (146), appears as the motor of Skalla-Grímr’s acts, and accordingly it is this more than human mana which invests him and his descendant with political authority over that land and the other individuals who come to settle within the bounds of his domain. In this sense, introducing mana in Skalla-Grímr’s story represents nothing less than a mystification of his success (a success more likely due to force of arms) insofar as it (super)naturalizes Skalla-Grímr’s and his heirs’ claim to the ownership of the Borgarfjörður, on the one hand, and, on the other, to political authority (Old Norse goðorð, ‘chieftainship’) over the region, as indicated by the end of Egils saga (chs. 80–84).33 Second, the mobilization of mana as a religious concept leads to a focus on religious representations of pre-conversion Iceland, and thus it participates in the wider, but somewhat problematic, project of reconstructing the pre-Christian religion of Scandinavia—at the expense of the sociohistorical context of production of the saga, the thoroughly Christian Iceland of the 1220s-1240s. Indeed, a critical reading of the saga in its context, attentive to the possible motivations of its production, would suggest that such an episode may have more to do with the politico-economic requirements and agendas of the thirteenth-century landowning class than with an impartial description of a remote pagan past. As medieval texts dealing with contemporary matters, such as Íslendinga saga, show, Iceland in the early thirteenth century was torn by violent conflicts between rival landowning families, conflicts that were prosecuted both with physical and discursive means. Relevant in this context are Jesse Byock’s remarks to the effect that: Stórbœndr [great landowners] used the family sagas [to which literary genre Egils saga belongs] to verify the local history of their families and districts. In this way the family sagas served as tools for laying historical

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Egils saga, ch. 28, lists the available resources of the land in question: “Síðan kannaði Skalla-Grímr landit, ok var þar … skógar víðir … selveiðar gnógar ok fiskifang mikit” (Then Skalla-Grímr explored the place, there were there … great forests … plenty of seals and a lot of fish) (Nordal 1933, 72). Thus Clunies Ross construes second-order mana as an explanation, in the present case commensurable to physical force: “The main purpose of a number of rituals described in the texts [including those covered by mana] was to assert the dominance of one individual over other possible human claimants to a piece of land, thus securing the territory by a symbolic means of showing one’s dominance over other men rather than through actual physical aggression” (Clunies Ross 1998, 150).

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Other medieval sources dealing with contemporary events confirm that descendants of Skalla-Grímr and Egill were implicated in these early thirteenthcentury conflicts as chieftains in the Borgarfjörður area, and that such men were perfectly capable of mobilizing their prestigious forebears in order to further their cause.34 Egils saga undoubtedly used the past to speak about its present in an attempt to modify the consciousness of its audience. Bruce Lincoln has for instance shown that an important subtext in the saga is its critique of the centralization carried out by the Norwegian crown at the beginning of the thirteenth century (Lincoln 1994, 55–73; see also Meylan 2014, 154–58). Egils saga’s tendentious dimension is further illustrated by the fact that the size of Skalla-Grímr’s domain in Borgarfjörður is greater in the saga than in its direct source, Landnámabók (Einarsson 1993, 156). To resort to mana in such a context amounts to an acknowledgment of the biased and self-serving discourse of the sociopolitical elite who commissioned the saga. Why then resort to mana, an originally Oceanic word, in medieval Scandinavian studies if not only to fill in a void in the vernacular lexis? The occurrences of the term, whether they have to do with kingship, magic, or the settlement of Iceland, have in common the fact that they stand at the crossroads of what we classify as religion and politics sensu lato. Significantly, the writings of Codrington, Marett, Grønbech, as well as Clunies Ross, all point to the fact that mana as “supernatural or magical power,” whether or not it is translated as hamingja, allows for the reconceptualization of political power in terms of religion, a purely human phenomenon that requires critical sociological analysis. As was the case for the anthropologists and historians of religion who raised it to second-order status, the Scandinavists’ mana has served to hide the

34

One of these chieftains was Snorri Sturluson (1178–1241), who descended from Egill through his mother, see Wanner (2008, 19). For instance, in his Íslendinga saga, ch. 21, Sturla Þórðarson, Snorri’s nephew, narrated the following story. Snorri was living at Borg, the farm of Skalla-Grímr and his son Egill, when he got his hands, in a less than honest way, on the domain of Reykjaholt. The saga then introduces a man who is presented as both Snorri’s servant and a descendant of Egill and Skalla-Grímr. This man has a dream in which Egill comes to him and asks angrily if it is true that Snorri means to leave Borg. Learning that he does, Egill tells the man Snorri should not look down on Borg and suggests that the success of the family is tied to that ancestral domain.

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political dimension present in the representations, rituals, or institutions they perceived as belonging to the sui generis domain of religion, two categories scholars of religion still all too often dissociate (see, for example, Lincoln 1989; McCutcheon 1997; Styers 2012; Lincoln 2012). While it is true that “mana” can translate Old Norse representations, the royal biographies do after all mobilize commensurable notions such as hamingja to confer unquestionable authority upon kings, mana as it was constructed and used in the early twentieth century cannot for all that explain them. Defined as impersonal, substantial, and supernatural power, mana can at best serve as a testimony of the ideological nature of modern scholarly discourses about religion.

The Road Not Traveled But things might have been different. Earlier, we have seen that Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert had seen the correlation between attribution, rather than possession, of mana and variations in social status (Hubert and Mauss 1904), present in Codrington’s ethnography (1891, 46–58, 69–100). But they were not the only ones to see the inter-personal, social, and so potentially political, dimension of mana. The German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) likewise saw and theorized the dialectical relationship between the possessor of mana and his group, thereby nuancing the substantial and supernatural, and so mystificatory, character of mana. His use of the term, although restricted to a mere four occurrences in his prolific production, thus could have laid the ground for a more balanced interpretation of mana attentive to its political dimension.35 Weber resorted to mana in two different texts of his Economy and Society. It first occurs at the outset of his “Sociology of Religion,” written c. 1913, in a chapter where he sketched the origin and development of religions (Die Entstehung der Religionen) before turning to the discussion of a number of key categories for the socio-historical analysis of religion.36 Mana first appears in the chapter as the characteristic feature of the initial stage in the development of religion which consists exclusively in the manipulation of impersonal power (“pre-animism”), from which later notions such as the Catholic doctrine of grace have derived (Weber 2001, 123). It appears that Weber’s thinking about early religion was dependent on recent developments in British anthropol35 36

Weber’s use of the term is, if nothing else, yet another reminder of how prevalent mana had become by the early 1910s among scholars dealing with religion. The editorial history of this text is complex. Written in 1913, it was not published until after Weber’s death in 1920 as part of Economy and Society (see Kippenberg 2001).

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ogy of religion, as suggests Weber’s adoption of Robert Marett’s pre-animism– animism sequence (Weber 2001, 123; see Kippenberg 2001, 44–48; Whimster 2007, 166, 178). Moreover, the basic denotation he gave to mana, extraordinary power (ausseralltäglichen Kräfte) inherent in, or acquired by, specific individuals and objects reflects Marett’s supernaturalist theory (Weber 2001, 122). But Weber broke with Marett on two counts. First, in considering mana as a local instance, together with other notions such as Hewitt’s orenda and the newcomer Avestan maga,37 of a more general, theoretical category, which Weber chose to call charisma.38 Second, and more importantly, while this category plays a central role in Weber’s discussion of religious specialists, providing a critical criterion for the distinction between the ideal-types of magicians and prophets who have it and priests who do not (158), charisma, which Weber at times equated with “magic” (for example, 179), is not, in his writings, a strictly religious category. For instance, mana also occurs in the nearly contemporary “Charisma and Its Transformations,” which belongs more properly to Weber’s political sociology (Weber 2005, 513).39 Weber returned more fully to his mana-like category in a text written in 1918, later published as “Die Typen der Herrschaft” in part one of Economy and Society.40 There, Weber discussed his three ideal-types of legitimate domination, the first of which is charisma. Charisma, which in this text is applied to religious figures as well as to military and political leaders, points to a transitory mode of domination in which an individual dominates others because of his or her extraordinary or supernatural powers (Weber 2013, 490–91). Weber immediately introduced a qualification unfortunately absent from the Scandinavian discussions reviewed in the present chapter: It is naturally completely indifferent conceptually how the quality in question [i.e. charisma] is to be correctly assessed “objectively,” whether 37

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The Avestan (ancient Iranian) word maga denotes a union, a community, a secret society (Bartholomae 1961, 1109); Weber links it etymologically to the adjective ‘magical’: “bei den Iraniern; ‘maga’ (davon: magisch)” (Weber 2001, 122; Weber 2005, 513). “Nicht immer nur diese, aber vornehmlich diese ausseralltäglichen Kräfte sind es, welchen gesonderte Namen: ‘mana,’ ‘orenda,’ bei den Iraniern: ‘maga’ (davon: magisch) beigelegt werden, und für die wir hier ein für allemal den Namen ‘Charisma’ gebrauchen wollen” (Weber 2001, 122). Mana further appears once in Weber’s Religion of China and once in his Ancient Judaism. These occurrences, however, merely provide empirical counterparts to Weber’s theoretical notion of charisma. Mana is explicitly mentioned in Weber’s earlier political discussion of charisma, Umbildung des Charisma (Weber 2005, 513).

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from an ethical, esthetical, or some other point of view: the only thing that matters is how it is assessed by those who are dominated charismatically, the “followers.”41 While Weber stressed that charismatic leaders, among which he included the Germanic kings mentioned above, must prove now and again their possession of charisma (or mana, hamingja, etc. for that matter), this possession only needs to exist in the eyes of the beholders who thereby consent to their domination (Weber 2005, 514; 2013, 492; Smith 2013, 10–11; cf. Codrington 1891, 52). What Weber did with charisma amounted to giving its human actors back to mana, thus opening the way for an analysis of its role in the construction and maintenance of uneven social relationships. But stripping mana of its external, when not transcendent, substance in no way lessened its effectiveness for the sociologist. Indeed, Weber insisted on the historical role played by charisma in the politics of modernity. In addition to documenting the operations of charisma in recent European history, for instance in the person of Napoléon Bonaparte, Weber argued that charismatic domination would, and indeed should, have a place in Western parliamentary democracies (Weber 1992, 162; see Freund 1976, 385).42 Weber died before the rise of fascism could give him the opportunity to assess his pronouncement, but scholars of Third Reich Germany have not failed to make the connection between charismatic domination and Nazi conceptions of power (see, for example, Kershaw 1999; Welch 2003, 82–89).43 Weber’s prophetic powers notwithstanding, his main contribution to mana is undoubtedly his transfer of mana/charisma away from the strictly religious sphere (Weber borrowed the term charisma from early Christian theology through the Church historian Rudolf Sohm; Weber 2013, 454) into that of politics, thus opening the way for a political treatment of mana that was so conspicuously absent from the writings of most dynamists.

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“Wie die betreffende Qualität von irgendeinem ethischen, ästhetischen oder sonstigen Standpunkt aus ‘objektiv’ richtig zu bewerten sein würde, ist natürlich dabei begrifflich völlig gleichgültig: darauf allein, wie sie tatsächlich von den charismatisch Beherrschten, den ‘Anhängern,’ bewertet wird, kommt es an” (Weber 2013, 490–91; emphasis in original). In this sense, Weber’s use of mana/charisma represents one more case of the use of mana to provide a conceptualization of religion that allowed scholars to avoid the consequences of Tylorian and Frazerian intellectualism and so accord religion some degree of relevance, whether aesthetic, moral, or political, within Western modernity (see Chapter 4; contra Styers 2004). It might be noted that the liberal theologian Kurt Leese drew a link between the Nazis’ conceptions of power and mana itself (Leese 1934, 44).

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While Mauss’s and Weber’s preoccupation with the social side of mana provided an important (but widely disregarded) corrective to substantialist and theological approaches, they did not amount to a critical approach. The Durkheimians’ reductionist focus on the integrative function of society led them to disregard political conflicts arising within the ranks of a society (Moberg 2013, 87–91; see Durkheim 1912).44 On the other hand, Weber’s focus on interpretation (verstehen) rather than explanation (erklären) led him to accept agents’ accounts of their doings at face value, and so left him rather ill-equipped to deal with involuntary or willful misrepresentations or, in other words, ideology and mystification. 44

Mauss eventually gave up on mana as a second-order category, in his essay on the Gift, for instance, mana only functioned as a local, Māori concept (Mauss 1950, 149–279).

Chapter 6

The Physics of Mana: From Substance to Unit1 Nos pères des années 1900, éblouis des merveilles de la science, nous ont légué ce nom démodé et charmant: la Fée Electricité. Si l’expression nous fait aujourd’hui sourire, c’est que nous sommes des ingrats et que nous ne savons plus contempler les splendeurs de ce monde. Devaux 1941, 5

∵ Your character, a sorceress, forges ahead steadily in the wasteland. Holding a long staff, wearing a diadem and a coat of mail, you make your final preparations for the fight to come. As soon as the first wave of monsters appears, your sorceress swiftly makes a few gestures and projects a fireball towards the horde of creatures. A few such spells prove enough to dispatch your enemies, but quickly a fresh wave of demons swarms towards your character and you find yourself stuck in a dangerous hand-to-hand mêlée. You manage to cast a fire wall but as you attempt to cast a spell that would allow you to teleport away from the claws of your enemies, your sorceress calmly utters the words: “not enough mana.” The screen then turns red; your sorceress has died.

The Supernatural Resource of Gaming Magic Diablo II, from which the preceding paragraph draws, is a videogame published by the North American editor Blizzard Entertainment in 2000. The player controls a character embedded in a medieval fantastic world in which she must face, in real-time, increasingly powerful monsters in order to acquire experience points and better equipment. The gamer may choose among different classes of characters (sorceress, barbarian, necromancer, etc.) who all

1 This chapter is a revised and translated version of a text originally published under the title “Magie numérique, magie anthropologique. Le Mana dans la construction de l’efficacité rituelle” in the journal Les Cahiers du numérique 9 (3–4) (2013): 11–32.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 | DOI 10.1163/9789004349247_007

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allow to various extents the practice of magic. While the game’s designers do not provide an explicit definition of magic, its omnipresence in the game nevertheless allows for a sketch of its contours. The graphic interface of the game shows the character, as she casts a spell, executing a short stereotyped sequence of gestures in the pursuit of her interests (whether they be to fry a ghoul or increase her resistance to lightning). Barring a few minor details, Diablo II appears to mobilize an essentially anthropological definition of ritual.2 The game, however, breaks with mainstream anthropology and history of religions on one crucial point; it admits a priori the material efficacy of magical rituals. Accordingly, the rituals of games pose the question of the modality of the construction and rationalization of such efficacy. Three elements constrain the use of magic in Diablo II: the choice of character defines the nature of the spells available (necromancers cannot cast lightning bolts; however, they and only they can raise the dead); a character’s experience determines the effectiveness of her spells (the more experienced a character, the more she can augment the power of her spells); finally, the quantity of mana available to a character defines the number of spells she can cast. Casting a spell invariably “costs” a fixed quantity of mana that the character draws from her personal stock, her “mana pool.” While that stock is always limited, it is possible for a character to replenish it, in particular by drinking “mana potions.” Mana thus functions in Diablo II, and also in numerous other videogames, board games, card games, etc., most often set in a fantasy world resembling the European Middle Ages, as the supernatural resource that drives magical rituals. Utterances such as “it takes ten mana to cast a fire ball spell” are instrumental in making the magic of such games a quantifiable, repeatable, and predictable phenomenon.3 Mana is indeed represented here as a form of energy comparable to nuclear or radiation energy; it is subjected to laws, i.e. the rules of the game, which according to Caïra “take the place of scientific laws and statistical regularities that reign over our world” (Caïra 2007, 217), and can be measured by means of units that resemble closely those developed by physicists to theorize and measure power (kilowatt) or energy (joule). The analogy 2 See, for example, Victor Turner’s definition of ritual: “A ritual is a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and designed to influence preter-natural entities or forces on behalf of the actors’ goals and interests” (Turner 1973, 1100). 3 In Diablo II, for instance, such utterances can be found in the menu describing the spells available to the character, where the gamer will find after the spell’s name, the spell’s “mana cost,” followed by a number.

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between magical energy and physical energy was made explicit by the game designer Greg Costikyan, in the booklet accompanying the board/war game set in a medieval fantasy world Swords & Sorcery (Costikyan 1978a), the first published game to make use of the notion of mana: Casting a spell requires the casting Character to expend Manna Points. A Manna Point is an arbitrary measurement of magical power, analogous to, for instance, horsepower as an arbitrary measurement of mechanical power. Costikyan 1978a, 124 Not content with this clarification, Costikyan further accounted for the source of this “magical power” in terms that evoke the physical process of radiation: “Spell-casting Characters draw their Manna from one of the three Suns of the Dis stellar system” (12). As these quotations suggest (and other similar ones might be adduced), the magic of games takes the form of an isolable and positive phenomenon, amenable to (admittedly simple) mathematical formalization. And in many games such as Diablo II and Swords & Sorcery, the operator of the theorization of magic, and thus of ritual efficacy, is none other than mana. This observation raises at once a terminological issue. What did Costikyan and other game designers in his wake see in this exotic term that led them to mobilize it as a privileged conceptual instrument in the construction of gaming magic? What did mana have that made it appealing to them? What did mana allow that other expressions such as “magic point” or “spell point” did not? This last question is all the more pregnant in that mana is unique in the world of gaming. Other elements in such games are expressed quantitatively, most conspicuously a character’s life. However, the units used to measure life in various games are purely descriptive, such as “life points” or “hit points.”5 4 In an e-mail interview, dated March 13, 2013, Costikyan explained that the spelling “Manna” rather than “mana” was due to a misreading on his part. As indicated below, this error was corrected by subsequent game developers influenced by Costikyan. Note that horsepower (hp) does not belong to the metric system, but it is convertible into it since 1 hp = 736 watts. The occultist Isaac Bonewits, who seeks to reconcile gaming magic and “real” magic, provides the following equation: “1 Mana Point ≈ 1.0 Gramcalorie ≈ 4.2 × 107 Ergs ≈ Footpounds ≈ .0000001 Kilowatt Hour” (Bonewits 1998, 24). 5 On life and life points in video games, see Steffen (2012, 261–74) and Poole (2000, 56). Life points or hit points are defined by Costikyan as follows: “Hit Points are a quantification of the amount of physical and mental damage a Character may receive before he is considered dead” (Costikyan 1978a, 37).

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To begin to answer these questions, we must return once more to the decades when mana was being put together by scholars of religion.6

Mana and Science Although it is impossible to reconstruct a neat genealogical sequence between the study of religion and videogames, there are two elements in the academic construction of mana that qualified it for its subsequent role as the supernatural resource of gaming magic. The first is that mana was constructed against Edward Tylor’s intellectualism (see Chapter 3). In Tylor’s system, magic and religion were nothing else than early, under-developed forms of rational thinking about the world, i.e. proto-science. This “primitive philosophy” (Tylor 1871, 1: 62) was thus liable to evaluation according to the criteria of its more developed form, experimental science. Naturally, magic and religion were found systematically lacking with most prominent intellectualists developing a barely concealed atheist subtext. With mana, scholars, from the Romantic, Protestant Max Müller onwards, disconnected magic, and religion, from science, and so prevented their evaluation in terms of factual truth, or rather error. And in so doing, mana granted magic and religion (some measure of) substance and objectivity, contributing to their legitimation as proper objects of study for twentieth-century scholarship. As shown above, around 1900 several scholars began re-conceptualizing religion in terms not of rational and individual thinking about the world but in terms of affects and emotions. Importantly, such a shift allowed them to argue for the observability and even the reality of religious phenomena (however qualified). Thus, Robert Marett, for whom mana transcribed actual non-rational experience, mobilized ethnographic evidence indicating that irrationality did not at all entail vacuity or inefficacy. For instance, in his “From Spell to Prayer,” written in 1904 under the influence of the psychologist William James, Marett adduced the story of the “savage” dying from having been symbolically tortured by his distant enemy (Marett 1909, 50–51). Moreover, Marett then went on to argue that mana designated precisely such extraordinary but nonetheless empirical efficiency.7

6 For a complementary and very well documented “Boasian culture history” of videogame mana, see Golub and Peterson (2016). 7 “But when a wizard brandishes a magic spear simply in the direction of a distant … person, who thereafter dies, the wizard … is almost bound to notice something in the action of the

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Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss attacked intellectualism from another side, but they arrived at the similar conclusion that the notion of mana arose out of collective psychological states that were far from ineffective (Hubert and Mauss 1904, 126).8 Their issue with Tylor hinged on the idea that religion for the latter had to do with individual representations, which the Frenchmen associated with rational, scientific thought. In their theory of magic, Hubert and Mauss sought to show that magic is a phenomenon that finds its origin not in individual reflection but in collective life. To do so they set out to document the existence of irrational magical representations. Mana provided them with the requisite argument. Indeed, mana as described by Codrington did not satisfy the requirements of Aristotelian logic in that it broke the law of noncontradiction: “it reveals to us what has seemed to be a fundamental feature of magic—the confusion between actor, rite and object” (Mauss 1972, 134). Mauss and Hubert concluded that “it goes without saying that ideas like this have no raison d’être outside society, that they are absurd as far as pure reason is concerned and that they derive purely and simply from the functioning of collective life” (149). Having thus rejected the intellectualist—dismissive—approach to magic, they then identified the collective psycho-social phenomena responsible for belief in magic and in so doing conceded some degree of efficacy to magic and mana (see Chapter 3). They went on to write such suggestive affirmations as “a feeling of universal consensus may create a reality” (164) or that: The world of magic is full of the expectations of successive generations, their tenacious illusions, their hopes in the form of magical formulas. Basically it is nothing more than this, but it is this which gives it an objectivity far superior to that which it would have if it were nothing more than a tissue of false individual ideas, an aberrant and primitive science. Mauss 1972, 171 Having thus conferred some measure of positivity to magic, which, moreover, they linked genealogically with science (177), Hubert and Mauss further consymbolic weapon that is indirect, and as such calls aloud for explanation on non-mechanical lines. The spear did not do it of itself, but some occult power, whether in, or behind, the spear. Further, his own consciousness cannot fail to give him an intuitive inkling of what that power is, namely, his projection of will, a psychic force, a manifestation of personal agency, mana” (Marett 1909, 57). 8 It should, however, be kept in mind that Hubert and Mauss were not granting magic and religion material, extra-social efficacy (see Dianteill 2013, 180–81).

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tributed to its objectivity by writing that “the magical art has not always been characterized by gesticulations into thin air. It has dealt with material things, carried out real experiments and even made its own discoveries” (175). Hubert and Mauss were far indeed from Tylor’s dismissal of magic as a “monstrous farrago” (Tylor 1871, 1: 133) or Frazer’s “spurious science” (Frazer 1911, 53). Such authors and others like them might be read as having, by means of mana, made magic coherent and objective. As such, magic could be analyzed and explained, and perhaps one day laws of magic might be identified. The second element that may have eased the reconversion of mana into the supernatural resource of videogame magic has less to do with debates among specialists of religion than with the general context in Western Europe. The years that saw the development of second-order mana coincide with the Second Industrial Revolution that swept much of Western Europe and the United States in the late nineteenth century, a revolution that went hand in hand with scientific progress, most conspicuously within the field of physics. Defined by its mathematical rationality and use of the scientific method, as well as by a history marked by a succession of individual heroes, for example, Isaac Newton and Benjamin Franklin, physics conformed perfectly to the vision of science held by intellectualists such as Tylor or James Frazer. Physics easily played the role of the positively-marked modern if not Victorian counterpart of Tylor’s animism in that just like “savage” animism, the aim of physics was to explain the world and act upon it. And whereas animism was characterized by failure, physics, by the early twentieth century, had a formidable streak of results. Intellectualists, however, were not the only ones impressed. Developments in the earlier nineteenth century such as Alessandro Volta’s construction of a (more) reliable source of electrical energy (1800), Michael Faraday’s electric motor (1821), and James Maxwell’s theoretical work on electromagnetic fields and their milieu (1865) led not just to the satisfaction of the intellectual curiosity of a few single-minded theorists, but also to practical applications that were instrumental to the Second Industrial Revolution and affected millions in the West more generally. Their work found numerous sensational applications, for instance in the light bulb, which as early as 1879 illuminated streets in Great Britain. Electric motors powered railways from 1889 on, in the years that followed, Nikola Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi began transmitting wireless radio waves, and the beginning of the new century witnessed the electrification of factories and urban households that was to transform profoundly human activity.9 These innovations, electricity in particular, 9 There are many accounts of the history of physics and electricity; Bodanis (2005) is an especially entertaining one.

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were duly celebrated at the 1900 Paris Exposition universelle where the Palais d’Electricité enjoyed popular success (Geppert 2010, especially 91–92; Mabire 2000, 21, 41, 141–43). Incidentally, this acclaimed exhibition also hosted the first International Congress for the History of Religions (see Schmidt 1900). But in addition to providing movies, transportation, and long-distance communications, physics, understood as the science of matter and its interactions, also provided many scholars with convenient comparanda for mana.10 Indeed, late nineteenth-century physics wielded impersonal, amoral concepts such as force or energy that, like Codrington’s mana, are immaterial but whose effects are observable in the material world, and can move or be transferred from one object to the next.11 Physics moreover provided a model for the issue of interactions between discrete bodies (gravity, electromagnetic fields, etc.), an issue of signal importance for magicians and their theorists.12 Codrington himself had resorted, in 1877, to the comparison between mana and physical force in an attempt to clarify the word’s meaning (Müller 1878, 53–54), and many others took up the analogy. It appears for instance in the work of Hubert and Mauss, for whom mana as magical force is “quite comparable to our notion of mechanical force” (Mauss 1972, 132; see also King 1910, 139); Marett turned to the notion of energy to gloss mana noting its “dormant or potential” character (Marett 1909, 128). But possibly the most self-conscious user of the physical analogy was Emile Durkheim, who used it to co-opt the prestige of the natural

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For at least one “scholar,” there was in fact identity between mana and the forces postulated by physics (Saintyves 1914, see above, Chapter 4). Mana “is a power or influence, not physical, and, in a way, supernatural; but it shews itself in physical force … This Mana is not fixed in anything, and can be conveyed in almost anything” (Codrington 1891, 118; see also Durkheim 1912, 286). James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879), for instance, was confronted to the problem of how electromagnetic waves (and light) are supported in space. He settled for the notion of an undetectable, immaterial “milieu” transmitting mechanical action from one body to another, which he, and others before him (Descartes, Newton, etc.), called “ether” (Borvon 2009, 145–51; Walter 2006). It is very likely that Hubert and Mauss’s conceptualization of the fundamental representation of magic as a composite idea of force and milieu is indebted to contemporary physics: the term “ether” indeed appears in the Esquisse (Mauss 1972, 138; Hubert and Mauss 1904, 112). James Frazer made his debt more explicit: “Both branches of magic … may conveniently be comprehended under the general name of Sympathetic Magic, since both assume that things act on each other at a distance through a secret sympathy, the impulse being transmitted from one to the other by means of what we may conceive as a kind of invisible ether, not unlike that which is postulated by modern science for a precisely similar purpose, namely, to explain how things can physically affect each other through a space which appears to be empty” (Frazer 1911, 54).

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sciences for his positivist sociology (Lukes 1973, 35–36). Writing of the impersonal forces or principles (i.e. mana) at the heart of totemism, Durkheim indicated that: “When we say that these principles are forces, we do not take the word in a metaphorical sense; they act just like veritable forces. In one sense, they are even material forces which mechanically engender physical effects” (Durkheim 1915, 190). In addition to mechanics, electricity, which still proves both a source of useful power and terrible danger, provided a recurrent analogy for mana. In 1904, Arnold van Gennep accounted for taboos protecting kings in terms of “a kind of electrical discharge” of a mana-like power residing within the king (Gennep 1904, 116). Durkheim followed van Gennep’s example, noting that approaching sacred, mana-filled, objects required precautions lest one “receive a shock which might be compared to the effect of an electric discharge” (Durkheim 1915, 190; see also Lovejoy 1906, 366). Marett spoke of the “voltage” or “intensity” of mana, presumably to account for its uneven distribution among people (Marett 1909, 137–38; see also 1916, 376, 377) while Nathan Söderblom used such expressions as “Lebenselektrizität” (Söderblom 1905, 8) and “manacharged holy” (1914, 738), referring to the notion of electrical charge. Others followed, whether ethnographers, such as Jack Driberg (1936, 4) and Ruth Benedict (1938, 630), or generalists, such as Charles Aldritch (1970, 42, 135, 182; originally 1931) and Gerardus van der Leeuw (1986, 46; originally 1933), until the analogy eventually made its way into general textbooks for the study of religion, see, for example, McCasland, Cairns and Yu (1969, 16), Smart (1976, 29), and Wagner (2005, 5631). While most of these authors did not develop the analogy between mana and electricity, allowing it to speak for itself as it were, one Oceanist went further. In 1927, the ethnologist E. S. Craighill Handy published a Polynesian Religion, in which he pushed the analogy to its extreme (Handy 1927, 28–29). Although he was careful to indicate that the analogy was merely illustrative,13 he exhaustively described Polynesian mana in terms of electricity, both static and current: gods were the positively charged pole whereas the earthly aspect of nature was “the uncharged, the negative pole [sic]” (28), creation consisting of the charging of the latter by the former. Chiefs being positively charged, it was dangerous for a negatively charged man (i.e. a man of lower social standing) to come into contact with him, a danger tapu were designed to prevent. 13

“Lest the description of the theory of mana in terms of electricity, which has been pursued only for the sake of illustration, and not because I believe mana to have anything to do with electricity, or vice versa, become tedious, this method may now be abandoned in favor of specific illustration” (Handy 1927, 29).

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Moreover, the “chief was a transmitter … his was mana directly transmitted and made subject to conduction wherever the potential was needed—in agriculture, industry, war” (29). Finally, mana could be “generated by means of ritual … just as electricity is generated through mechanical processes” (29). While electricity served the explicit purpose of making Oceanian mana comprehensible for Europeans, a concept often described by these same Europeans as “confused” or “irrational,” it may be supposed that the physical analogies also contributed to the shape itself of the second-order, theoretical category of mana, favoring an interpretation in terms of substance (impersonal power or energy) rather than state or quality (success, authority; thus Keesing 1984, 150). But if the reliance on the prestigious physical sciences most likely eased the recuperation of mana by scholars first and later by games designers, these analogies came with a price. Hidden within the often bare but suggestive analogies used by Marett, Durkheim, and others, lurks the fact that electricity was documented empirically and formalized mathematically, that it is very real.14 I would argue that this comparison conferred upon mana some of that reality, and in the same breath did away with the need to analyze the notion of power at the heart of mana as a strictly human, cultural phenomenon—in other words the analogy naturalized mana. The idea that mana led to the scientification of magic receives confirmation from the work of Rodney Needham and others after him on causality in anthropology (Needham 1976; Dureau 2000; Ciminelli 2004). Needham has shown how ethnographers and anthropologists from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when confronted with indigenous discourses linking ritual practice (in the present case headhunting) and empirical effects (good harvests), systematically misrepresented native explanations of the causal relationship between the two by inserting a third, intermediary term.15 In the absence of any such emic third term,16 Western scholars arbitrarily postulated notions such as “soul-substance” and “life force”—notions of which mana is

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Durkheim (1915, 190) seems on one occasion to suggest a near identity between magical representations and electromagnetic theory when he notes that the Kwakiutl conceptualize impersonal power as issuing from points, which echoes the fact that electrical discharges most often occur where electric fields on an object are strongest, that is at places with the strongest curvature, namely points. This should not be confused with outright rejection of causal thinking by so-called “primitives,” of which Frederick Schleiter (1919, 136–37) is an instance, a case Needham does not address. “But what could never be made plain, by any means of analogy or linguistic equivalents or in any way whatever, was just how the cause produced the effect” (Needham 1976, 78).

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an all the more convincing instantiation in that the term is borrowed from an indigenous language—in order to mediate the relationship between ritual and empirical effect (Needham 1976, 79). Needham noted, however, that such notions were not at all present in indigenous discourses but belonged exclusively to the scholars’ culture (84; see also Firth 1940, 498). Needham, moreover, pointed to the fact that the terms used by scholars to designate these media (“force,” “energy,” “fluid,” or “substance”) were directly borrowed from the lexis of physics. Importantly, with these words comes a way of conceptualizing causality defined by that same discipline, according to which: A given agent is said to cause a specific effect by means of some form of force or energy … You strike with a hammer and a nail penetrates a board: this is because a kinetic force is imparted from the tool to the head of the nail. Needham 1976, 82–8317 Notions such as mana, introduced to account for a perceived gap between ritual and effect,18 thus find their model and justification, according to Needham, in the hard sciences. Confirming this idea, the scientific model for mana can be seen to evolve along with developments in physics. In the late 1930s, Driberg suggested that radium, first discovered in 1898 by Marie and Pierre Curie, provided a better analogy than electricity,19 whereas Harold Driver, writing in the midst of the Cold War, preferred a vaguer but undoubtedly more potent “atomic energy” (Driver 1969, 397). In these various ways, mana contributed to cloaking magic and religion in an aura of objectivity and scientificity, which opened the possibility of formalizing them mathematically, admittedly to a rather limited extent. As the subsequent history of mana suggests, this scientific gloss of mana would eventually seduce game designers who were confronted with the challenge of building actual ritual efficacy.

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Indeed, Needham insists that this conceptualization of causality “pervades the daily experience of technological civilizations” (Needham 1976, 82). See for instance, the following sentence: mana “is the active force in all they do and believe to be done in magic” (Codrington 1891, 191). “Like radium it gives out energy indefinitely without diminishing its own extent or potency, and each spark is capable no less of infinite sub-division without loss of potency” (Driberg 1936, 8). Firth noted that this amounted to a “denial of the second law of thermodynamics” (Firth 1940, 484 n1).

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Between the Academy and Games While the history and anthropology of religion have built a scientific-looking mana, they did not for all that confuse magic and science. Game designers did not find ready-made in the scholarly literature the predictable and repeatable magic they needed. And although Codrington’s mana, as well as Mauss’s and Van der Leeuw’s mana were quantifiable (we regularly find in such texts the idea that some people possess more mana than others),20 the term had not for all that become a unit similar to the kilowatt. This step would eventually be taken not by a scholar of religion but by an American author of science-fiction. Larry Niven (1938-), who holds a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics from Washburn University, is best known as an author of hard science fiction, a subgenre characterized by its positivism and its respect for known scientific, in particular physical, principles.21 Niven’s concern for logical rigor and up-todate documentation, both in physical and social sciences,22 also surfaces in his forays into other literary genres, most notably fantasy where Niven gives magic a major role. As a result, Niven has acquired the somewhat paradoxical status of writer of “rational fantasy” and of “logical fantasies” (Miesel 1978, 203; Finholt and Carr 1982, 460). Indeed, Niven’s stories are characterized by his scrupulousness in developing rational conclusions from various fantastic hypotheses (Finholt and Carr 1982, 459–60). In his fantasy stories, Niven begins from the premise that the world’s mythologies, and their casts of gods, heroes, and magical powers, represent an accurate account of the world’s prehistory. His fantasy texts thus seek to provide a rational explanation of the transformation of a prehistoric world dominated by magic into the world we know, a world ruled by science and technology (a transformation not entirely absent from the writings of evolutionists such as E. B. Tylor and J. G. Frazer).

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“Among the ancient Germans, too, the idea of Power was dominant. The Power of life, luck (hamingja [a Scandinavian equivalent to mana according to Van der Leeuw], was a quantitative potency” (Leeuw 1986, 27). See for example Niven’s Ringworld (1970). For a description of Niven’s work, see Wilson (1981), as well as Finholt and Carr (1982). For a discussion of the subgenre hard science fiction, see Wolfe (1986, 51, 92). Niven himself stresses this aspect of his work, noting in an interview that: “you can’t make up your own laws of physics. That’s the surest way to be laughed out of the field” (Elliot 1979, 19). “Starship: Some people maintain that in order to write good science fiction, one must be well-versed in the social sciences as well as the physical sciences. Do you think that’s a necessary requirement? Niven: Yes very much so … I’ve picked up a certain amount of knowledge, for example, in sociology” (Elliot 1979, 18).

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The answer Niven chose, namely that magic has disappeared from the Earth over the course of the millennia preceding historical sources, led him to give a somewhat particular form to his magic. Not Long before the End, a Nebula Award-winning short story Niven wrote in 1969, offers his first description of magic and the way it works (Niven 2005, 98–104).23 Not Long before the End tells the story of the showdown between a warrior and a warlock, a fight the author situates some 12’000 years before the current era. Having fruitlessly cast magical spells at his opponent who is protected from magic by an enchanted sword, the warlock decides to change tack. He takes a copper disc and at a word sets it spinning in the air. The disc picks up speed until it explodes at which point the magical sword disappears. The warlock then explains what just happened. The spell he has used on the disc, like any spell, requires the expenditure of mana, which is nothing other than “the power behind magic” (105; Marett would simply speak of “magical power”). Unlike other spells, however, this particular one does not use a determined quantity of mana.24 As the warlock discovered, there is a relationship between a territory and mana. Should one practice magic for an extended period of time in the same spot, it will eventually fail: “‘Mana,’ the Warlock mumbled … ‘Mana. What I discovered was that the power behind magic is a natural resource, like the fertility of the soil. When you use it up, it’s gone” (106). It is thus the exhaustion of this non-renewable resource (any echoes of oil are hardly fortuitous) that led to the disappearance of the world found in myths, for instance that given by Plato in his Timaeus: One day all the wide world’s mana will be used up. No more mana, no more magic. Do you know that Atlantis is tectonically unstable? Succeeding sorcerer-kings renew the spells each generation to keep the whole continent from sliding into the sea. What happens when the spells don’t work any more? They couldn’t possibly evacuate the whole continent in time. Niven 2005, 106 With the exhaustion of the Earth’s mana will come the end of magic, mankind will have to turn to a new way of coercing nature, i.e. technology. Niven’s short 23

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In 1978, Niven penned a longer text, The Magic Goes Away, which built on the theme of the short story. Its name has been retrospectively applied to all of Niven’s texts set in that fantasy world. “The disc? I told you. A kinetic sorcery with no upper limit. The disc keeps accelerating until all the mana in the locality has been used up” (Niven 2005, 107).

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story thus represents magic as immanent and subjected to universal laws, set in a world governed by the laws of physics. Implicitly, Niven’s magic is reducible, but not analogous, to physics: magic is the means to harness one kind of energy among others, mana. As energy, mana can be used over time, depleting its reserve but also allowing for its measure. From this point it takes little to transform mana into the unit of magical energy or of magical power, much as the joule is the unit of energy and the (kilo)watt that of power in the International System of Units. In Niven’s fantasy world, it is perfectly reasonable, not to mention linguistically correct, to speak of the twenty-five mana necessary for the accomplishment of a task such as casting a fire ball. But where did Niven’s mana come from? Golub and Peterson have shown that other American fantasy or science-fiction writers such as Jack Vance, Poul Anderson, Roger Zelazny, and Frank Herbert had used the word mana in the decade before Niven wrote his short story (Golub and Peterson 2016, 322). While it is not impossible that Niven borrowed the word from such writers, he is certainly unique in “produc[ing] a detailed account of mana … the earlier precedents were just name-dropping” (Golub and Peterson 2016, 322, 323).25 In an interview given on March 14, 2013 to the present writer, Niven stated that he had come across mana while in college and had later read several books about the term before writing his fantasy stories, although he could not recall their titles. In an earlier e-mail (November 3, 2010), however, Niven had mentioned Peter Lawrence’s study of Melanesian Cargo cults (Lawrence 1964).26 In a 2013 interview with Alex Golub, Niven referred to another nearly contemporary study of Cargo cults, Peter Worsley’s The Trumpet Shall Sound (Worsley 1968; Golub and Peterson 2016, 321), pointing to cutting-edge and specialized anthropological literature. These two texts, however, have either nothing or very little to say about mana,27 and Niven’s general outlook on the concept seems more indebted to the classical view thereof than to more recent research.28

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It should be noted that the use of mana was not restricted to science-fiction authors, as it may be found, for example, in the writings of Arthur Koestler (1949, 274), who was well read in anthropology, and in those of the mystery writer Helen McCloy (1975, 53), who reflects the Codringtonian definition. “The book I remember was Road Belong Cargo, about the Cargo Cults of New Guinea. I believe it introduced me to mana (or manna) in all its forms. I used it in the Magic Goes Away stories” (e-mail to the author, November 3, 2010). The word mana, however, does not appear in Road Belong Cargo (Lawrence 1964). “Mana” appears on one page in Worsley (1968, 37). In a later story, “What Good Is a Glass Dagger,” Niven gave the following description: “Mana can be used for good or evil; it can be drained, or transferred from one object to

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The next step, taken some ten years after the publication of Not Long before the End, was to import mana into gaming. As this story has been very competently told by Golub and Peterson (323–31), I will limit myself here to a number of important landmarks. The first mention of mana in a gaming context occurs in a text penned in 1975 by Greg Costikyan, who three years later published his board game Swords & Sorcery (1978) where mana (or rather “manna”) functioned as the non-renewable supernatural counterpart of the kilowatt—i.e. as magic or spell point. That Niven’s story was his source is readily apparent (see above) and has been confirmed in an interview.29 As Golub and Peterson have shown, other gamers seeking to build better magic systems for role-playing games also began using mana to refer to magic points in the years 1976–78 (326–30). Although they argue for independent inventions, it is noteworthy that the basic use of the term is essentially identical (mana = supernatural kilowatt), that at least two other gamers made the same spelling mistake as Costikyan, and that a third, Isaac Bonewits (see Chapter 7), criticized those who made that spelling mistake and made “scornful reference to Niven’s mana” (328). Thus, while some gamers did make reference to scholarly literature, Eliade in particular (328, 330), it seems Larry Niven has played a highly significant role in the shape gaming mana assumed. But Niven’s mana made its mark not only on role-playing games, for his vision of a non-renewable resource spent in order to cast magical spells easily transitioned to video- and card games. Andrews Jaros, who designed the magic system for the first video game to use mana, Dungeon Master (published by Faster Than Light Games in 1987), has stated that his source for mana was Costikyan’s Swords & Sorcery rulebook.30 Dungeon Master’s significant success resulted in the wide diffusion of mana in American video games, including

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another, or from one man to another. Some men seem to carry mana with them. You can find concentrations in oddly shaped stones, or in objects of reverence or in meteoroids” (Niven 1972, 29). All but the last element, which reflects a Marettian view of mana, can be mirrored in Codrington’s classical Melanesians: “mana … is the active force in all they do … in magic, white or black;” “Having that power it is a vehicle to convey mana to other stones;” “he has got the mana of a spirit … conveyed in an amulet of a stone round his neck;” “a man comes by chance upon a stone which takes his fancy; its shape is singular, it is like something, it is certainly not a common stone, there must be mana in it” (Codrington 1891, 192, 119, 120, 119). In an e-mail interview with the author, dated March 13, 2013, Costikyan wrote: “I picked up [mana] from Larry Niven’s ‘magic goes away’ short stories.” In an e-mail to the author, dated August 8, 2012, Andrews Jaros wrote: “My first exposure to the word being used to describe magical energy was in the game Swords & Sorcery by Simulations Publications, Incorporated, or SPI (published in 1978). In that game ‘Manna’

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such blockbusters as Heroes of Might and Magic III (3DO, 1999), World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004), and the Diablo franchise (Blizzard Entertainment, 1997–2012).31 Richard Garfield, designer of the immensely successful trading card game Magic: The Gathering (1993), also borrowed from Niven the idea of mana as a supernatural resource, which in Magic is drawn from lands and used for the casting of various spells. Garfield acknowledged this debt toward Niven with a card entitled “Nevinyrral’s Disk,” which, in addition to spelling the writer’s name backwards, represents a spell whose effect resembles closely that of the disc in the short story.32

Constructing a Gaming Discourse on Magic It is now possible to return to the question asked at the beginning of the chapter. What could mana offer to game designers who decided to include magic in their game? Larry Niven has suggested that gamers took up his mana because “they like rules in their fantasy, as do I.”33 I would submit, however, that it less a question of liking than necessity. Game designers and game studies specialists agree on the fact that games require consistency, a requirement that also applies to their magic (Poole 2000, 50–51). The conditions for the casting of a spell as well as its effects cannot be left to chance without incurring the risk of spoiling the player’s gaming experience. Indeed, in most games in which magic appears, spells play an important role in the survival of a character, so their manipulation and effect must be predictable and rational to be useful and fun. It does not follow, however, that all uncertainty is thereby removed from the game, which would dramatically lessen its appeal (see Costikyan 2013). The videogame Diablo II, which gives a major role to magic, provides a neat testing-ground for this hypothesis.34 In the game, life is expressed numerically. Thus, to kill one’s enemies requires dealing them a number of damage points

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was defined almost exactly as I was to use it later in the development of the D[ungeon] M[aster] magic system.” The Dungeon Master Wikipedia page gives a list of the awards the game has won. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_Master_(video_game)#Awards (accessed June 24, 2016). For an image of the card, see http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx? multiverseid=159266 (accessed June 24, 2016). E-mail to the author, dated March 14, 2013. Note that other games using mana, such as Dungeon Master, Heroes of Might and Magic, Magic: The Gathering, World of Warcraft, etc., would have yielded a similar picture.

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equal or greater to their total life points. Alongside combat with weapons such as swords, bows, etc., magic represents a means to inflict such damage. The sorceress’s “Fire Ball” spell, for instance, allows its caster to inflict a determined quantity of damage that varies according to the spell’s level and the character’s other magical capacities. Thus, a first level fire ball deals randomly between six and fifteen damage points for a “Mana Cost” of five mana, whereas at level twenty, the same spell can remove up to 258 life points from an enemy for the cost of 14.5 mana. Moreover, if your sorceress learns the magical skill “Fire Mastery,” she will increase the power of her fire balls by thirty per cent at level one and by 163 per cent at level twenty.35 If the player’s character has both “Fire Ball” and “Fire Mastery” at level twenty, she knows that she will deal an enemy between 598 and 679 damage points.36 Armed with this information, the player will be able to predict the number of spells she will need to cast, their effect, as well as the quantity of mana she will have to expend in order to reach her goal. In addition to a player’s manual skill, the management of limited, if not strictly non-renewable, resources—here mana—represents a central element in Diablo II, but also in gaming more generally (Costikyan 1994). In the case of Diablo II, the quantification of magic may seem to be required by the medium used, computer software. Other non-computer games (Swords & Sorcery, Magic: The Gathering) demonstrate, however, that this quantification does not necessarily answer to technological demands. Game designers who mobilized mana did so because their games, not the materials they used, demanded it.37 First, mana as a resource (i.e. as magic point) provides a means of limiting the use of magic within a given period of time, in both turn-based and real-time games.38 If, in Diablo II, casting a fire ball costs fourteen mana and one’s character has at its disposal a total of 220 mana, she will be able to

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These figures, and many others, are available online on the official Diablo II website: http://classic.battle.net/diablo2exp/skills/sorceress-fire.shtml (accessed June 27, 2016). I refrain here from taking into account various monsters’ resistance to magic and/or fire spells. For a detailed discussion of the role of mana in the card game Magic: The Gathering by one of its developers, see Rosewater (2011). “A Character may cast any number of Spells in one Magic Execution Phase; the only limit is the number of Manna Points he has at the beginning of the phase” (Costikyan 1978a, 32). Compare the solution to the same problem, adopted by the first role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (first edition Tactical Studies Rules, 1974). There, magic-wielding characters are allowed only one spell per turn; magic therefore did not require a quantified resource such as mana.

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cast fifteen such spells; after that, she will have to either flee or find a means to replenish her stock of mana (for instance by drinking a mana potion). The aim here is to control the firepower of magic, whether to maintain balance between magic-wielding characters and those that must rely on their brawn, as is the case in Swords & Sorcery, or to make sure that a game lasts a sufficient number of turns for it to be enjoyable, as for instance in Magic: The Gathering.39 The quantification of magic has another function. In a context where magic use is limited, knowing exactly how much mana one has left represents vital information. To avoid defeat, a player must be able at any time to tell which spells are available to her. By making important data “readable” (Caïra 2007, 214–15) or “discernable,” mana makes that aspect of the game “meaningful,” thereby contributing to a game’s success (Salen and Zimmerman 2005, 60): Discernability in a game lets the players know what happened when they took an action. Without discernability, the player might as well be randomly pressing buttons or throwing down cards. With discernability, a game possesses the building blocks of meaningful play. Salen and Zimmerman 2005, 62 In other words, mana grants magic in games coherence and predictability. And, as was the case in early twentieth-century anthropology and history of religion, mana contributes to the misrepresentation of magic as science. This conclusion, however, should be nuanced insofar as it is not the signifier “mana” alone which accomplishes this shift, but its conceptualization as quantifiable energy, as a unit. There are indeed alternatives to this term as exemplified by the Japanese video game industry, which long ignored mana.40 For instance, the highly popular series of console role-playing video games Final Fantasy, created by Hironobu Sakaguchi and produced by Square Enix starting in 1987, generally uses a magic system where characters expend a fixed quantity of resources to cast a spell, yet the resource in question is not called mana but マジック ポイント, a transcription of English Magic Point in katakana (the syllabary used to transcribe foreign words), an expression Final Fantasy borrowed from the American game Ultima III (Golub and Peterson 2016, 332). 39 40

Rosewater (2011) notes that in Magic: The Gathering, “the mana system serves as a release valve that helps ensure that something happens each turn but not too much.” This lack of interest in mana cannot be attributed to lack of direct knowledge of Oceania since the Japanese had an important colonial presence in various Melanesian islands during World War II.

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If mana did not by itself solve a gameplay issue for games employing magic, what then did this seemingly foreign-sounding word bring to the designers who chose to mobilize it? In an e-mail interview with the author, Costikyan admitted that his “Manna” is a strict synonym of spell point (or magic point), but went on to explain that the former struck him as “more evocative and fantastic, less jargon-y,” adding that “‘Spell point’ is terminology that somewhat breaks the fantasy.” In the “Designer’s Notes” for Swords & Sorcery, Costikyan further stressed his desire to produce a game that would satisfy fans of fantasy literature: Every attempt has been made to provide S&S with a self-consistent, interesting fantasy background; to a large degree, the background was developed before the game. A fair amount of background material is included in the game, in the form of historical notes, scenario descriptions, straight-forward histories, character descriptions, and short stories. Costikyan 1978b The choice by the designers of Dungeon Master (1987) to use the word mana reflects the same wish to avoid all too technical jargon and provide an easily remembered term. Andrews Jaros, who was responsible for Dungeon Master’s use of the term, explained in a 2012 e-mail to the author that: “the term [mana] was meant to be simple, short and intuitive. A ‘point’ is a very gamey concept … A made up word like ‘grigelsep’ doesn’t ring any bells, and definitely doesn’t roll off the tongue.” So what, ultimately, does the signifier “mana” bring to gaming? Through its reference to fantasy literature (Niven primarily, but also other major writers such as Terry Pratchett (1996, 275)) and to a generic super-nature, mana reenchants a magic in danger of becoming too technical, if not too scientific. In games-studies terms, the word mana confers a “representational” dimension to what is fundamentally an issue of gameplay.41 Evoking Niven’s tales of magic and heroes, as well as Costikyan’s world inhabited by dragons, goblins, and enchantments, mana contributes to the insertion of the games mobilizing it into the vast inter-text of fantasy literature (including the tales of J. R. R. Tolkien and Howard Lovecraft) and its epic and mythical sources. Indeed, to take just two examples discussed here, both Swords & Sorcery and Dungeon 41

“While the core, or the gameplay layer concerns everything a player can do while playing the game, and also game rules that govern these actions, the shell [or game as representation and sign system] includes all the semiotic richness modifying, containing and adding significance to that basic interaction” (Mäyrä 2008, 17).

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Master make numerous and explicit references to the mythologies of India and Pre-Christian Europe (Costikyan 1978a, 51; Holder 1987, xiv), although they fail to make reference to Oceanic myths. This intertextual, meaning-making function served by mana has been labelled “atmospheric” by Matthieu Letourneux (2005, 202–03), according to whom, the “atmospheric value” of mana grants the game an impression of narrative depth which the technical demands of gameplay would otherwise hinder.42 It would thus appear that the ludic use of mana is an exact inversion of what may be found in scholarly discourses.

Mana, Manna, and … If in the two discursive contexts discussed here mana bore the burden of vindicating ritual efficacy, the way it did so has proven to be perfectly opposed. In the case of the history and anthropology of religion from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, mana was mobilized to strengthen the legitimacy of a discourse issuing from the human sciences by providing empirical documentation on the one hand, and by co-opting the prestige and authority of the hard sciences on the other. Larry Niven, who was looking for a way to rationalize magic, knew what he was doing. In the gaming context, however, mana was adopted to conceal the science-like regularities imposed by technical considerations which threatened to make the game repetitive and boring. This opposition is again apparent in the differing statuses granted to mana. From a scholarly, theoretical category, this Oceanic term became the name of a unit of magical power which referred to a generic and indefinite magico-religious sphere, both linguistically exotic and familiar in its physical and arithmetical formalism. And yet for all that, these two conceptualizations of mana served an identical end: to transfer to a first discourse (scholarship, game rules) the properties of a second (natural science, fantasy)—in other words, to misrepresent that first discourse, which in the case of scholarship represents something of a problem. There may, however, be another reason for the popularity of mana in the gaming industry. In the interview mentioned above, Andrews Jaros, the designer of the Dungeon Master magic system, implied that mana rang a bell. But what bell? Jaros is unequivocal; he picked up the term from Costikyan, 42

Letourneux’s “atmospheric value” has been conceptualized under the name of “flavor” by the developers and players of Magic: The Gathering, where that role is played by, inter alia, each card’s illustration; see for example Beyer (2010). More generally, on the role of religious representations in video games, see Di Filippo and Schmoll (2013).

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who spelled it “Manna.” Jaros, who had not been exposed to anthropological literature, did not see a reference to Oceania, or to Niven’s tales for that matter, but rather, because of a fortuitous homonymy, to the Biblical book of Exodus and its tale of the supernatural substance, manna (often glossed as bread), given by God to the Israelites as they wandered in the desert (Exod 16:1–36). In the interview, Jaros, who had played numerous games of Swords & Sorcery, stated that: When I presented my ideas for the magic system, all the others on the team took the term Manna in stride. My boss at FTL Games, Wayne Holder suggested, and I agreed, that we should de-Exodus the term, so we went to lower case and only one n. Jaros and Holder were not the only ones to see a biblical reference and its aura of miraculous or magical power. Others in the gaming community used the biblical spelling so that as early as 1978 the occultist/gamer Isaac Bonewits felt it was necessary to explain to his fellow gamers the difference between the two (Golub and Peterson 2016, 328)—but still the confusion endures to this day.43 The confusion of mana and manna, however, does not belong exclusively to gamers. James Cook himself had used the biblical spelling, and the anthropologist Arthur Hocart directly addressed this issue in the academic heyday of mana. Working in the Melanesian field, Hocart was one of the first scholars to attack mana as second-order category for the general study of religion. In a short article published in 1922, Hocart asked the question why the signifier “mana” had found so much success in his discipline. He offered three explanations: first, mana occurred among so-called savages, and “savages have come into fashion”; second, lack of literature about it made for great interpretative freedom; and “last, but not least, it has the advantage in sound over any of its rivals: it is simple and easy, with a reminiscence of the Old Testament about it” (Hocart 1922, 139; Smith 2004, 118; Kolshus 2016, 163). In other words, for Hocart, as for Jaros, mana rang a (church) bell. Mana thus poses the destabilizing question of continuity between supposedly impermeable discourses, scholarship and fiction for example. Just as destabilizing, the lurking presence of the Bible points to the weight of the Christian legacy in the constitution of the anthropology and history of religion and their concepts, a presence that further

43

For one example among many others, see this discussion on a gaming forum: http:// gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/17146/where-does-the-concept-of-mana-as-aresource-come-from (accessed June 29, 2016).

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begs the question whether behind the mana of the Melanesians, behind the mana of Müller, Marett, Hubert and Mauss, and many others, hides not the miraculous power wielded by the God of the Bible. By way of conclusion, I will return to something I said in Chapter 2. There I noted that some elements of Polynesian culture, such as gods or atua, tapu, etc. had easily been conceptualized in religious terms by Westerners in the nineteenth century because they could be compared to biblical or classical notions. Mana on the other hand did not ring any such bells and long stayed outside of religion. When it did get conceptualized in religious terms, starting with Robert Codrington, it was undoubtedly on the strength of an analogy. But which analogy was that? The preceding discussion suggests two possible comparanda, physical notions of energy and biblical manna. Exactly what might be the relationship between these two is a question I gladly leave to others.

Chapter 7

Energy for a New Paganism Knowledge equals power … The string was important. After a while the Librarian stopped. He concentrated all his powers of librarianship. Power equals energy … People were stupid, sometimes. They thought the Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most dangerous places there could be was the simple fact that it was a library. Energy equals matter … He swung into an avenue of shelving that was apparently a few feet long and walked along it briskly for half an hour. Matter equals mass … And mass distorts space. Pratchett 1990, 166–67

∵ It is not only digital wizards who have given thought to how their magic works. Magic, or occasionally magick,1 is studied and practiced throughout the contemporary Western world by a good many real life witches, druids, and magicians, whether they mean by this vexed term such things as “the Science and Art of causing change to occur in conformity with Will” (Aleister Crowley, quoted in Hutton 1999, 174) or “the art of changing consciousness at will” (Starhawk 1989, 123; borrowing from Dion Fortune), to cite but two influential definitions. These witches and druids, women and men conventionally

1 The term is at times spelled “magick,” after occultist Aleister Crowley, which he claimed represented a more archaic spelling of the term (Hutton 1999, 174). Amber K, the author of a popular introduction to the practice of magick, writes in typical fashion that the “’k’ at the end of the word serves to distinguish it from the ‘magic’ of nightclub acts. Magick is not for show” (K, 2006, 2).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 | DOI 10.1163/9789004349247_008

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arranged under the label Neo-Pagans,2 communicate about magic(k), some go on to teach it, all the while expecting results out of it, as Tanya Luhrmann has amply shown (Luhrmann 1989), whether the stated aim of their magic is self-development, more earthly goals such as making extra cash or healing a broken body, or, more impressively (if not outright fantastically), acquiring the capacity to walk on fire. But being able to communicate about and teach magic implies, much like its virtual counterpart, that magic is repeatable and predictable (at least in theory), and also that it is a worthwhile activity. In other words, magic is effective. But that is not all witches and gamers share. As the magic of Neo-Pagan witches is result oriented, most handbooks of magic will give an account of the cause(s) of the effect sought. These accounts range from the cryptically implicit to the tediously exhaustive (for an example of which see Bonewits (1971)), but, while accounts found in Neo-Pagan literature differ in many aspects, there is a strong consensus that at the heart of magic lies the concept of energy or power. Take for instance the following charm first published in 1979 by the influential author, witch, activist, and co-founder of the Reclaiming movement, Starhawk: Healing image spell Create your poppet (a wax or cloth doll) to represent the person you wish to help already completely healed and whole. Do not represent the problem; rather, create the image of the solution. Concentrate as you make the poppet. Cast a circle. Light a BLUE CANDLE. Sprinkle your POPPET with SALT WATER. Say, “Blessed be, thou creature made by art. By art made, by art changed. Thou art not wax (cloth, wood, etc.) but flesh and blood, I name thee ___________ (name the person you wish to heal). Thou art s(he), between the worlds, in all the worlds. Blessed be.”

2 In the present chapter, I will focus mainly on texts stemming from the North American pagan scene, which belong to what Pizza and Lewis label “Contemporary Paganism—which consists of Wicca and Witchcraft, Druidry, Heathenry, Asatru, Goddess-worship, Ethnic Reconstructions, and many other traditions” (Pizza and Lewis 2009, 1). I choose to leave out of my discussion what has come to be labelled Western esotericism. The focus on the United States in the present chapter is not purely arbitrary, but may be linked to Chas Clifton’s observation that neo-paganism’s crossing of the Atlantic implied a shift away from a discourse of indigeneity, with its attendant lexis (Anglo-Saxon in the case of Gerald Gardner, Wicca’s founder, and Old Icelandic in the case of Ásatrú) (Clifton (2006, 37–70)); see below, p. 154.

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Chapter 7 Hold the poppet in your hands. Breathe on it, and charge it with energy. Visualize your friend completely healed, completely well. Charge particular parts of the doll especially strongly to correspond with the parts of your friend that are hurt or diseased. Visualize your friend completely charged with white light, well, happy, and filled with energy. Bind the spell. Earth the power. Open the circle. Starhawk 1989, 138–39

While the charm involves such typically magical elements as sympathy (or rather “homeopathy,” as James Frazer would have it (1911, 55)), visualization (Luhrmann 1989, 191–202), performative speech acts (Tambiah 1985, 77–79), and properties (Mauss 1972, 92–98), what appears to distinguish a peculiarly manufactured doll from the magically effective puppet is the energy with which the magician/witch must charge it. In 1971, although working in a very different register, Isaac Bonewits, a leading figure of American Neo-Pagan druidism, whom we met briefly in the last chapter, came to a similar conclusion, as his definition of magic suggests: A science and an art comprising a system of concepts and methods for the build-up of human emotion, altering the electrochemical balance of the metabolism, using associational techniques [e.g. laws of sympathy] and devices to concentrate and focus this emotional energy, thus modulating the energy broadcast by the human body, usually to affect other energy patterns, whether animate or inanimate, but occasionally to affect the personal energy patterns. Bonewits 1971, 204; my emphasis Examples could be multiplied,3 but in what follows I will concentrate on three influential figures within North American Neo-Paganism, Raymond Buckland, Isaac Bonewits, and Starhawk, who not only have given thought to the energy they manipulate while practicing magic(k), but who also happen, on occasion, to call that magical energy mana. How and why they do so will be the object of the present chapter. 3 See, for example, the handbooks of magic by Amber K (2006, 34), and T. Thorn Coyle (2005, 16–17), etc. See also the frankly dynamistic Pagan theology proposed by York (2009), a scholar who has been denounced as a Neo-Pagan insider (Davidsen 2012, 186).

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Raymond Buckland, or Wicca in America Raymond Buckland (1934–) is a prolific British-born author of books dealing with magic and witchcraft who has played a critical role in spreading Wicca to the United States in the early 1960s. In addition to his extensive writings about this new religion, he, together with his wife Rosemary, initiated the first generation of American Wiccan witches. Wicca was created in the late 1940s and early 50s by the English civil servant Gerald Gardner (1884–1964), and made public through his various books, including Witchcraft Today published in 1954 (Gardner 1973). Gardner’s creation rested largely on material borrowed from the occultist Aleister Crowley, a major figure in twentieth-century Western esotericism, and scholars such as J. G. Frazer and Margaret Murray, an Egyptologist best known for her (now discredited) theory that the early modern witches persecuted by Christian society were the remnants of a European pre-Christian fertility-based religion (Murray 1921; 1973).4 Gardner claimed he was merely safeguarding the tradition of these witches’ religion and not inventing a belief system from scratch. Yet, the contemporary echoes in his creation are clear, whether in its mythology and liturgical cycle of Sabbats, which above all deal with the Frazerian theme of a dying and rising (Horned) God associated with the vegetation cycle and his mother/wife the Great Goddess, or in its magical rituals, which “borrowed heavily from [Aleister] Crowley’s writings” before they were modified by Gardner’s first high priestess Doreen Valiente (Drury 2009, 59). Throughout Gardner’s work the themes of nature, fertility, the body, and sexual polarity are given a central place in an explicit rejection of perceived Christian values. These elements have coalesced in the rejection of patriarchy, which is made most evident by the organization of Wiccan adepts into covens of initiates, where women and men collaborate in writing and performing ritual and magical work and raise energy under the shared guidance of a high priestess and a high priest, the female being deemed the more important of the two. Buckland was initiated in Great Britain as high priest in Gardner’s coven in 1962 (Clifton 2006, 15–16). Upon moving to Long Island, New York, he established his own coven, where he began quietly initiating the first American witches before splitting off from Gardnerian Wicca and establishing his own

4 The story of Wicca has been told competently by many authors among whom may be mentioned Hanegraaff (1996), Hutton (1999), Clifton (2006), and Drury (2009); see also Adler (1986) for an insider’s perspective. For Crowley’s influence on Gardner, see, for example, Bogdan (2009).

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rival witchcraft tradition, Seax-Wica.5 In 1971, he published his own presentation of Gardner’s religion, Witchcraft from the Inside (Buckland 1971), aimed at an American audience. There he began with the idea that the witches’ pagan religion went back to the Paleolithic period, when the worship of the Horned God of Hunting and the Goddess of Fertility originated. Hunting and fertility were then, as today among “Australian Aborigines” (Buckland 1971, 6), of central concern, and sympathetic magickal rituals were developed to ensure their fruitfulness.6 Thus, this religion combined both worship of the god and goddess, what Buckland calls “animism” (7), and the practice of impersonal magick, which he defines as “belief in a supernatural force or power,” adding that the “name usually given to this power is mana, a Melanesian word meaning ‘what inspires awe”’ (7).7 It is this power that magicians and priests controlled through their knowledge and power (8), and by extension it is the power through which Wiccan witches, their heirs tasked with ensuring the fertility of nature, act magically. Buckland did not further elaborate on mana in Witchcraft from the Inside, merely dropping the name on one other occasion (10) and he used it sparsely in later publications.8 He came, however, to grant it a full entry in his Witch Book: The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, Wicca, and Neo-Paganism, which deserves to be quoted extensively: Mana. A general term for the mysterious spiritual power that is found throughout the universe, within humans, animals, and even inanimate objects. In general ethnological usage, the term is applied to the concept of spiritual power found in sacred things, places, people, and objects. 5 The absence of a central authority protecting a Wiccan “canon” has given rise to various innovations which have in certain cases coalesced into traditions. Thus, there are Gardnerian Wiccans, Alexandrians (named for Alex Sanders), etc. 6 Methodologically, Buckland relies both on archeology and the old Tylorian and Frazerian comparative method. 7 While Buckland does not provide references for his use of mana, his discussion clearly bears the imprint of dynamistic scholarship. In addition to Marett’s “awe,” Buckland evokes orenda and wakan, and echoes Codrington’s discussions of extraordinary skill as testifying to the possession of mana and the presence of mana in stones (Buckland 1971, 7–8). It is possible that his source is Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion (Eliade 1958), see below. 8 For instance, mana appears once in the liturgical handbook he wrote for his own variant tradition of Wicca, Seax-Wica, The Tree first published in 1974. In a footnote, he indicates that the more one uses one’s ritual knife “the more mana (power) it acquires” (Buckland 1974, 91). This book was of some moment insofar as it introduced the idea—quite controversial at the time—that one could self-initiate into Witchcraft (42; see Clifton 2006, 22).

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Originally, it was specifically a Melanesian and Polynesian term, where it was thought to be a power derived from divine ancestors, although some view it as that, but natural. It is the means by which Witches, magicians, and healers are able to cure sickness, control forces, bless and curse. Eliade says that anyone possessing large quantities of mana in the Solomon Islands is regarded as saka, which is “burning.” The idea of mystical heat belongs to magic generally and shamanism in particular. Many primitive tribes have a word meaning heat or burning to describe the energy of mana. When witches and others do hand-on healing, the patient invariably feels great heat coming from the hands, to the point where sometimes red marks are left on the body despite the fact that there was no actual physical contact made. The power of a male or female virgin in magic (and especially as sacrifice, in novels and movies) comes from the belief that by sexual intercourse the mana is lost to the powers of the earth. This happens through both the emission of semen and by virtue of the heat generated in the union. A virgin, therefore, possesses far greater mana than a nonvirgin [sic]. The ancient Chibcha of Colombia would take a young boy at puberty for sacrifice to the sun god. But he would be released if he managed to have intercourse with a woman, for he would have lost his mana. The power generated in Witchcraft rituals is referred to as mana, as is the power found in anything from crystals to trees. Buckland 2002, 322–23 With this text, Buckland seems to have been concerned with justifying his practice of Wiccan magic, and it is to anthropology that he turns for the means to do so. Buckland not only presents mana and the power it denotes as a given of ethnographical scholarship, requiring little discussion or explanation, but he also plays on mana’s ambiguous status straddling the emic/etic divide which allows for the sort of ethnographic “proof” early theorists happily exploited (see Chapter 3). He likewise co-opts Mircea Eliade’s authority (however criticized Eliade may be by professional scholars of religion; see, for example, McCutcheon (1997), Wedemeyer and Doniger (2010)), citing Eliade’s book Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, in order to build the affinity between “primitive” (or anthropological) and Wiccan magic, both of which generate a sensation of heat.9 While calling upon Eliade might appear misguided in the light of Eliade’s attack on the concept of mana (see p. 101), this 9 “In the Solomon Islands, any person possessing a large quantity of mana is considered saka, ‘burning”’ (Eliade 1951, 370). This is an inexact quotation of Codrington’s chapter on magic,

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choice (rather than, say, Robert Marett) points to Buckland’s strategic aim. His use of Eliade’s Shamanism allows him to link mana, which he takes to be the power manipulated in magic everywhere, with another central element of Neo-Pagan witchcraft, namely trance or ecstasy. He thereby provides anthropological sanction for this practice.10 Shamanism, which implies the idea of a specialist, the shaman, supports yet another critical idea for Buckland: while mana, as a universally distributed energy, is available to anyone (even inexperienced youngsters, i.e. virgins), its effective use in (Wiccan) magic requires specialization, be it through initiation into a coven or through individual bookish study, services Buckland is well positioned to provide. Mana undoubtedly represents in Buckland’s case a shrewd appeal to anthropological authority, an authority he claims for himself, most conspicuously through a Ph.D. from Brantridge Forest College, which a Google search suggests was a diploma mill. There may, however, be another factor in Buckland’s use of mana. In mobilizing mana, Buckland broke with Gerald Gardner (and Margaret Murray), who did not use the term but spoke simply of power. This difference is all the more interesting in that as a reader of anthropological lore and a member of Robert Marett’s and Sidney Hartland’s Folk-Lore Society, it is likely that Gardner had heard of mana. This difference between Gardner and Buckland may be linked to their respective positions on the two sides of the Atlantic. As Chas Clifton has remarked in his history of Neo-Paganism in America, the transition from Britain to the United States posed a problem for a religion whose existence was predicated on the idea of historical and/or ethnic heritage. Gardner’s Wicca claimed to be a survival of the old indigenous religion of Britain, a claim that necessarily broke down in the United States where Wicca was quite clearly an imported religion (Clifton 2006, 42). Accordingly, there was a shift, which Clifton situates in 1970, in the insiders’ discourse on Neo-Paganism. Whereas in Britain it had been presented in terms of a survival of the local “Old Religion,” once it crossed the ocean it began to be described as a “nature” or “earth religion” (3, 43ff.; see, for example, Starhawk (1997, xxvii)). Mana, culturally and linguistically linked to Oceania, may have felt too foreign to Gardner, whereas in the American context no such qualms need exist, nature/earth religion being a priori global. Moreover, mana had been linked by

10

where he notes that: “At Saa in Malanta all persons and things in which this supernatural power [mana] resides are said to be saka, that is, hot” (Codrington 1891, 191). Gerald Gardner had already insisted on trance as a necessary element of magic (Gardner 1973). Trance is a recurring feature of Neo-Pagan magic, see, for example, Amber K (2006, passim), Bonewits (1989, 84, 151, 160, 180–81, 214), Starhawk (1989, 152–71), Coyle (2005, 98), etc.

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scholar after scholar to Native American words such as orenda and wakan, a link also reported by Buckland (1971, 9). Indeed, it was not long before American Neo-Pagans came to claim that “Wicca … shared a great deal with native or tribal religions” (Clifton 2006, 71), whether Native American religions or that of the Oceanians. This geographical feature provides yet another common element with the extra-academic recuperation of mana in fantasy and science fiction literature and in gaming, which was likewise mostly the doing of Americans. But this link is probably nowhere more obvious than in the person of Isaac Bonewits.

Isaac Bonewits: Academically Accredited Magician Isaac Bonewits (1949–2010) was the founder and Arch Druid Emeritus of the largest Neo-Pagan Druid organization in the United States, Ár nDraíocht Féin (which he too described as an “earth religion”), a High Priest in the Gardnerian Wicca tradition, and an initiate of various other Neo-Pagan and Occultist groups (including Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis), as well as an important organizer for the wider Neo-Pagan community.11 But his main claim to fame was his college degree from the University of California at Berkeley. Devising his own course of study, he graduated in 1970 with a bachelor of arts in magic and thaumaturgy from the prestigious, but embarrassed, institution. Building on his BA thesis, he published his theory of magic as Real Magic (Bonewits 1971; second edition 1989), which, as its title suggests, is an attempt to provide a detailed account of magic within a naturalistic framework under the premise that “magic really works” (Bonewits 1971, 161). Bonewits writes that “one of the many purposes of the book [is to give the reader] a system of organizing your data about magic and the ‘supernatural’ in a way that will not insult your mind” (140). He mobilizes, on the one hand, anthropology and history to identify cross-cultural laws of magic (1–17) and the forms it has taken throughout the globe (for example, 147–59),12 and on the other, quantum physics together with a healthy dose of “parapsychology” (34–70), in order to construct a materialistic theory of the interconnectedness of minds past and present, a theory based on the “fact” that our nervous systems “broadcast”

11 12

I have taken the biographical information from Guiley (1989, 33–35) and Bonewits’s website, http://www.neopagan.net (accessed August 30, 2016). Laws, for example, the Frazerian “Law of Similarity and the Law of Contagion … the key phrase for the Law of Similarity would be: ‘Lookalikes are alike!”’ (Bonewits 1971, 5–6).

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and “receive” electromagnetic waves, which some individuals can convert into information (131–40). Having laid these foundations, Bonewits proceeds to his explanation of how, and why, magic works. Since modulations of human metabolism affect the electromagnetic waves (which Bonewits equates with energy) sent and received by the nervous system, which waves in turn affect other “patterns of energy whether mind or matter” (i.e. other persons or things),13 it follows, according to Bonewits, that it is possible to have material effects at a distance (for example, healing a wound or influencing another’s decisions) provided one is able to change “the electrochemical balance” of one’s metabolism (161). And what is the most readily available means of changing one’s metabolism? Emotions. Consequently, the practice of magic will consist in generating emotions and then directing the energy thus raised through the application of the various laws of magic (204).14 While Bonewits’s tone in Real Magic is at times playful and even ironic,15 authorized by his University training (the BA in magic, xi), he assumes the persona of a scientist, however unconventional, applying the scientific method (xii, 21), and ostentatiously showing willingness to suspend judgment in the face of “insufficient data” (ix, passim). By conforming to the requirements of the discourse of science, however superficially—a physicist might well take issue with his discussion, as he later acknowledged (Bonewits and Bonewits 2007, 28–29)—he endowed his theory with the prestige and authority of science. In this sense, he evinces little difference from Larry Niven and Greg

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The equivalence between energy and matter refers to Einstein’s famous equation between energy and mass, E = mc2. This equation is frequently alluded to in defense of the practice of magic in Neo-Paganism, in New Age discourse, and in their antecedents; see Bonewits (1971, 41), Albanese (1992, 72–73), York (2009, 297). See also Terry Pratchett’s spoof on the equation given at the head of the chapter; note that Pratchett was quite knowledgeable both on fantasy literature and on Wicca and occultism (Harvey 1997, 50– 51). Bonewits does not provide the script of a magic spell. He does, however, provide the following guidelines for a magical cure: “Normally the emotion will be one of compassion, sympathy, or sorrow … get a good image of the target’s present condition. Change that image until you have one of the way you want the target to look. … Fill your entire being with compassion and resolution that the target will be healed. Build up everything to the utmost peak and fire!” (Bonewits 1971, 173). For instance, “The popular mantras are also noted for their droning, hypnotic qualities. By the time you have repeated, Om-mani-padme-hum or Nam-myo-ho-renge-kyo or … Eee-ee-kwals-emmm-seees-kwared for the one-millionth time, you will not only begin to believe it, but you will also be well on your way to a magnificent hypnotic trance” (Bonewits 1971, 84).

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Costikyan, who similarly turned to a scientific-sounding idiom to vindicate their magic (see Chapter 6 above; Hammer 2001, 205–08). In 1971, Bonewits had not found it necessary to give this energy a particular name, speaking at most of “emotional” or “psychic energy” (Bonewits 1971, 199, 204; 51), possibly having found the latter expression in the writings of Jung (1969, 61, 65). In 1978, however, this was to change. Like other Neo-Pagans, Bonewits was also involved in the early role-playing game scene, being an active member of the Society for Creative Anachronism,16 where he interacted with some of the gamers who came to play a role in the introduction of mana into role-playing games (Golub and Peterson 2016, 327–28). Although he presumably enjoyed playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, he was dissatisfied with the magic systems being used in such games, which he found to be based on inadequate sources, such as fantasy novels rather than anthropology or parapsychology, and so “highly unrealistic” (Bonewits 1998, 12). To remedy this situation Bonewits wrote Authentic Thaumaturgy (Bonewits 1978, second expanded edition 1998), in which he took his findings from Real Magic and converted them into a form that could be used in role-playing games. Emotional or psychic energy and the laws of magic accordingly retained a central role both in the configuration of characters and their abilities (Bonewits 1998, 50–55),17 and in the spells they cast (for example, 76). But this process of adaptation included a terminological innovation; the energy of magic acquired a new name: “mana.” Magic, according to Bonewits, thus became the science and art of raising and using mana, “a natural force distributed throughout the universe(s) in more-or-less infinite quantity, just as light, gravity and the strong & weak nuclear forces are” (24). And how do real world magicians— himself included—raise such mana/energy? By generating emotions through, inter alia, chanting, meditation, and potions (i.e. drugs),18 as theorized in his Real Magic, to which he refers the reader (Bonewits 1998, 140). 16

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Clifton has noted the important role of the Society for Creative Anachronism in building bridges between Neo-Paganism and role-playing (Clifton 2006, 117–18). For a description of the Society and its activities, see: http://www.sca.org (accessed August 31, 2016). The way a character à la Bonewits uses magic depends on randomly determined “stats,” such as a character’s “Psi potential … a character stat … that measures the subtlety of the character’s nervous system … and therefore the type and number of inborn Psychic Talents/Abilities/Powers he may have” (Bonewits 1998, 51). Other stats include “Magical Strength” and “Magical Power” (53–54). “Meditation takes a very long time to generate high amounts of mana, although an experienced meditator can often ‘pull in’ mana from the outside in a short period. Meditative magic has an advantage in fine tuning, for the mage using meditation has far more time in which to concentrate on her or his desired goal … This is why the ‘Rune Weaver’ in-

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But where did Bonewits pick up the term? In the absence of references in Authentic Thaumaturgy, we can turn to the second edition of his Real Magic in which he both added the equation between psychic energy and mana and gave an updated and extensive bibliography (Bonewits 1989, 200). Although he was aware of the ethnographic, Polynesian, origin of mana (Bonewits 1978, 14; 1989, 259), the references Bonewits summons suggest that his knowledge of mana came largely from (armchair) generalists; in Real Magic there is one lone reference to a fieldworker, Bronislaw Malinowski, and his theoretical essay Magic, Science, and Religion (Malinowski 1984). He cites authors such as Carl Gustav Jung, whose theories of the collective unconscious Bonewits explicitly likens to his own theory of the interconnectedness of minds (Bonewits 1989, 131), Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell (of Star Wars fame), scholars who have been roundly criticized by their peers, while enjoying considerable success outside the Academy.19 At the same time, it is possible that there may have been a more proximal type of source. Authentic Thaumaturgy presumes a passing acquaintance with the word on the part of its intended audience, for instance by warning against confusing mana with manna (Bonewits 1978, 14). Indeed, before Authentic Thaumaturgy came out in 1978, not only had there been publications by gamers in which mana occurred (see Chapter 6), but also, as Golub and Peterson have shown, a number of players were already using the term in their games, in particular in the Berkeley area where the future Arch Druid was living at the time (Golub and Peterson 2016, 326–28). While it is most likely that Bonewits had encountered mana during his studies in magic at U.C. Berkeley, it is in no way impossible that his interest for the term was primarily sparked by fellow gamers. In this sense, he incarnates the close ties often noted between Neo-Paganism and fantasy literature and gaming (see, for example, Harvey 1997, 181–86; Clifton 2006, 145; Robertson 2009; Cusack 2010). At any rate, Bonewits happily adopted the term for his magical practice, whether ludic or occult, reflecting some thirty years later that “because it has so many possible uses, mana became one of Isaac’s favorite magical terms” (Bonewits and Bonewits 2007, 40). The cases of Raymond Buckland and Isaac Bonewits thus show two variant versions of the adoption of “mana” as a name for the active ingredient in Neo-Pagan magic. Although they agreed on its fundamental meaning, the

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vented by David Hargrave (in the first volume of his Arduin Grimoire [a book of rules for role-playing]) can produce such powerful effects” (Bonewits 1978, 14). For critiques of Jung, see, for example, Noll (1994) and Dohe (2016). For Eliade, see McCutcheon (1997) and Dubuisson (2005). For Campbell, see McCutcheon (2001, 43–45).

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energy that powers their magical spells, they did not grant it the same status. For Buckland, the word itself was powerful. For Bonewits, mana was but a convenient and useful signifier, whose power presumably lay in its capacity to echo in wider social circles. But there are yet other variants and other ways to vindicate Neo-Pagan magic by means of mana.

Starhawk’s (Hawaiian) Energy A third modality of such vindication can be seen in the writings of Starhawk.20 Born Miriam Simos (1951-), Starhawk is among the best known witches in NeoPaganism as a proponent of Goddess religion and teacher of magic, and an ecofeminist political activist, activities she sees as closely integrated.21 In 1975 she moved to the Berkeley area, the same region that saw Bonewits and others tinker with mana for their Dungeon & Dragons games (in fact Starhawk and Bonewits refer to each other). When there, she was dissatisfied with the various forms of Witchcraft that were available (Salomonsen 2002, 38) and so began forming her own feminist and egalitarian covens, which she understood as “training group[s] in which women could be liberated, men re-educated, and new forms of human relationship explored which were free of the old gender stereotypes and power structures” (Hutton 1999, 346). Magic and spells played a role in her project, largely because she sees them as “psychological tools that have subtle but important effects on a person’s inner growth” (Starhawk 1989, 125), which in turn lead to transformative effects in the outside world. At the same time she studied with and was initiated into Faery (or Feri) Witchcraft by Victor Anderson (see below), and began teaching her own material. By 1979, her material was sufficiently developed that she founded a “school,” Reclaiming, and published a handbook of her brand of Witchcraft, The Spiral Dance (Starhawk 1989), a book that spells out the history, myths, rituals, liturgy, and magic of her version of the “Old Religion.”22 20

21 22

For Starhawk’s biography, I follow Starhawk’s remarks in the second edition of the The Spiral Dance (1989, 1–13) and Salomonsen’s useful if somewhat theologically-biased study of the San Francisco Reclaiming witches (Salomonsen 2002). See also Hutton (1999, 345– 52), Berger (2005), and Morgain (2013 and 2016, for Starhawk and mana). “Politics is a form of magic, and we work magic by directing energy through a vision. We need to envision the society we want to create” (Starhawk 1987, 314). Despite her denial of Gardner’s influence (Salomonsen 2002, 93), his influence nevertheless surfaces in various places, for example, in the liturgical cycle of Sabbats, in the mythology, the form of magic, and in the claim that the religion goes back to early modern witches; see Hutton (1999, 350) and Salomonsen (2002, 67).

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Starhawk’s Magic The Spiral Dance, a bestselling book that has undergone three editions, presents magic as a means of transforming society, as a way, in other words, to cause change in the material world. This claim is based on two central affirmations. First, that the universe is dynamic, “things are swirls of energy” shifting from one configuration to another, a mythical view she presents as corroborated by “modern physics” (Starhawk 1989, 32; 1997, 9). Second, that perceiving this dynamic, interconnected nature of the universe requires “extraordinary consciousness” (1989, 32), which belongs to the “unconscious mind,” as psychoanalysis has it, or “Younger Self,” as Starhawk calls it (35). To work magic one must first integrate the unconscious and the conscious minds by using symbols and images. At a basic level, these symbols will generate effects by implanting ideas into one’s unconscious, leading to what is called “suggestion” by “skeptics” (125–26), or “placebo” by Bonewits (Bonewits 1971, 126–30). The greater magic, through which a witch seeks to influence the outside world, requires being in a state of alternate consciousness, in a state of trance, for it is only then that one can perceive the material world as energy patterns. To effect material change, the witch must introduce energy into the greater system, directing that energy by means of the symbols and images present in the spell, for example, a black stone, a blue candle, or clover (Starhawk 1989, 130, 134, 133). Introducing energy may lead to changes in the overall pattern and so to concomitant changes in its material manifestations as perceived by ordinary consciousness,23 provided one also acts physically in accordance with the desired effect (127–28; 1987, 24). But what is that energy and where does it come from? While Starhawk does at times borrow from quantum physics, her energy is of a different order: “subtle,” it is the energy of the “occultists” (Starhawk 1989, 147). This subtle energy takes three forms, each of which is associated with one of the three selves postulated by Starhawk: Younger (unconscious), Talking (conscious), and Deep or High Self, equated with Goddess and God (147–48), and at times with a “Divine within” (Starhawk 1989, 35; see also Starhawk 1997, 54). For all that, Starhawk only really pays attention to the first type of energy, which she calls “elemental or raith energy” (Starhawk 1989, 147): “It is the subtle force of the elements; earth, air, water, and fire, of plants and animals. Elemental vitality sustains 23

“When our own energy is concentrated and channeled, it can move the broader energy currents. The images and objects used in spells are the channels, the vessels through which our power is poured and by which it is shaped. When energy is directed into the images we visualize, it gradually manifests physical form and takes shape in the material world” (Starhawk 1989, 126; see also Starhawk 1987, 24).

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the physical body” (147). It may be acquired, for example, through physical exercise and sex, and lost. Indeed, it is the energy expended in magic (148).24 To prevent magical depletion of energy, one may turn to auxiliary sources of energy such as animals or to the earth: “instead of draining our own vitality, we tap directly into the unlimited sources of elemental energy in the earth” (Starhawk 1989, 148, 58; Starhawk 1997, 29). Starhawk’s is thus a more optimistic take on Niven’s territorial magical energy (see above p. 138). Being linked to Younger Self, this energy accordingly belongs to the realm of the nonrational; Starhawk thus links this energy to emotions (for example, Starhawk 1989, 126, 131) and equates it with ecstasy, in other words, alternate consciousness (142, 28). Starhawk’s Mana In The Spiral Dance, Starhawk refers to her training in the tradition of Faery Witchcraft as a source for her material (1989, 5, 25, 54, 174, etc.). Faery (sometimes spelt Feri), however, long remained an initiatory, secret, tradition (Anderson 2004, 46), which led Starhawk to cloak under new names the many ideas she borrowed from Victor and Cora Anderson, the founders of Faery.25 In addition to the creation myth and the primary focus on ecstasy (rather than fertility à la Gardner), the Andersons’ influence can likewise be seen in Starhawk’s tripartite model of the self. As early as 1972, Victor had published material on “etheric anatomy” where he identified three selves, the unconscious self, tasked with creating and storing “life force,” a mental self, and finally the personal God (2004, 11, 17, 32). Anderson, who identified as both a witch and a kahuna (‘Hawaiian pre-Christian priest’; cf. Māori tohunga), called these: “Unihipili, Uhane, and Aumakua” (9). These three words are Hawaiian, although the way they are used by the Andersons does not correspond to what is found in language dictionaries (see Morgain 2016, 289). As might now be expected, the term Anderson reserved for “life force” was Hawaiian “mana” (Anderson 2004, 11). Mana plays an important role in Faery 24 25

“Magic and psychic work require tremendous vitality—literally the energy of raith, of Younger Self” (Starhawk 1989, 67). Victor Anderson (1917–2001) claimed to have been initiated as a witch by an old woman in Oregon in 1926 (Adler 1986, 78–79) and a member of the Harpy Coven there in the 1930s (Coyle 2005, 3; Clifton 2006, 129). Despite these claims to authority, what he and his wife Cora taught, seemingly starting in the 1950s, appears to have been mainly based on the work of Gerald Gardner and Max Freedom Long (see below), with further loans from Kabbalah, Voudoun, etc. (Clifton 2006, 130–31). While Victor published some of his teachings during his lifetime, much of it was revealed posthumously; see, for example, Anderson (2004) and Coyle (2005).

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magic, and by extension in that of The Spiral Dance.26 In a text published after Victor’s death, the Andersons provided the blueprint for magical working, the “old Hawaiian Ha Prayer” (47–55). Because its aim is to create communication with the Gods, or in other words to straighten the three selves, it may be used to ask “for anything you need” (47). The prayer itself consists in sending the mana stored in the Unihipili (Starhawk’s unconscious mind or Younger Self) to the Aumakua (the God Self), by standing straight and “breathing slowly and deeply to build up mana” (48–49). Once adequately charged, the practitioner must “exhale quickly and strongly, blowing the air upward through the lips. The Unihipili will release the mana to the Aumakua,” thus establishing union with the divine and enabling magical working (49, 53). This central practice of the Faery/Feri tradition (Coyle 2005, 70–74; Morgain 2016, 296) is indeed present in The Spiral Dance, where it is described as “the greater magic of rituals” which is about “connect[ion] to the divine” (Starhawk 1989, 130). More pointedly, it appears that behind the energy Starhawk situates at the heart of her magic, the “elemental” energy of the Younger Self, lies the Andersons’ mana. Later books by Starhawk confirm this reading.27 While she has inflected her views of magic in the direction of political action (for example, Starhawk 1997, 13; see Hutton 1999, 348–49), she has maintained the axiomatic notions that the universe is dynamic and that changes in energy patterns require alternate consciousness (Starhawk 1997, 10, 13; 1987, 24), and preserved a central role for energy. Moreover, she has occasionally called that energy “mana” (Starhawk 1997, 29, 51; 1987, 100), noting that: no modern English word quite conveys the meaning of energy in the sense I’m using it here. The Chinese ch’i, the Hindu prana, and the Hawaiian mana are clearer terms for the idea of an underlying vital energy that infuses, creates, and sustains the physical body. Starhawk 1997, 51 In such a passage, mana, alongside the associated notions of ch’i and prana,28 appears to play the role of documentation, if not proof, of the key element in 26

27 28

For descriptions of mana by practitioners of Faery/Feri, see Morgain (2016). According to Morgain’s informants, mana is “an almost tangible substance … a fluid … blue,” it is readily compared to electricity and “permeat[es] every corner of the cosmos” (296–302). A reading already proposed by Morgain (2016). In her second book Dreaming the Dark, published three years after The Spiral Dance, Starhawk introduces elements drawn from Chinese acupuncture and Indian yoga to her

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what is in fact a thoroughly Western esoteric theory (Hanegraaff 1996), presumably in the face of rejection by Western science. Interestingly, in the absence of an exposition of just what that mana is, much of its authority, I submit, must come from the adjective “Hawaiian.” Thus, rather than a universalized, scholarly mana à la Eliade or Jung (Buckland), or the quantified, scientificized mana of gamers (Bonewits), Starhawk wields the emic mana of a native people. Associating such mana to her magical energy amounts to her conferring upon the latter the authority of an authentic non-Western, magical “earth religion.” Max Freedom Long: From Prana to Mana This last point, however, requires some qualification. I have noted above that the Andersons, Starhawk’s source, used Hawaiian terms in ways that did not exactly correspond to what may be found in Hawaiian language dictionaries. Their use in fact corresponds to the meaning given to them by Max Freedom Long (1890–1971), the founder of the Huna religion (Anderson 2004, 47), which Long, and the Andersons after him, claimed was the secret pre-Christian religion of Hawai’i. As Long tells the story, he had arrived in Hawai’i in 1917 where he had been highly impressed with stories of the magical powers of Hawaiian priests, the kahunas who reportedly could instantly heal, as well as walk on the barely solidified lava of the Big Island. Convinced of the reality of such claims, he embarked on a lifelong quest to discover the “psycho-religious system” whereby kahunas and other “primitive people” accomplished such “miracles” (Long 1948, 16, 20). To do so, however, he did not draw on native informants, like Codrington in Melanesia, or mobilize written sources about Hawai’i’s preChristian religion (on which, see Valeri 1985) but rather turned to contemporary Western esoteric ideas (Rothstein 2007; Chai 2011; Morgain 2016, 288–89). He deduced from his armchair cross-cultural study of fire-walking and magical healing a theory of magic involving three elements: some form of consciousness controlling the magic, a force actually doing the work, and a substance acted upon. The first we have already met. It is the Aumakua the Andersons borrowed from Long, which with the two other selves forms a tripartite model which Long built on the basis of the theories of both the Theosophical Society and Sigmund Freud (Morgain 2016, 289; see also Rothstein 2007, 322). As theory of energy (Starhawk 1997, 52), elements which were thoroughly absent from The Spiral Dance. I would argue that mana functioned as her original proof. Bringing together acupuncture, yoga and mana is recurrent in the wider New Age movement; see inter multa alia http://justeuneetincelle.ch/etincelle.ch/Reiki.html (accessed Nov. 16, 2016).

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for the substance, Long argued that man has both etheric and physical bodies, notions that can also be linked to the Theosophical Society (see Leadbeater 1903, 13–14). The etheric bodies function, according to Long, as molds for the physical one, so that influence exerted upon the etheric substance translates into physical change, for example, healing.29 Long’s force, “mana,” likewise did not originate in Hawaiian ethnography.30 Indeed, his text Mana or Vital Force (Long 1981) suggests that the primary notion he was struggling with was not mana but “vital force,” a vitalistic notion, which he had first studied under the name of prana, as a member of the Theosophical Society, before arriving in Hawai’i (1).31 The primary character of his notion of vital force, and by extension the happenstance nature of his use of the term mana, occasionally surfaces in his descriptions of the Hawaiian concept. Beyond assigning characteristics absent from the historical and ethnographic record, such as water-like substantiality (cf. Valeri 1985, 95–104), Long’s circular argumentation evinces his dependence on the preconceived notion of vital force as a template for his mana: The union of the ideas of life and mana, in the minds of the kahunas, is to be seen in the word ola-ola, which is a doubling of the word for “life.” This compound does not translate “more life”; it translates “to make a gurgling sound with water, as in pouring,” and there we have the familiar symbol of “water” for mana. Long 1981, 1132 It is, however, in his description of mana in terms of electromagnetism that Max Freedom Long most clearly reveals the prototype on which he con29

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His theory of magic is given in his The Secret Science behind Miracles (Long 1948), and in a condensed form in a text published online under the title “Huna—The Workable PsychoReligious System of the Polynesians,” available at: http://www.maxfreedomlong.com/ articles/huna-the-workable-psycho-religious-system-of-the-polynesians/ (accessed September 16, 2016). Long, and the Andersons after him, defined mana as “life force” (Long 1948, 33; Anderson 2004, 11). Andrew Lorrin’s dictionary, which according to Morgain (2016, 288) was Long’s source for Hawaiian words, does not give such a definition (Lorrin 1865, 382). For Lorrin’s meager value as a source on Hawaiian ethnography, see above pp. 12–14. There are a few other vitalistic interpretations of mana in its Western history, most notably Pierre Saintyves (1914, 114–20) and Carl Gustav Jung (see Noll 1994, 51). While Lorrin indeed rendered “ola-ola” as “an ebullition; a bubbling of water … same as ola, life … to gargle, to bubble, as water entering a calabash” (Lorrin 1865, 483–84), nowhere does he link the term with mana.

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structed his mana,33 as for instance when he claimed that: In the kahuna practices, the knowledge of the vital forces and of the mild forms of hypnotic suggestion went hand in hand. In the West we made a good beginning, in the discovery of mesmerism, toward recovering the ancient Huna practice of giving the patient vital force [i.e. mana] through the touch of the hands while administering the suggestion of healing. Long 1948, 121 Although like Durkheim, Marett, and other scholars discussed above, Long speaks of the voltage and charge of mana, unlike them, his reference is not to contemporary physics but to the esoteric tradition, beginning with Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815). Mesmer proposed that a “subtle invisible fluid,” permeated the universe and that the distribution of this fluid in the human body determined health and illness. Being “magnetic,” this fluid, called “animal magnetism,” could be manipulated by a specialist (see Hanegraaff 1996, 430–35; Fuller 1982).34 Indeed, Long regularly referred to Mesmer and his animal magnetism (Long 1948, 42–45, 121) as well as to the more psychologically inclined variant propounded by Phineas Quimby (164–67), the founder of New Thought, one of the pillars of the later New Age movement (Hanegraff 1996, 484–90). Like his Unihipili, whose meaning he crafted to suit his designs, Long’s mana represents no more than a Western esoteric concept dressed in Hawaiian garb. In that sense, his use of mana—which can be chalked up to his serendipitous move to Hawai’i, rather than North Dakota for instance, to take up teaching—and the universalized category denoting “magical power,” constructed by historians and anthropologists of religion, appear to represent a case of convergent but independent evolution. Long’s use of mana may thus represent an alternative genealogy for the mana found in Neo-Pagan magic

33

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“The Aumakua or superconscious part of mind is the consciousness involved in giving fire-immunity. The force it uses in this work is called mana by the kahunas, and is known to us as vital force. It is electrical in its nature and shows strong magnetic qualities” (Long 1948, 33–34). I have come across only one early theorist of mana (see Chapter 3 above) to have mentioned mesmerism, namely Andrew Lang in his Making of Religion (Lang 1898). Lang, however, discussed mesmerism as source material, not as a valid theory (for example, Lang 1898, 37). Jung also very occasionally mentioned Mesmer and animal magnetism, acknowledging the latter’s contribution to hypnosis and suggestion (Jung 1989, 295–96, 339–40).

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and more generally in the New Age movement.35 It is not impossible, however, that Long had encountered mana in Jung’s psychological work on psychic energy and the mana personality (for mentions of Jung by Long, see, for example, Long 1948, 55).36 With Max Freedom Long, and to some extent the Andersons and their students, I have returned to my starting point, Polynesia. Unfortunately it is, to paraphrase Lisa Aldred’s happy expression (Aldred 2000), a return to a “plastic” Polynesia. But however guilty of misappropriation of cultural wares they might be (Hall 2005; Rothstein 2007, 315), Long and the witches and druids of Neo-Paganism only represent the final step in a process initiated and worked out by the scholars who extracted mana from its cultural contexts and fashioned it into a general category, in order to come to grips with religion and magic—categories that belong exclusively to the West.

A Useful Category In this chapter, I have stressed the commonalities between gamers and witches, not least of which their common use of mana. There is, however, a major difference between the two groups. While, in one case, there is a clear and observable link between cause and effect—pay five mana and you will see the fireball hurtling toward your target—the same cannot be said of Neo-Pagan magic (see, for example, Luhrmann 1989). Which leads me to the question, why have (some) Neo-Pagans turned to mana? I have begun to answer this question by pointing out the genealogies of their use of the term (whether religionist scholars such as Jung and Eliade, fantasy/sci-fi authors, or (pseudo-)ethnography), which in turn suggests the presence of strategies of authorization. But herein lies another critical difference from the gamers, whose use of mana has little to do with explaining or legitimating the magic of their virtual worlds, but rather with gameplay and atmosphere (see above,

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Note, however, that some members of the Neo-Pagan scene reject Long’s Huna as “completely non-Hawaiian” (Cunningham 2009, xiii) or as “mostly invented stuff” (Bonewits 2007, 40). While it is possible to speak of independent convergence in the case of Max Freedom Long, such is no longer the case in later authors such as Amber K who bring together these initially separate strands: “We begin exploring this three-part model of the Self. It is not the only model of the way we human beings are organized, but it is one that has been used effectively within the Huna religion of Hawaii, the Faery tradition of Wicca, and by giants in the field of psychology, notably Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung” (K 2006, 51).

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pp. 143–45). Neo-Pagans, on the other hand, who claim actual, real-world efficacy for their magic, must deal with the socially dominant discourse on causality, science. As we have seen, one way to do this is to co-opt elements of scientific discourse, most notably the figuratively and literally esoteric quantum physics and the concept of energy. Yet such co-optation is not without risk for too much of it can expose magical causality to empirical falsification. Enter mana or “magical power” (Marett 1904, 154) as conceptualized by scholars of religion. As we have seen, a central element in its construction was its anti-intellectualism (Chapter 3). Mana was built to counter a rationalistic perspective on religion, which saw religion as a functional, but sadly inadequate, equivalent of science that would necessarily come to be discarded, insofar as they answered to the same validation criteria. Accordingly, theorists of mana variously reified a sui generis sphere for magic and religion where their causal claims, which would have failed in terms of scientific causality, could nevertheless be presented as valid. In this sense, those who mobilized mana wanted to have their causal cake and eat it too. This pretension (or ambiguity) may be illustrated by means of a comparison with anthropological symbolism as represented by John Beattie. While both mana users and symbolists sought to protect religion from critical evaluation according to the criteria of the rationality of Western science, symbolists did so by entirely removing the discourse of causality from religion and magic. Beattie thus insisted that religious and magical rituals had nothing to do with practical ends but rather with expression of meanings, values, etc., and so belonged to the sphere not of technology or science but that of art.37 The Western category of mana did no such thing.38 On the one hand, it was constructed as non-rational, having to do with emotions (Marett), collective psychology (Hubert and Mauss), paranormal phenomena (Lang), or transcendence (Söderblom), but on the other hand it cloaked itself in the rational, scientific language of force, energy, and electricity (Chapter 6). The mana of the Academy was effectively about power. Predictably, this useful duality evinced by mana reappeared in the writings of Buckland, Bonewits and 37

38

“In so far as magical and religious rites contain an essentially expressive element, they may, so far, be satisfying and rewarding in themselves. For the magician, as for the artist, the basic question is not whether his ritual is true, in the sense of corresponding exactly with some empirically ascertainable reality, but rather whether it says, in apt symbolic language, what it is sought, and held important, to say” (Beattie, 1966, 68; see also Horton’s neo-intellectualist criticism of the symbolist position; Horton 1993). It is thus hardly an accident that one of the first “collective representations” Lucien LévyBruhl mentioned as typical of “pre-logical mentality,” a mentality defined by an a-rational but causal principle, the “law of participation,” was mana (Lévy-Bruhl 1910, 68–110, 3).

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Starhawk, who all wished to present their magic as a worthwhile, reasonable activity for modern Westerners. They all fell back on mana, a category that allowed them to advance causal claims, while protecting them from systematic falsification by mainstream science. Unsurprisingly, their energy/mana arises and operates within an explicitly irrational context, whether it is the Marettian world of emotions for Buckland (“awe”; 1971, 7) and Bonewits (1971, 204), or the more Jungian and Freudian unconscious of Starhawk (1989). And so falsification is left not to outside verification (did the promised effect really occur?) but rather to individual experience. This recourse to individual experience is reminiscent of Nathan Söderblom and Rudolf Otto as well as the two most often quoted scholars of religion by Neo-Pagans, Mircea Eliade and C. G. Jung, who likewise adopted mana and its substitutes (the Holy, the Sacred, libido) as part of a similar bid to protect their religion from critical inquiry, a personal religion that in the case of Jung and Eliade had close ties to Western esotericism (see, for example, Noll 1994; Idel 2014). A second critical point of contrast between gaming and Neo-Pagan magic has to do with the substantiality of mana. In role-playing games, mana is a tangible substance; indeed, in many games not only is it quantifiable but it is often physically concrete. For instance, characters in video games such as Diablo, Heroes of Might and Magic, or World of Warcraft, have at their disposal “mana potions,” usually depicted graphically as bottles filled with a blue liquid—a literal energy drink. Drinking such a potion restores a determined quantity of mana points to the character, who will use them to cast further spells. Within the game then, the substantiality of mana is never in doubt; it is not, cannot be, a mystification. In being substantial, mana can be used to provide a fairly accurate index of a virtual wizard’s power, if only because more powerful spells require more mana. Mana may thus be used as a means to hierarchize magic-using characters within the game—and their players outside of it. Thus, within the gaming community, mana can determine social rank (and power), whereas pre-existing features such as class, gender, profession, etc. have no bearing whatsoever. The power coded by mana is purely personal; it is the outcome of a player’s actions and decisions within the game. Again, there appears to be no mystification. Like gamers, Neo-Pagan witches tend to describe mana in substantial terms. Buckland, for instance, speaks of witches “possessing large quantities of mana” (Buckland 2002, 322; see also Morgain 2016, 297). Insofar as it is conceptualized as energy, the implication is that it can be stored, acquired and expended. Some writers go so far as to describe it as a “fluid” that can be “shape[d]” (Morgain 2016, 297–98). Substantializing magical energy, mana, accordingly represents an affirmation of the reality and efficacy of magic as whole. Unlike gamers, however, no witch or druid has yet produced the equivalent of

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a mana potion. Described as “spiritual” (Buckland 2002, 322), “paranormal,” which Bonewits equates with “supernatural” (1971, 34), and “subtle” (Starhawk 1989, 51), magical energy resolutely defies direct observation, the best efforts of Isaac Bonewits and parapsychologists notwithstanding. From a critical perspective, then, mana in the Neo-Pagan context is best seen not as substance but as a discourse of substance. In this sense, it appears as something of a misrepresentation in a way that echoes Melanesian mana as described by Codrington. I have shown above that Codrington’s mana represents, to borrow Lincoln’s happy expression, a mystification of success (Lincoln 2014, 81). In the Melanesians (Codrington 1891), mana can indeed be analyzed as a discourse that effects the cloaking of the social and economic bases of power (see above, pp. 49–50). And later scholarly conceptualizations of mana as substance have proved to be just as mystificatory, most noticeably in causal contexts as when scholars of medieval Scandinavia turned to mana to “explain” royal power (see Chapter 5). Thus, in addition to providing a scientific-like idiom of cause and effect, mana as constructed in the Academy also supplied a readily available mystificatory discourse of power, geared at obfuscating its social, human workings. As Morgain has noted (2016, 301), Neo-Pagan mana is presented as a purely personal power, often located within the individual.39 Such a discourse, however, cannot fully hide the social dimension of magic, of Neo-Pagan power. As noted above, witches’ mana reveals itself to be as much a discourse of power as an instrument of authorization, whether by claiming a link to prestigious scholarly figures or an unadulterated and global earth religion. In thus claiming authority, such discourses point to an underlying situation of competition; competition with mainstream scientists, with other religions, but also competition within the Neo-Pagan community. As in role-playing games, there are hierarchies between magic-wielders—some are manifestly more powerful than others. Their books have turned best-sellers, their views of magic have become authoritative, and they themselves come to be staples of academic discussions of Neo-Paganism. But such envied positions cannot be simply ascribed to a witch’s (or a druid’s) personal magical power. Otherwise why would Bonewits make so much of his Berkeley B.A. in magic? Like Melanesian chiefs, chief

39

Starhawk, for instance, has developed the view in her second book, Dreaming the Dark, that the energy—the power—that is used in magic is of a different order than the force used by dominants to coerce others. In contrast to this interpersonal form of power, magic mobilizes what Starhawk calls “Power-From-Within,” which is “the power we sense in a seed, in the growth of a child, the power we feel writing, weaving, working, creating, making choices … It is the power that comes from within” (Starhawk 1997, 3).

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witches enjoy success that can be explained through social and economic factors as well as serendipity, as, for example, Buckland’s arrival in America at the right time. But should they not wish to foreground such explanations for their success (which would presumably have an adverse effect on the sales of their magical wares), and, more generally, should they wish to dissociate issues of power from their magical religion (Wicca, Witchcraft, Goddess Movement, etc.), mana provided an ideal, time-tested instrument. Indeed, as the foregoing discussion suggests, different scholars had configured mana as an innocuous discourse of power, innocuous because it was a power expressly constructed as non-political. However oxymoronic (as in simultaneously having and eating a cake), it has proved useful again and again in dissociating religion from politics.40 In this sense, Neo-Pagans are the direct heirs of the phenomenology of religion. Second-order, Western mana, in its twin capacity as discourse of cause and discourse of power, appears to be perfectly positioned to stand in for the active ingredient of real-world magic in late twentieth, early twenty-first century America and Europe. It is arguably better than potential rivals such as Tantric shakti (‘cosmic energy’), Mesmer’s animal magnetism, or Wilhelm Reich’s “orgone energy,”41 none of which combined these two discursive elements with the prestige and authority of having been a general, theoretical category of the academic study of religion. And yet, as I have noted at the beginning of this chapter, the name “mana” is only occasionally used by Neo-Pagan authors to name their magical energy. While any account of this apparent discrepancy must involve speculation (I have yet to find a Neo-Pagan discussion of why the term might be inappropriate), I would submit that the success of mana in the field of fantasy gaming has made its use somewhat awkward for NeoPagans, who make realist claims about their magic and who work hard to lend credence to their new religion. Thus, ironically, it is when mana ceased being mystificatory, when it was effectively made into a rational substance (however virtual it might be), that it stopped being useful for religionists. Ultimately, it is not wholly unfitting that mana failed as a religious category because of an all too Western excess of substance. 40

41

Note, however, Starhawk’s explicit attempt to mobilize magic within the political sphere (for example, Starhawk 1997). Yet, for all that, Starhawk is not reducing magic (or religion) to politics. On orgone energy, see Mann (1973), Clifton (2006, 62–64). Some Neo-Pagans have shown interest in Reich’s work, possibly because of his claim that this universally present energy, responsible for all movement, was especially discharged during sexual orgasms (Clifton 2006, 62). Bonewits felt that “every occultist should be familiar with Reich’s work” (Bonewits 1989, 241).

Epilogue In telling this story of mana I have striven to go beyond the bounds of Academic discourse. But for all that, the foregoing narrative nevertheless strikes me as a potent synecdoche for the history of the institutionalized study of religion, if only because the two stories largely coincided for over fifty years, and shared an almost identical cast of characters (cf., for example, Sharpe 1975, Kippenberg 1999, Strenski 2006). But if the story of mana is also the story of the academic study of religion, what then, if anything, can be learned from that concurrence? On the one hand, it provides an opportunity to reassess the position of various scholars within networks of influence and intellectual debt. On the other, and more importantly, the story of mana is a story of the various processes whereby historians and anthropologists of religion build categories, define particular objects, and deal with what they perceive as problems for themselves and their disciplines. Mana thus represents a means to explore the intellectual backrooms of the study of religion, and the picture that emerges is indeed a bleak one. That this diagnosis is likely to be extended to other such categories as tabu, myth, totem, belief, or for that matter religion, is warranted both by the centrality mana held for a time within scholarly discourse and by various recent critical historiographical studies of parallel categories.1 In different ways the story of mana is the tale of a compromise of scholarly principles. As regards the construction of categories, both first- and secondorder conceptualizations of mana answered to agendas and circumstances that had little to do with honest and responsible scholarship. Thus, the mana of Oceanians first achieved relevance for Westerners in the context of the Britanno-Māori wars of the 1840s and 1860s as a discursive means to assail the credibility of non-Westerners who were proving to be more than a match militarily for British troops. To speak like the historian James Belich (1986), the Western invention of mana in New Zealand answered to Victorian, European expectations concerning unequal race relations. The same is true of Robert Codrington, still a crucial, if not the only, source for the understanding of mana, who, despite his intimate knowledge of and sympathy for Melanesians, was no more able to evade outside influences, whether these influences had to do with race relations and the question of human diversity, with missionary agendas, or with scientific representations of causality. At the turn of the twentieth

1 See for instance McCutcheon (1997), Lincoln (1999), Styers (2004), Arvidsson (2006), Barbu (2016).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 | DOI 10.1163/9789004349247_009

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century, mana, the empirical basis of ulterior theorization about religion as a general and universal category, was thus described and defined in profoundly ethnocentric terms, as has been suggested by a host of later, more sophisticated ethnographic studies. Indeed, such ethnocentricity, a widespread phenomenon in the history of the study of religion (see, for example Dubuisson 1998), may well be a major cause of the protean nature of mana. The rise of mana as a second-order category provides a similar picture. Again, it was conceptualized in answer to external requirements of various kinds, not least as a means to combat atheism. It thus achieved general relevance by being freed from its ethnographic context and redefined in ignorance of, if not in outright defiance of, its vernacular meanings. Indeed, the feature which most contributed to its enduring success, impersonality, was in large parts fabricated by scholars who had no direct knowledge of Oceanic languages and culture but who found themselves in need of precisely that feature to attack a rival general theory of religion, or a rival religion for that matter. At the same time, the story of mana also provides an insight into the uses and abuses of the method most closely associated with the study of religion, comparison. The universality of mana was argued and established on the strength of the presence of notions constructed as analogous throughout the world (orenda, boylya, dúnamis, etc.).2 As has been all too frequently the case in the study of religion, this comparison was wide-ranging and superficial— references given by scholars for the various comparanda at first rarely exceeded single digits (see, for example, Marett 1900). Moreover, this method “constitute[d] similarity as the fact of primary interest and regard[ed] difference as a complicating development of considerably lesser importance” (Lincoln 2012, 122). As such, it allowed for the production of such ahistorical fantasies as a pre-animistic phase in the gradual and teleological development of mankind. But far more serious than the rupture between Oceanic and universal mana (which can be justified by a deductive perspective) is the mystificatory character of mana. It is most likely the case that throughout the Pacific, and not just in Codrington’s Melanesia, the concept of mana was used to naturalize the workings of social and political power. Mana was one ideological instrument among others—here tapu/tabu comes to mind—serving to make hierarchies 2 The analogy between mana, orenda, wakan, etc., is in fact twofold: not only were such categories perceived by generalists as analogous to mana (being impersonal, substantial, etc.), but also conditions similar to those informing discussions of mana presided over their description and definition by the Westerners who first published about them, namely political subtexts within a colonized context, culturally slanted expectations about causality, etc.

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among humans and differences in power palatable. However, early Western scholars did not denounce the ideological uses of mana, rather they embraced it, reconfiguring it in order to best serve their own agenda. The most influential and most enduring agenda was that of Robert Codrington, as his no less enduring popularity suggests. Although it was marked by positive traits, Codrington had a genuine interest for race equality as well as a knack for languages, his view of mana was formatted by his missionary concerns. Most importantly, he carefully distinguished between the domain of politics—of the squabbling among chiefs and their efforts at controlling their underlings—and that of religion, which he located within a class-less and clan-less individual. Having determined that mana belonged to religion, Codrington accordingly built what can only be qualified as an oxymoronic nonpolitical power. To do so, he borrowed from the innocuous, but prestigious, discourse of physics and unwittingly bequeathed generations of scholars of religion what amounts to an authoritative theory of religious or magical power. Codrington’s mana, i.e. an impersonal, substantial, and supernatural power, has proved highly efficient at masking sociopolitical issues by externalizing power, by separating it from human agency. Although possessed, wielded, or experienced by individuals, mana does not properly belong to them. Whether it ultimately comes from spirits (Codrington), from God (Söderblom), or from some dark corner of the human mind (Marett), it stands outside of the realm of the mundane, and so of the historical. Configured thus, not only can it divert attention away from the relations of power at play in any given situation—very much including those that the contemporary West labels religious—but, as the discussion of sacred kingship in medieval Scandinavian studies suggests, mana can also be used to mystify these relations. Introducing this supernatural power, or any notion construed as its analogue (orenda, wakan, hamingja, etc.), into a situation of unequal power relationship has as its consequence the replacement of a horizontal relationship between human actors (to be analyzed in terms of their respective social positions and available resources) by a vertical relationship between an individual (the eventual winner) and something that may be variously qualified as transcendent, sacred, supernatural, or perhaps most to the point, more than human. Accordingly, the sociopolitical success enjoyed by the (lucky) individual, and the social order that derives from that success, is chalked up to something more than human and accordingly becomes non-negotiable. But to do so is to engage in religious rather than scholarly or historical discourse (Lincoln 1996, 225), or, in other words, in mystification. And while it is true that in the 1930s and 1940s anthropologists rejected mana as a category for the study of religion and culture, they unfortunately did not do so for the most important reason—because it was an instru-

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ment of mystification. And the exception, when mana is a non-mystificatory concept, only serves to prove the rule, since it occurs solely in the explicitly virtual, unreal, world of fantasy fiction and gaming. It is in this melancholy sense that the history of mana represents a synecdoche of the history of the academic study of religion. Mana as a purported analytical but really ideological category can and should be read as one more indictment against that discipline, with the present book joining an ever increasing list of critical inquiries exposing the discipline’s fundamentally ideological and mystificatory nature, whose most conspicuous manifestation has been and still all too often is the “shield[ing of] its object of study against critical interrogation” (Lincoln 2012, 134; see also Dubuisson 1998; Masuzawa 2005; Chidester 2014; McCutcheon 2015, etc.). This is an indictment moreover strengthened by the genealogical link between mana (and dynamism more generally) and the phenomenology of religion, which so dominated the field throughout much of the twentieth century. Having arrived at the end of our story, it might be concluded that the only responsible way to study mana is to avoid what those discussed here have done, to stop theorizing and focus on local, Oceanic usages of mana, to “rethink it” and so uncover its real Oceanic, when not proto-Oceanic, meaning (Keesing 1984). To “draw theoretical mileage from it,” as some proponents of the so-called ontological turn have attempted to do in these early years of the twenty-first century (for example Holbraad 2007, 189), would accordingly seem to be wrong-headed. Such a conclusion, however, strikes me as unwarranted for it would amount to an argument against theory.3 It is true that many if not most of the theories discussed in the preceding chapters are racist, mystificatory, or simply foolish, but I see little direct link between this state of things and “mana” specifically. Other words/concepts/categories have proved racist, mystificatory, or foolish in many other contexts and disciplines. I am thus disinclined to reduce the issue to an opposition between ethnographic versus anthropological or particularistic versus generalist approaches. Yet for all that, the consensus in social scientific circles is in favor of the ethnographic, particularistic approaches. An explanation for this situation lies, I submit, in the core of mana/mana, i.e. power. Power—Foucault notwithstanding—involves people, and so does mana. The failure of mana as a theoretical category lay not so much in issues of semantics as in the occultation of its pragmatics. Theorists of mana forgot,

3 On the necessity and relevance of theory in the study of religion, see, for example, Lincoln (1989; 1999), Smith (1978, 289–309), McCutcheon (2015, 1–16).

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or perhaps could not see,4 that in Oceania mana was tightly linked with precise individuals.5 On the other hand, professional ethnographers working in the Oceanic field have carefully documented the contexts in which the word was uttered,6 thereby preserving its interpersonal, political dimension, even in cases where it is conceptualized in thoroughly religious terms (for a neat example see Kolshus 2016). Unsurprisingly, their studies have routinely transcended the boundary between politics and religion, established by scholars of religion and have thus yielded important results (see, for example, Sahlins 1981, Valeri 1985, Grijp 2014). It would appear then that the problem is less that of the impossibility of generalizing mana than the failure of taking into account a central element of the term—its pragmatics. Rather than treat mana as a word, concept, and/or category, it should be dealt with as discourse, as “language in use” (Schiffrin 1994, 31). Reconfiguring mana as a discourse has a number of advantages. Foremost would be the foregrounding of the ways social actors use it strategically, and with it an explicit acknowledgment of its mystificatory character. From this it follows that the object of study pursued by means of mana would shift from (religious) representations to social interactions. Such a shift would moreover make for better controlled cross-cultural comparison than that attempted at the turn of the twentieth century.7 And provided it is attentive both to similarities and differences, such comparison might be expected to contribute positively to the critical project articulated by scholars of religion such as Bruce Lincoln, who has written that: The ideological products and operations of other societies afford invaluable opportunities to the would-be student of ideology. Being initially unfamiliar, they do not need to be denaturalized before they can be ex-

4 In the formative days of mana as a second-order category, there was resistance in granting individuality to the so-called primitives: “At the level of primitive culture, however, where representative individuals are not easily met with, where, to our eyes at least, one man is very like another …” (Marett 1909, 163–64; see also Lévy-Bruhl 1910). 5 See for example the place given to the chief Takua in Codrington’s The Melanesians (1891). 6 See Firth’s programmatic statement: “By giving a contextualized description of the native usage of the mana-concept I hope to clarify its precise meaning at least for this particular community” (Firth 1940, 488). 7 The proposed shift is akin to that between Max Müller who compared words and Georges Dumézil who compared relationships between words. Here, comparison would move from single words (mana, orenda, wakan, etc.) to the complex relationship between speaker, word, and addressee.

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Epilogue amined. Rather, they invite and reward critical study, yielding lessons one can put to good use at home. Lincoln 1996, 227

The Western history of mana told here has been a story of mystification and misrepresentation, but who is to say that there will not be a new, critical, chapter?

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Index Awe 48n26, 62–63, 76, 80, 90, 152 Afterlife, belief in 43–44, 51 Anderson, Victor 159, 161–163 Andrews, Lorrin 12–14 Anglicanism 46 Animism 35, 37–39, 46, 54, 57–58, 61–62, 116, 132, 152 Archetype 99–100, 101 Ariki (chief) 7, 17, 18n25 Army, British Imperial 18 Atheism 37, 82, 172 Australia 37, 54, 57, 82, 84–86, 91, 152 Authority 11–12, 17–18, 18n25, 20n, 22, 25, 50, 109, 169–170 Beings, spiritual 38, 44–46, 47n23, 51, 74, 82, 112n18 Beowulf 109 Bible 14, 33, 59, 146 Boas, Franz 73, 74n3 Bonewits, Isaac 129n4, 140, 146, 150, 155–159, 166n35 Boylya 54, 55, 84n21, 172 Britanno-Māori Wars 19, 171 Brosses, Charles de 32n47, 36–37 Buckland, Raymond 151–155, 159, 168 Campbell, Ivy 73 Causality 79–80, 135–136, 167 Cause Idiom of 169 Charisma 124–125 Chiefdom, Polynesian Institution 49n27 Christianity 34, 40, 41n10, 46, 54, 78, 91 Clifton, Chas 149n, 154, 157n16 Codrington, Robert 6, 29–31, 39–52, 57n45, 59, 69–70, 76, 79, 84, 91, 95, 100, 107n, 108, 113, 116n21, 133, 140n28, 171, 173 Colonization 19–20, 24, 108, 111, 119 Consciousness Alternate 160–162 Ordinary 160 Conversion 14, 46, 51, 115n19 Cook, Captain James 6–7, 19, 146 Costikyan, Greg 129, 140–141, 144, 145, 157

Crowley, Aleister

148, 151, 155

Degeneration 26, 36, 37, 57 Demons 38n5, 66, 67 Desire 68 Developmentalism (or Evolutionism) 37, 45, 103 Diablo II (videogame) 127–128, 141–142 Dictionary, language 11–14, 164n30 Dieffenbach, Ernst 7, 11, 26 Differentiation, social 50, 118 Diffusionism 37, 45, 107, 112n18 Dominion, territorial 24 Dream 46, 54, 97–98, 122n Druid 148, 150, 155, 166, 168 Dumézil, Georges 78, 107n3, 175n7 Dúnamis 67n65, 77 Dungeons & Dragons (game) 142n38, 157, 159 Dungeon Master (videogame) 140, 141n31, 144, 145 Durkheim, Emile 65, 68, 76, 82–86, 87, 114, 133–134 Dynamism 52, 69, 71–73, 74n3, 89, 95n43, 116 Ecstasy 77, 154, 161 Effervescence 68, 85 Egill Skalla-Grímsson 120, 122 Electricity 81, 84, 85, 132, 135 Analogy between mana and 134–135, 136, 162n26 Eliade, Mircea 101, 111, 119n, 140, 152n7, 153–154, 158, 168 Ellis, William 11, 32, 63 Emotion 46, 53, 61, 63, 68–69, 74n3, 76, 82, 150, 156–157, 161, 168 Energy Atomic 136 Emotional 150 Equivalence between matter and 156n13 Magical 129, 139, 140n30, 150, 163, 168–169 Numinous 99 Physical 129

202 Psychic 99, 157–158, 166 England Church of 25, 40 Queen of 20n, 24, 25, 27 Esotericism 149n, 151, 163, 165, 168 Experience 58–60, 68, 77, 82, 85, 87, 94, 96, 117, 168 Religious 72, 88, 92, 95, 97 Faith 29, 35, 38, 77, 97 Fantasy 128, 137, 139, 141, 144, 145, 157 Rational 137 Feeling, religious 88, 114 Fetishism 36 Fiction 146, 174 Science- 137, 155 Fiji (or Feejee) 8–10, 12, 46, 59, 74 Firth, Raymond 34n, 48n26, 74n4, 102–103, 136n19, 175n6 Fison, Lorimer 44n18, 46, 50n30 Force Impersonal 76n, 80–81, 84, 110, 112, 134 Life 135, 161 Mechanical 133 Numinous 111 Physical 30, 49, 67, 116, 121n33, 133 Frazer, James 26n34, 42n, 46, 63–64, 69, 73, 108, 110, 113, 132, 133n12, 150, 151 Freud, Sigmund 26n34, 97, 98, 100n52 Functionalism 74, 103 Gaming 129, 140–142, 144, 145–146, 168–170, 174 Gardner, Gerald 151–152, 154, 159n22 Gennep, Arnold van 68n66, 69, 134 Ghost (tamate) 44–45, 47–49, 58 Goddess 149n, 151–152, 160 God(s) Christian 11, 13, 32, 33, 88, 92, 96, 109n, 112 High 57–58, 60 Olympian 75 Personal 29, 31, 36n2, 54, 55, 74n5, 100, 110 Polynesian 11, 12–13, 18 Roman 77–78 Gorst, John 24–25 Grønbech, Vilhelm 73, 87, 113, 115–119

Index Hale, Horatio 9, 10n7, 11n, 12, 15, 32 Hamingja 106, 114–119, 120n31, 123, 137n20 Handy, Craighill 134 Harrison, Jane 75–78 Hartland, Sidney 62, 69, 73, 154 Hawai’i 6, 11, 12–14, 161–166 Hewitt, John 64–65, 68n65, 70, 74 History 36, 53, 88, 94, 96 Hocart, Arthur 9, 10n7, 64n58, 70, 74, 101, 107, 146 Hogbin, Ian 34n, 74, 102 Holiness 88–92, 116, 117 Definition of 90 Phenomenology of 91 Holy 89–93, 117, 134 Hubert, Henri 61, 65–69, 77, 84, 86, 100n52, 104, 113, 123, 131–133 Huna 163, 165, 166n35, 166n36 Iceland 109, 111, 119–123 Identity, Western 78 Ideology 49n27, 126, 175 Infinite (religious representation) 29, 35–36, 38–39, 57n45, 70n Intellectualism 37, 48, 51–53, 56, 58, 60, 62, 65, 68, 76, 82, 89, 110, 115, 130, 131 James, William 56 Jaros, Andrews 140, 144–146 Jung, Carl Gustav 97–100, 157, 158, 164n31, 165n34, 166, 168 Kalou 59, 62 Keesing, Roger 10, 12, 34n, 74n4 Kilowatt 128, 129n4, 137, 139–140 King, Irving 75n7, 80 King, John 52–56, 60, 84 King Movement 21–22, 24–25 King of Norway 115n19, 120 Kingship 11, 108–109, 118–119 Sacred 108–109, 119n, 173 Land Ownership 16–18, 21–23, 26, 33 Right to 16–18, 20 Speculation 19 Transaction 21, 25

Index Lang, Andrew 26n34, 35, 37n, 56–60, 61, 67, 88, 165n34 Leeuw, Gerardus van der 93–97, 98n49, 101n54, 134 Lehmann, Rudolf 34n, 51n33, 74n4, 95, 100n52, 102 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 104–105 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 69, 98n49, 99n, 115, 118, 167n38 Lexicography 10–14, 66n61 Lincoln, Bruce 49, 50, 116n22, 122, 173, 175 Long, Max Freedom 161n25, 163–166 Lovejoy, Arthur 79–80, 100n52 Luck 26n38, 54–55, 80, 115–118, 120 Magic As psychological tool 159 Belief in 66–67, 131 Efficiency of 66, 131, 149 Gaming 127–129 Handbooks of 149, 150n, 159 Laws of 132, 155–156, 157 Neo-Pagan 154n, 158, 165, 166–168 Objectivity 69n68, 130, 132, 136 Old Norse 110–111 Quantification of 142–143 Representations of 66–67 Social nature of 66 Theory of 67, 73, 131, 155, 163, 164n29 Magic: The Gathering (card game) 141, 142–143, 145n Magick 148, 152 Malinowski, Bronislaw 103–104, 158 Mana As adjective 7, 10n7, 11, 104n, 105n As discourse 52, 118, 169–170, 175 As empty symbol 104 As magical force 133 As noun 7, 10n7, 11, 15n19, 105n As object of faith for Westerners 97 As power behind magic 138 As second-order category 55, 56, 59, 63, 65, 69, 72, 77, 82, 101, 103, 104, 113, 119, 126n, 135, 146, 170–172, 175n4 As supernatural resource 127–128, 130, 132, 141 As theory of the world 80 As verb 7, 10, 10n7, 11, 11n, 13, 104n, 105n

203 As vernacular concept 10, 33, 55, 74n4, 100, 102–103, 113, 145, 172, 174 Context of use of 51, 101, 108–111 Cost 128n3, 142 Critique by field anthropologists 74–75, 101–103 Definition of 34, 47, 101–102, 112 Discursive nature of 33 Essentialization of 96 Eulogy of 101 In games 128, 129, 135, 140–146, 157, 168–169 In Scandinavia 107–113, 114, 119, 122 Irrationality of 38, 130 King’s 108–109, 118–119 Manipulation of 76–77 More than human 121 Mystificatory character of 49, 49n27, 50, 114, 119, 121, 123, 169, 175 Objective reality of 85, 86, 91, 135 Political conceptualization of 7, 11, 18, 22, 23, 24–25, 33–34, 74n4, 175 Potion 128, 143, 168, 169 Quantification of 49, 137, 142–143, 168 Religious conceptualization of 13, 30–31, 33, 39, 51, 70, 79, 104, 111, 113, 121, 170 Social dimension of 44, 50, 126 Sympathetic 55 Universality of 34, 55–56, 61–69, 101, 104, 114, 163, 172 Versatility of 28 Voltage of 134, 165 Mana-personality 99–100, 166 Maning, Frederick 25–28, 33n49 Manitou 64n58, 65, 67n65, 74n3, 75n6, 79, 80, 84, 111n15 Mankind, psychic unity of 37, 46, 72 Manna 6–7, 70, 129, 139n26, 140, 144, 146–147, 158 Māori Authority 18 Disenfranchisement 21 King 21, 24–25 Land tenure 23 State 21, 25 Marett, Robert 61–65, 69, 71–72, 73, 76, 79, 82, 86, 87, 89–92, 102, 110, 113, 114, 124, 130, 133–134, 152n7, 154, 168

204 Marillier, Léon 66–67, 88n28 Mauss, Marcel 60, 65–69, 71, 77, 84, 86, 100n52, 102, 104, 113, 123, 126, 131–133, 167 Melanesia 12, 28–32, 35, 38–39, 40–52, 55, 58, 59, 63, 67n62, 84–85, 88n28, 91, 96, 101–103, 113, 116, 119, 143n40, 163, 169, 172 Mentality, mystical or pre-logical 98n49, 167n38 Mesmer, Franz Anton 165, 170 Method Comparative 36, 37, 39, 56, 72, 98, 152n6 Phenomenological 94, 96 Miracle 11, 12, 163 Mission Melanesian 29, 40–42, 46, 47, 51, 107n Missionary 8n, 9, 11, 12n12, 13n14, 14, 19, 20, 28, 30n43, 40, 41, 43, 46, 63n53, 88n29 Moerenhout, Jacques-Antoine 8n, 32, 33n49 Mota (language) 41, 43 Müller, Max 28–31, 34, 35–39, 41–42, 43–44, 47, 51n33, 53, 56, 57n45, 59, 70, 83, 87n26, 102, 113, 175n7 Murray, Margaret 151, 154 Mystification 49, 118–119, 121, 126, 168–169, 173–174 Myth 17, 22, 23, 29, 32, 37, 57, 68, 75, 94, 111, 138, 145, 159, 171 Mythology 23, 112n18, 151 Classical 32, 76 New Age 97, 100, 156n13, 163n, 165 Neo-Paganism 149n, 150, 154, 157n16, 158, 159, 166, 169 New Zealand Anglican Church 40 Colonization of 19–22 Company 11, 19, 20, 21 European presence in 19, 21n Land Purchase Department 16, 17, 21, 22 Native land court 16, 25 Patterns of settlement in 15 Niven, Larry 137–141, 144, 145, 156, 161 Norfolk Island 40–41, 70 Numen 78, 92

Index Oceania 31n44, 34, 51, 103, 105, 143n40, 146, 154, 175 Occultists 80, 101, 129n4, 146, 148n, 151, 155, 156n13, 160 Orenda 64–65, 66, 67n65, 74, 76, 79, 80, 84, 95, 101, 111n15, 114, 124, 152n7, 155, 175n7 Otto, Rudolf 92–93, 95, 99, 168 Oxford 40, 42, 47, 56, 61, 78 Pacific Ocean 6, 7, 9, 11, 30, 52, 102, 107, 172 Paganism 25, 121 Pākehā 15, 19, 21, 25, 26, 28 Parapsychology 155, 157 Participation, law of 98n49, 99n51, 115, 167n38 Performative 9, 26, 150 Phenomena, paranormal 56, 167, 169 Phenomenology Of religion 87n25, 93–94, 96, 170, 174 Philosophy, primitive 37, 38, 79, 130 Phúsis 67n65, 77 Physics 80–81, 132, 136, 137n21, 139, 160, 173 Providing comparanda for mana 133–136 Quantum 155, 160, 167 Point Hit 129 Magic 129, 140, 142–144 Spell 129, 140, 144 Polynesia 6, 12, 14, 15, 17, 23, 28, 32, 39, 40, 46, 153, 158, 166 Positivism 35, 58, 67n64, 82, 134, 137 Potence, mystic 64 Power And religion 8n, 82, 90–92, 95–97, 107, 111, 117, 119, 122 Discourse of 52, 169–170 Magical 63, 68–69, 99, 109n, 118, 129, 139, 145, 163, 167, 169 Physical 30, 53 Political 7, 12n10, 18, 22, 72, 105, 118, 119, 122, 172 Sociopolitical 49, 118 Spiritual 44, 49n28, 152 Supernatural 11, 12–13, 30, 42–43, 48, 52–55, 62–64, 89, 91, 102, 108, 118, 119–120, 124, 173 Prana 162, 164

Index Pratchett, Terry 144, 148, 156n13 Pre-animism 61–63, 73, 116, 124 Preuss, Konrad 62 Priest 8, 11, 14, 17, 26–27, 43n17, 51, 124, 151, 152, 155, 163 see also tohunga Prophecy, self-fulfilling 50, 119 Psyche 98 Psychology 68, 71, 85, 91, 98, 155, 166n36 Rationality 18, 75, 79, 98, 113, 132, 167 Read, Carveth 80 Reason 29, 35, 37n, 38–39, 68n67, 131 Reclaiming 149, 159 Reductionism 86, 91, 96, 114 Religion Aryan 22–23, 35n Christian 12, 13, 33, 34, 37, 40, 54, 83, 91, 93, 115n19 Civilized 71, 87 Definition of 31, 33, 39, 42, 65, 83, 84n22, 89 Earth 154, 155, 163 Greek 75n8, 76–78 Melanesian 30, 31, 39, 44–48, 52, 78 Minimum definition of 38, 45, 51, 54, 57, 72 Object of 31, 83, 87, 90, 92, 95n43, 114 Paleolithic 152 Phenomenology of 93–96, 170, 174 Polynesian 31–33 Pre-animistic 61, 76–78, 172 Roman 77–78 Theory of 28, 32n47, 35, 37, 54, 56–57, 61, 172 Revelation 37n, 77, 88, 92, 93, 96 Ritual 23, 49, 50, 62, 66, 68–69, 75–77, 82, 88, 92n, 111, 121n33, 128, 135–136, 151, 153, 159, 162, 167 Efficacy of 69, 72n, 128, 129, 136, 145 Rose, Herbert 75n8, 77–78 Sacred 10, 76–77, 83, 87, 89, 92, 96, 101, 108, 109, 112, 120, 134, 152, 168 Opposition with profane 83, 87, 89, 114 Sagas 106, 115n19, 116n22, 120–122 Saintyves, Pierre 80–82, 133n10, 164n31 Scandinavia 91, 106–123, 173

205 Science 37, 38, 48, 53, 58, 70, 80, 84n22, 89, 130–135, 136, 137, 143, 156, 163, 167–168 Prestige of 133, 135, 145, 156 Senses 29, 38, 39 Shamanism 153–154 Shortland, Edward 22–23 Smith, Jonathan 7, 14, 39, 65, 82, 84n22 Snorri Sturluson 108, 109n8, 115n19, 118n27, 122n Söderblom, Nathan 87–94, 100n52, 101, 110, 114–117, 134, 168 Soul 30, 31, 38, 46, 54, 57–58, 73, 74, 81, 85, 116–117 Sovereignty 18–25, 28, 33–34 Spirit 30, 31, 44–45, 47–49, 57–59, 71, 73, 74n3, 75n6, 95, 101, 103, 106, 116n23 Starhawk (Miriam Simos) 148, 149, 159–163, 168, 169n, 170n40 Success Mystification of 49, 169 Suggestion 58, 86, 160, 165 Supernaturalism 62, 86 Superstition 27, 42, 51, 75n9 Suqe 45n, 50–51 Swords & Sorcery (board game) 129, 140, 142–144, 146 Symbolism 167 Sympathy 67, 73, 111, 133n12, 150 Tapu (tabu, taboo) 18, 23, 26n34, 28, 33, 42, 91n, 100n52, 134, 172 Telepathy 58, 81 Testament New 91, 114 Old 32–33, 146 Theism 57, 77 Theology 13, 76–77, 78, 87–88, 93, 96, 125, 150n Tohunga 27, 161 see also priest Totem 55n41, 83, 85–86 Totemism 54, 82–87, 134 Trance 37, 154, 156n15, 160 Tregear, Edward 31, 51n34, 66n61 Tylor, Edward 9, 35, 36–39, 42, 45, 46, 48, 51–52, 53–54, 56, 57–58, 61, 70, 75, 79, 83, 88, 98, 112n18, 115, 130, 132, 137, 152n6

206

Index

Unconscious, the 58, 97, 98, 160, 168 Collective 98, 99, 158 Verb, stative 10, 13 Verne, Jules 10 Viking 106, 107 Vries, Jan de 108–111, 112n18, 114, 116n22, 119 Waitangi Treaty of

20, 25, 28

Wakan 54, 55, 59, 60n, 62, 67n65, 74n3, 76, 84, 95, 114, 152n7, 155, 173 Weber, Max 69, 123–126 White, John 15–18, 22 Wicca 149n, 151–153, 154–155, 166n36, 170 Witch 55n41, 59, 148–150, 151–153, 159–160, 161, 166, 168–170 Witchcraft 48, 110, 149n, 151–154, 159, 161, 170 X phenomena

56–60